Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America 9780812293777

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Luxurious Citizens

AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wideranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

LU XUR IOUS CITIZENS 2 The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

JOANNA COHEN

u n i v e r s i t y of pe n ns y lva n i a pr e s s p h i l a de l p h i a

Copyright © 2017 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 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-4892-0

To my parents: Jonathan and Micky Cohen and to Erik Mathisen

Contents

Introduction. Imagining the Citizen-Consumer

1

Chapter 1. Dilemmas of Abundance

15

Chapter 2. The Marketplace of Retribution

46

Chapter 3. The Perils of the Public Auction

81

Chapter 4. Of Tariffs and Taste

112

Chapter 5. “They Now Advertise Liberally”

149

Chapter 6. Consumers at War

181

Epilogue. The Citizen-Consumer and the State of the Nation

219

Notes

229

Index

275

Acknowledgments

281

Introduction Imagining the Citizen-Consumer

A freezing twilight had descended on Boston as a mob of citizens gathered at the customshouse to protest their rights as consumers. The city had been at war for two long years, but Boston’s inhabitants had been enduring the effects of confronting British might for longer than that. With communal bonds stretched thin by the demands of war, tensions were running high. Surrounding the home of the customs officer, George Johnson, a seething crush of people threatened to tar and feather the frightened man who cowered within. It would not have been the first time that a Boston crowd had meted out such rough justice to a customs official.1 Boston commissioner John Malcolm had been brutally attacked in this way in January 1774, as a punishment for his loyalist beliefs and support of British commerce. But the crowd under Johnson’s window was not trying to boycott British goods; this was not a Revolutionary protest. In fact the year was 1814, and the angry crowd, far from demanding that British imports be kept out of their community, were clamoring for a confiscated hoard of consumer goods to be let in. These goods were smuggled wares. Johnson had confiscated them because, as imports, they violated the Republican government’s wartime restrictions on commerce. Such restrictions were part of the arsenal of weapons that the Republicans were using to fight the British during the War of 1812—a conflict often dubbed then and now the second war of independence.2 Yet the crowd who railed against George Johnson seemed to be displaying very little of the patriotism that had characterized the Revolutionary fight. Instead, the commercial sanctions that President Madison had designed as punishment for the British had simply created internal division and disaster within the city that had once spearheaded America’s consumer protests in the name of liberty. The attack on George Johnson deployed the same political theater of the Revolution, but the plot had twisted in a strange and unexpected way.

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Why had Johnson’s seizure of “broadcloths, silks, stockinets, shawls, cambrics and files” created such collective fury?3 These were not foodstuffs, and despite the war, this was not a starving community. Nor was this riot solely an expression of partisan politics. Rather, this episode reveals the extent to which Americans fought over, demanded, and ultimately defined their rights and obligations as consumers in the new United States. They challenged the right of the U.S. government to command them as consumers, refusing to deny their desires for comforts and luxuries in the name of civic duty. Instead, this crowd articulated a vision of citizenship that put consumer liberties at its center and did so in a powerful and startling fashion. Although Johnson escaped that night, his plight taught Madison and his supporters a valuable lesson on the limits of loyalty to be expected from citizen-consumers in the early Republic. The crowd at Boston did not make these claims alone, nor did all American citizens universally support their claim. From the end of the War of Independence to the end of the Civil War, merchants and auctioneers, artisans and entrepreneurs, civic boosters and textile manufacturers, advertisers and retailers, politicians and journalists, domestic economists and political economists, all joined that Boston rabble in its effort to define the rights and the responsibilities of the consumer as citizen. This task was no small challenge. Americans quickly recognized that the work of nation-building was in many ways an economic undertaking. If civic virtue was to be of any service to the project of constructing a powerful nation, it would have to encompass citizens’ economic behavior. Yet individuals’ interests and the national interest were not always complementary, and Americans struggled to reconcile their own personal desires with the demands of the nation. At a moment when the concept of American citizenship was itself a protean and contingent creation, these disputes stretched the meaning of citizenship to new limits.4 At stake in these debates was a vision of what it would mean, in economic terms, to belong to the American nation as a citizen of the new Republic.5 It was a debate that would transform the political economy of nineteenth-century America and enable middle-class Americans in particular to harness the nation-state to a capitalist marketplace.6 If we are to understand how Americans created a modern capitalist democracy, we must examine the ways in which American consumers imagined their role as citizens of the United States. This book explores how Americans created the modern citizen-consumer. It was a process that was slow and uneven, and the many men and women who helped to create this crucial figure did not intend to define any such person. Rather, between the birth of the United States as an officially recognized

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nation in 1783 and its rebirth as a new republic in 1865, the citizen-consumer emerged through a history of blunders and misconceptions, self-serving projects, and disappointed expectations. Above all, the citizen-consumer took shape as a result of the exigencies of war. Yet these uncoordinated efforts resulted in an idea that has remained entrenched at the heart of American politics and culture well into the twenty-first century. It is the idea that American citizens are free to consume without being asked to restrict their choice or alter their desires, that indulging in the world of goods is a positive civic good. It is the certainty that the liberty to consume has defined the meaning of American democracy and fueled the success of the modern American nation. It is the conviction that these same freedoms and rights should spread across the globe.7 Such an ascendance was neither inevitable nor expected at the start of America’s national history. The satisfaction of individual desires was not an inalienable right that the nation’s founders wrote into the Constitution. Instead, the lessons of the American Revolution had taught colonists that their desires, while powerful, ought to serve a purpose other than their own gratification. The consumer protests of the 1760s—the boycotts of British goods, the weaving of homespun cloth, the committees of inspection and observation, and the drama of the Boston Tea Party—had all served as proof that the colonists’ habits as shoppers should be made to serve a greater public interest and that consumer self-sacrifice was the key to independence.8 For the Americans who had fought for independence, the Revolution had offered no confirmation that individual desires were the key to citizenship; instead the Americans’ successful rebellion had highlighted the power of communal economic obligation and the importance of putting the needs of the nation ahead of personal consumer inclination.9 Yet slowly and fitfully, Americans overturned the assumption that consumer demands would come second to those of the nation and the nation’s producers. Instead, the certainty emerged that their desires could take precedence and, moreover, that such a precedence might even best serve the American nation. When the Union went to war to preserve the Republic, they put their belief in the virtue of unbridled consumption to the test. Their victory confirmed their faith; in the crucible of war, northern citizens forged consumption into a civic virtue. In the short space of time between the Revolution and the Civil War, the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed beyond recognition. It is the transformation of this relationship between consumer interest and national interest that is the story of this book.

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Remembering the power of boycotts and homespun in the wake of the Revolution meant that Americans embedded powerful tales of consumer obligation into their narratives of good citizenship. In the 1780s, elite Americans held on fast to the idea that the consumption of luxury imports should be harnessed to the service of the emerging nation, that men and women alike should be patriot-consumers. Indeed, eighteenth-century traditions of political thought underpinned such assumptions. The republican emphasis on the privileging of the public good over private ambition complemented the liberal assertion that self-interest would be reined in through the natural force of man’s moral and religious compass.10 The political elite of the new Republic assumed that consumer habits would remain subject to these powerful expressions of civic virtue. Saddled with debts, both personal and national, Americans concluded that they could not afford to buy imported goods. Instead, citizens encouraged each other to buy American-made goods and reject imported luxuries that led to the dreaded state of dependence, both economically and politically.11 Where consumer desires clashed with the best interests of the new Republic, such desires would be subdued, dismissed, and denied. Yet even as aspirations for political and economic independence were expressed and debated, the failure of the first generation of American citizens to rein in their consumption for the sake of the nation was already apparent. As the politics of personal responsibility faltered, and the bonds of union strained to contain the diverging economic acts of individuals as well as individual states, nationalists turned to a new language of political action, that is, legislated obligation. The newly created Constitution, forged in part as a response to the economic crisis the United States was facing in the 1780s, allowed the federal government to harness the act of consuming imports to the national cause and coffers. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution removed the power of taxing imports and exports from the individual states and gave it instead to Congress. The “power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” transformed the fiscal might of the United States.12 In their urgent attempts to save the new nation from poor credit and bad debts, the first national Congress transformed the consumption of foreign goods into a matter of national citizenship. Payment of these tariff duties would be an obligation owed to the federal government and not the individual states. Through their efforts to find ways to fund the nation, the framers of the Constitution transformed the patriot-consumer into a citizen-consumer. Whereas the patriot-consumer had been asked only to sacrifice on the part of the nation, the citizen-consumer was promised something in return. Patriot-consumers were defined by their

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obligation alone: their duty had been tied to self-sacrifice and withdrawal from the marketplace. But the emerging rhetoric that surrounded the debates over the tariff demonstrated a different vision of citizenship: one where the consumer’s duty as a citizen was now linked to making a purchase; there was gain as well as loss. This transition had both gender and class implications when it came to imagining a hierarchy of citizenship.13 While all citizens, rich or poor, male or female, white or black could choose not to buy for the sake of the nation, the same was not true for citizens seeking to purchase goods. While race and class limited men’s access to the marketplace and thus helped to define their actions as citizen-consumers, it was women in particular who were implicated in this shift. While many did make purchases, either directly or by proxy, far fewer did so on their own account. Married women relied on their husbands for access to credit, and if that was withdrawn, then their ability to consume was drastically curtailed. These legal realities of economic life for women meant that their role as citizen-consumers was not identical to that of men. Although women were important in their capacity as decision makers, it was ultimately most often men who purchased the goods themselves. It was men who were paying into the national coffers, not women. Few Americans would have disputed women’s identity as consumers in the late eighteenth century; however, their utility to the state was far less well established. Indeed, the government’s decision to establish the tariff as the primary mechanism through which consumption would be made useful to the state meant that from the outset, male consumers realized their civic obligations in full, whereas women performed their duty in a far more mediated way. The discourse surrounding gendered consumption patterns, which highlighted differences of habit and temperament when it came to shopping, amplified this civic distinction.14 Nonetheless, Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries acknowledged that in the case of consumer-citizenship, men and women would share many privileges and duties, although women would be expected to perform more obligations and claim far fewer rights. In this respect, consumption was different from discussions pertaining to suffrage, petitioning, and property. The result was an intermediate form of consumer-citizenship for women.15 The expectation that citizens would acquiesce to consumer obligation— that white men and women would stifle their desires, alter their demands, and change their purchases to suit the interests of the nation—persisted into the nineteenth century. It was an obligation that would be tested time and again

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and would always be found wanting. The return of war between America and Britain presented one such opportunity to try the limits of consumers’ civic duty. Between 1806 and 1815, Republicans asked citizens to give up luxury British imports for the sake of the nation and exist only on necessities that could be manufactured in America. It was hardly a radical request for Americans, who had won their independence through similar acts of material retrenchment. The scale of the public’s rejection was enormous. “Our visionary politicians, when they talk of the necessaries of life, go back to antediluvian ages,” scoffed one editorialist for the United States Gazette at the height of the restrictions in 1807. But, he continued, “no patriotism however fervid, no distress however pressing, can now bring civilized man to this state of nature.”16 Such backward-looking political economy was not acceptable to a nation who hoped to be the beacon of global progress. By the end of the war Americans had concluded that while they may have a duty to pay taxes on their consumption, they could not be denied the chance to consume the foreign goods they desired.17 By 1815, America’s politicians recognized that their fellow citizens—white men and women both—would not be prohibited from purchasing luxury imports outright. But although the rights and responsibilities of the consumer as citizen had not been fully established, in the wake of the war, the conversation over consumption was partially drowned out by debates over political economy that placed three competing interests—the farmer, the merchant, and the manufacturer—at the center of a national discussion. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, writers, journalists, politicians, merchants, planters, and entrepreneurs increasingly emphasized that it was balancing the needs of this trinity of competing interests, all rooted in production, that required attention. If this inchoate group did reckon with the actions and habits of consumers, it was to make them serve the needs of these producers, helping to create the three-part balancing act that was the political economy of the early Republic.18 Yet it was in the interstices of political debate and commercial activity that this same group of men and women inadvertently fashioned a consumer that would do more than solely serve the interests of others. The auction house became fertile ground for the creation of this new consumer. So too did the urban institutes that promoted American manufacturing, such as the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Within the walls of these institutions, auctioneers and merchants, as well as manufacturers and civic boosters, sought to promote a model of consumption that would serve their needs and their

In t ro d u c t i o n

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vision of a national political economy. Attempting to make the best case they could, each of these groups employed a language of rights and obligation to bolster its cause. Among the first of these groups were auctioneers. These men favored unrestricted trade and by extension an unrestricted consumer. Speed, excitement, a quick turnover, and no refunds suited their mode of trade. In their effort to maintain this advantage, they claimed citizens had a right to buy whatever and however they pleased, even if it led to personal ruin in the end. Merchants, who resented the market share that auctioneers had claimed, looked to undermine their competitors by attacking this vision of an unprotected and vulnerable consumer. The government, they argued, had an obligation to protect the American citizen from the ravages of uncontrolled trade. Their failure to make this case in the 1820s cemented a new right pertaining to consumer-citizenship into place. As one auctioneer put it, “in this free and happy republic, every man has a right to be ruined in his own way.”19 Buying whatever one pleased was simply one of those ways. Merchants were not the only group seeking to control the consumer in the 1820s. The urban champions of American manufacturing also sought to use the habits of consumers to promote their own interest. In the North, these boosters lobbied hard for high tariffs. They hoped not only to protect America’s new industries but also to educate the consumer. If men and women could learn to prefer American goods in the interest of promoting national interest, then the need for a tariff would gradually disappear. But by the 1830s the limitations of this mode of legislated obligation became clear. A tariff would not trump the tastes of the nation’s consumers and destroy their desires for foreign goods. In fact, as became abundantly clear in New York, in Philadelphia, and later on in Charleston, consumers would not alter their tastes to suit either a regional or a national interest, no matter how urgent. This realization led the commercial communities of the East Coast to acknowledge a newfound respect for the consumer. By the end of the 1840s, auctioneers, merchants, and manufacturers conceded that consumers were citizens who could buy what they pleased, free from condescending restrictions in the name of protection and liberated from serving the needs of America’s manufacturing sector. By the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of free trade had begun to transform the commercial politics of the Atlantic world, and these same ideas also helped to redefine the idea of the citizen-consumer in the United States.20 But the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism were refracted through a variety of lenses in America that gave shape to two distinctly regional visions

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of the citizen-consumer. In the North, the free-trade truism prevailed that consumer demand drove the engine of commerce and should thus not be restricted. Such ideology suited the emergence of a vibrant and increasingly competitive retail culture in the cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Free-trade advocates were swift to highlight that such power ought to command new respect. The right to consume cheap goods quickly became part of the American free-trade lexicon. It was the advocates of free trade, especially those connected with the Young America movement, who argued that such a right constituted a new commercial egalitarianism that was a unique expression of America’s political system.21 The broad distribution of material comfort reflected the success of the Republic’s grand democratic experiment. Such contentions were less important to planters and proslavery ideologues. To these men, free trade offered an opportunity to reinforce the political economy of slavery through a more liberal and direct trade with Europe and especially Britain. Without free trade, southern communities remained too reliant on northern merchants for their imported goods. Proslavery writers such as A. Dudley Mann were quick to argue that goods that arrived via New York were a liability for the slaveholders’ empire. “Let it be seen that Southerners are in earnest,” Mann thundered to the audience of a Virginia convention in 1858; “that patriotism has duties to perform in trade intercourse . . . and all the articles required for consumption from abroad will thenceforth come directly to their homes relieved from intermediate agencies and at vastly diminished rate.” This was, he argued the only way to end the power of the “overpowering and overshadowing fiscal fort of Wall Street.”22 As war loomed, proslavery men reverted back to the rhetoric of retrenchment and restriction in the hope that it would allow them to achieve their goal of a free-trade empire for slavery. The outbreak of Civil War returned Americans to old questions about the way consumers should serve the nation. Nearly eighty years after the Revolution, the old narratives of obligation returned to shape the southern response to the chaos and turmoil of war. The Confederate government demanded that its consumers serve the cause of slavery by sacrificing their desires on the altar of southern nationhood. The failures of this project illuminated once and for all that such a model of citizenship would not stand. By contrast the Union government amalgamated two apparently opposing visions of political economy to create a consumer whose shopping could serve the nation. Combining the structures of federal tariff law to raise revenue with the rhetoric of free trade, it liberated consumers to purchase as they pleased. The Union govern-

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ment converted the purchase of foreign luxuries and domestic comforts, of necessities and superfluities, of baubles, trinkets, furniture, and fashions into a civic virtue. It marked the apotheosis of the citizen-consumer. Such a transformation may have liberated consumer desire—but it did nothing to create economic equality. The triumph of the Union cemented the idea that every citizen is entitled to purchase freely, yet it did nothing to ensure that such aspirations might be matched by an equal ability. The citizen-consumer was thus both fact and fiction. Consumer-driven revenues would serve the national interest, but the idea of a consumer democracy was a fantasy and has remained so. This book is a cultural history of economic ideas and how those ideas have defined political categories. One of my central operating assumptions is that economic ideas and the debates surrounding them were not the sole province of an intellectual elite. They took shape not just in the minds of a few rarefied political economists, but also in the less tutored imaginations of men and women from a variety of stations. Examining the varied institutions and publications in which these ideas took shape thus becomes a means of examining the transformation of individuals’ economic notions into a collective culture of consumer democracy.23 Merchants and auctioneers, artisans and entrepreneurs, civic boosters and textile manufacturers, advertisers and retailers, politicians and journalists, domestic economists and political economists, in short, an emerging middle-class, from New York to New Orleans, all played a part in creating the economic dimensions of what it meant to be a good citizen in the nineteenth-century United States. Like other bonds of national belonging, the economy is also an act of collective imagination.24 Combining the commodities produced, goods bought and sold, transactions recorded, property evaluated, and labor contracted out, auctioned off, and sweated over into a coherent understanding of how a nation attains and distributes its wealth required more than intellect; the national economy demanded faith in something intangible. Indeed, I would argue that people understand the relationship between an individual economic act (such as purchasing a good) and its place in the national economy in a manner that is similar to the placing of a symbol within a cultural system of belief. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz explained about religious symbols, “They connect the reality of life with a metaphysic.”25 Individual economic acts are thus given meaning through their place in the larger cultural system of economic belief, and conversely that system of belief is reinforced through individuals’ decisions to see their separate economic acts as a

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part of that larger whole. Through such faith in an imagined economy, individuals made meaning out of all the constituent parts of a country’s political economy. That we are able to understand the power of the imagination in creating our economic worlds must be attributed to the work of scholars who have redefined the study of capitalism in recent decades. The debate over whether American capitalism was embedded by means of a liberal consensus into the nation’s founding structures or whether market society was imposed onto a republican society dominated scholarship for much of the second half of the twentieth century.26 A second debate also loomed large: the question of whether the slave societies of the antebellum South were inherently capitalist or “in but not of ” the larger economic system of the United States.27 Moving past these debates over the roots of capitalism in the United States, a new generation of scholars has focused instead on the creation of American capitalism as a series of culturally mediated processes. Such processes, they argue, do not simply alter an individual’s relation to the modes of production but produce people themselves in new ways. Examining capitalism from this viewpoint, it is possible to see a cultural system emerge, one that marks worth through the market and that conflates property and people in slave societies and free societies, although not in the same way. It is a system that converts work into profit and measures success through financial gain. Capitalism, at its core, transforms values, financial and ethical alike.28 Surprisingly, the history of consumption has not yet benefitted from this new perspective. Perhaps this is because earlier histories of consumer culture were primarily interested in the ways in which consumption enabled the formation of identities such as class, race, gender and sexuality. Through the 1980s and 1990s, scholars examined how these identities meshed with agency, as groups struggled for power in battles fought on the terrain of culture.29 These were not narratives that grappled with the economy, despite their engagement with consumption.30 Yet many of the scholars who have returned to the study of capitalism have done so precisely to “bring the economy back in.”31 Attempting to move past a history of identity politics, that seemed at once too subjective and fractured, this new cohort of historians sought to unravel the making and meaning of capitalism by exploring its processes and mechanisms. They explained how capitalism worked as a structure, even as they historicized and denaturalized it as a system. These concerns help to explain why consumption got lost. As these historians revealed what happened in the private counting rooms, trading pits and credit agencies of America

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they looked to the back of the shop, not the front. Yet as this book makes clear, the history of consumption in America is more than identity politics; it also encompasses how Americans harnessed the identity of the consumer to the project of building the nation-state. Capitalism helped to transform personhood in the nineteenth century. Building on this insight, I argue that we must take seriously the ways in which men and women imagined the civic demands of a nation’s economy. To do so is to understand how these expectations can reconfigure citizens’ understanding of their relationship to the nation-state and command a complex set of beliefs, agendas, and practices, all without reference to a constitution. The term that best describes that relationship is civic belonging. While never formalized into a set of legal rights or obligations, the notion of civic belonging encompasses a powerful underlying logic that is shaped by a nation’s political economy, its commercial life, and its cultural practices.32 Civic belonging defines what an individual might expect to gain from citizenship and in return can alter what individuals believe their country can ask them to do in the service of their nation. By examining capitalism as a structuring element of civic belonging, a widened horizon of historical possibilities emerges. There was nothing inevitable about the ascendance of the citizen-consumer. Instead, we are able to see how many different individuals yoked the government to their economic interests, creating a multilateral and sometimes messy relationship between the state and its economy, as well as between themselves and the nation.33 Over the first half of the nineteenth century Americans transformed the relationship between the consumer and the nation-state in ways that would redefine the meaning of both consumption and citizenship. Yet historians have not fully explored the transformation of the consumer’s identity in the first half of the nineteenth century.34 Even those historians who have thought productively about how consumer culture transformed political culture in the eighteenth century have failed to address fully the legacies of a Revolution that fused self-denial with both religious and civic virtue.35 The postRevolutionary generation inherited a complex set of ideas, expectations, and practices regarding the nature of their consumption and citizenship. Because of this, Americans did not face the challenge of creating a new nation-state as either modern liberal subjects or liberated consumers. Such identities would have to be painstakingly created over the course of eight decades and yoked together through trial and error. Nor have many historians of consumer culture examined the process

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through which consumer and citizen were fused together in the nineteenth century. Instead scholars move from explaining the impact of the consumer revolution in the eighteenth century to the birth of consumer culture in the twentieth century. In doing this, we have skipped over the crucial formative period in between.36 Despite the scholarly attention America’s “world of goods” has received in the last thirty years, the part that the everyday consumption of goods has played in reconfiguring American understandings of citizenship in the nineteenth century has been largely overlooked.37 In the nineteenth century the purchase of new luxuries went from being a political liability and a moral failing to a symbol of middle-class virtue, both personal and civic. And it was in the same century that politicians dismantled the restraints and obligations that they had once laid on consumers. While the eighteenth-century language of American citizenship had emphasized the public good over private interest, by the end of the Civil War, personal desires and individual demands were said to serve the body politic. Self-satisfaction was both necessary and desirable, and to that end it ultimately became state sponsored and nationally sanctioned. It was something Americans could take pride in as citizens. The struggle to find a place for the consumer within in the nation’s political economy added meaning to some of the central tenets of the modern nation: democracy, equality, and freedom—all this long before the mass consumer culture of the twentieth century took shape. It is crucial to understanding the creation of these foundations of America’s political economy and political culture. This story matters to everyone because this consumerinflected vision of democracy, equality, and freedom has been peddled by Americans around the globe. And just as in their own country, where the gap between what is promised and what is possible has been a source of constant tension and disappointment, so too have these tensions and disappointments spread across the world. Moreover, the fiction of consumer-citizenship, in particular the idea that everyone might aspire to (and by dint of hard work, one day achieve) the richness of consumer comforts, has constantly obscured the iniquities of capitalism, despite the many critiques of that fiction that exist. Woven into the fabric of the nation’s greatest triumphs—over secession and slavery—the fiction of the citizen-consumer is dearly cherished in American society and seemingly impossible to dislodge. The nineteenth-century notions of economic rights and obligations that were forged in war and peace over the first century of the country’s existence are embedded into modern conceptions of civic virtue and vice in the United

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States. In particular, the contests over consumption and citizenship have left a legacy of expectations that continue to shape Americans’ relationship to the nation-state and indeed the way in which the nation-state perceives their worth as citizens. By the end of the Civil War it was possible to think of a citizen’s consumption as either an asset or a liability to the nation as a whole. At the start of the twenty-first century, the echoes of such a forensic accounting still resonate.

Chapter 1

Dilemmas of Abundance

Over the course of his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin spent a lot of time thinking about America’s consumption of foreign goods. On the whole he was ambivalent, seeing both the problems as well as the utility of such purchases.1 But as the Revolution gathered speed, and Americans went to war, Franklin began to despair of his compatriots’ good sense. “Is it impossible for us to become wiser, when by Simple Economy and avoiding unnecessary Expences we might more than defray the Charges of the War?” he asked Samuel Cooper in 1779. “We import fashions, Luxuries and Trifles. Such trade may enrich the Traders, but never the Country.”2 He was less diplomatic with his own daughter. Berating her for sending off to France for linen when she could have spun it herself and chastising her for requesting “long black pins, and lace, and feathers,” he scolded her: “the war may make our frugality necessary; and as I am always preaching that doctrine, I cannot in conscience or in decency encourage the contrary, by my example, in furnishing my children with foolish modes and luxuries.” Finishing as only a father could, he jovially informed her that if she wanted feathers for fashion, she could pull them from the tail of an American cockerel.3 Throughout the war, Franklin’s certainty that no good could come of foreign imports seemed unassailable. But in the wake of the Revolution, his convictions faltered. On the one hand, he could see that foreign imports continued to threaten the vitality of the nation’s political economy. Displays of private extravagance in the face of public indebtedness would, he argued, “give Confidence to Enemies and Diffidence to Friends.”4 Any failure to pay national debts, both foreign and domestic, because of overspending on foreign goods would simply invite speculation that America was economically untrustworthy and politically vulnerable. But Franklin also acknowledged

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that luxurious goods could suffuse the Republic with an energy borne of consumer desire, an energy that would enable Americans to work toward the creation of a flourishing new nation.5 The question, as Franklin understood it, was whether Americans’ desires for foreign luxuries could play any part in the making of America’s new political economy.6 Carefully handled, he thought, these desires might be directed toward the pursuit of national prosperity. Mismanaged, these same desires for luxuries had the capacity to undermine America’s international reputation and even dissolve the fragile bond of union that held the new Republic together. Franklin was not alone among American elites to recognize that the consumption of imported luxury goods posed a real dilemma for the new nation. Between the fragile peace accords of 1783 and the first congressional session under the new Constitution in 1789, the consumption of foreign luxuries, especially those bought from the British, became a particular problem. No longer entitled to the commercial privileges they had enjoyed as a colony, Americans, rich and poor, struggled with the consequences of living and trading outside the Empire’s protective embrace. Such exclusion not only highlighted their economic disadvantage; it also illuminated the economic differences between each state. With no law in place that compelled every state to make the same economic treaties with foreign nations, fears that each state might act in its own interest festered.7 Such suspicions placed a great strain on the tenuous union created by the Articles of Confederation. In some ways this was hardly surprising. If wearing homespun and refusing to buy British goods had in some ways cemented the bonds of loyalty patriots felt toward one another, there had been just as many Americans who smuggled in British goods, wore British fashions, and continued to enjoy a cup of East India Company tea.8 Thus in the wake of the war, with the urgency of conflict behind them, the question of how to respond collectively as citizens to the dilemma of buying imported goods, not to mention the quagmires of international trade, was not easy to resolve.9 Instead discussions, both public and private, regarding commercial policy highlighted the chasms that cut across the supposed union of interests on which the Confederation rested.10 No simple model of citizenship or of nationhood emerged from the wreckage of the war.11 Indeed, individual Americans’ desires for foreign imports added up to a set of wider demands that jeopardized the very bonds of union that had just been created. If the consumption of imported goods threatened the political structure of the nation, it also exposed the economic weakness of the federal govern-

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ment. By the mid-1780s, a powerful strand of elite discourse argued that the excessive consumption of imported luxuries had drained the nation of hard currency. Yet this elite did not blame themselves for such a crisis. Instead America’s wealthiest merchants, bankers, lawyers, and planters were quick to argue that the rural middling and lower classes were indulging in extravagant purchases rather than saving their specie to pay their taxes. Such shortcomings were not only symptomatic of a moral failing. They also represented an economic disaster. Under the Articles of Confederation, these hard-money revenues, requisitioned from each state by the Confederation Congress, were the only funds that the national government could command. Yet throughout the 1780s, Congress was left short, as state governments encountered massive resistance to tax collection. Despite this, the United States government could not impose taxes and had little recourse to action when their requisitions from the states did not come rolling in.12 Once again, elites blamed imported goods for both causing and exposing the weaknesses of their young union. Faced with these dilemmas, America’s political class wondered who should take on the task of protecting the nation from these problems? The crux of the matter was the question of civic duty. Should the responsibility fall on the shoulders of individual citizens to change their consumer habits? This model of patriotic consumption was familiar to the Revolutionary generation, who had already used their habits of consumption to help lay claim to a new polity. Or should, as nationalists were increasingly arguing, Americans agree to create a new governing structure that asked citizens to cede a portion of their responsibility to consume virtuously to a newly fashioned federal government? In choosing the latter of these two options, supporters of an expanded federal government created a new mode of national citizenship for the Republic. This citizen-consumer would still have obligations, but they would be defined by law, not by a personal moral code. Using the tariff as its primary tool, the first Constitutional Congress framed the consumption of luxuries as an act of civic virtue for the wealthy and defined frugality as a civic obligation for the poor. Indeed, by 1789, the Federalists instituted a model of citizenship that was sharply differentiated by class, creating one set of civic obligations for the rich and a separate set of civic obligations for the poor. Through their intervention, the Federalists helped to establish the idea that all citizens did not have to perform their civic obligations in the same way. Their solution rested on a powerful underlying truth: that some obligations, and indeed some citizens, would be more valued than others.13 It was a model that would provide

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the foundation for the debate over consumption and its relation to citizenship for the next seventy years. The dilemma that foreign imports posed for American elites was not simply borne out of the immediate political expedience of the postwar moment; the understanding that luxuries were problematic was one that was deeply rooted in colonial thought and religious belief. Because of this, middling and elite Americans regarded luxury goods with a deep ambivalence, and foreign imports did not simply enter through customshouses weighed down by local tariffs; they arrived freighted with a wide range of meanings that were as diverse as they were contentious. It is hardly surprising that eighteenth-century Americans, like Franklin, understood foreign goods to be luxury items. Though some imports were surely necessities (nails, tools, and salt, for example), most imported goods fell into the broad spectrum of self-indulgence. Encompassing textiles, crockery, silverware, and cutlery, as well as embellishments such as lace, ribbon, and buttons, not to mention wines, sugars, spices, tea, and coffee, these were items that gratified the senses, sources of pleasure, both physical and aesthetic, that had the capacity to pique desires. In a tradition of social thought rooted in Hebraic teachings, classical wisdom, and Christian belief, Americans remained convinced through the end of the eighteenth century that these desires, if uncontrolled, would give way to expressions of sensuality, venality, and excess.14 As Noah Webster put it in the 1806 edition of his great compendium, “luxurious” was defined as a “softening by pleasure,” while a consumer remained someone “who spends, destroys or wastes.”15 Nor were such traits simply a personal moral failing. Eighteenth-century critiques of consumption warned that the men and women who gave in to luxury would do whatever was necessary to satisfy their material cravings, even if it meant flouting social order and defying the proper authority within the polity.16 Defining the nature and meaning of these luxuries changed as the politics of the Revolution took hold. As Thomas Paine’s incendiary call for rebellion reverberated around the colonies in 1776, Whigs and Tories alike began to debate what would be required of the American people to ensure the foundation of a secure republican government. Nearly all agreed that a republic required a people whose civic virtue was embodied in “Industry, Frugality [and] Economy.” In this context, luxury became the great enemy of the republican project.17 Indeed, as part of a set of goods that symbolized and constituted British fashions, luxury imports became markers of loyalism, the signal that

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their owners had defied Patriots’ efforts to punish Britain through economic sanctions.18 Conversely, after 1780, a similar set of luxury goods, if bought from France or worn in the Gallic style, meant something quite different. Despite her father’s scolding, Franklin’s daughter Sarah Bache knew that wearing French feathers could be a powerful expression of patriotism and a show of support for the Franco-American allegiance during a moment of national peril.19 These displays of political sentiment intertwined in complex ways with demonstrations of social status. Colonial elites, including the lesser gentry and the professionals of American society, understood that the correct display of luxury goods could ensure access to networks of political and commercial power, prosperous alliances, and the enjoyments of genteel society.20 Luxury goods were thus never an abstract term or even a clearly defined set of items. They were goods made luxurious by the moment in which they were bought, by the purchaser, and by their use. In the postwar context, the term luxury took on yet another new dimension. Beginning in 1783, the consumption of foreign imports became a luxury that America as a nation-state could simply not afford. Once again, it was Benjamin Franklin who identified the crux of the dilemma. Writing to the secretary of the Continental Congress, Charles Thomson, in 1784, Franklin reflected on the state of national affairs and America’s future. He warned Thomson that “if we do not convince the World that we are a Nation to be depended on for Fidelity in Treaties; if we appear negligent in paying our Debts . . . our Reputation . . . will be lost, and fresh Attacks upon us will be encouraged.” The U.S. position was precarious and Franklin knew it. “Being both enervated and impoverish’d by Luxury . . . [and] shamefully extravagant in contracting private Debts, while we are backward in discharging honorably those of the Publick” would only serve to confirm that Americans were not yet economically mature enough to make responsible decisions.21 Franklin’s warning was ominous. By giving into luxury consumption and falling into debt, Americans were undermining the credibility of their nation. But Franklin could also see that luxury consumption had a role to play in creating a prosperous nation. Writing to British diplomat and American sympathizer Benjamin Vaughn in London that same year, 1784, he reflected on the subject of luxury in the United States. “I have not indeed yet thought of a Remedy for Luxury,” he mused. “I am not sure that in a great State it is capable of a remedy. Nor that the Evil in itself always so great as it is represented. . . . Is not the Hope of one day being able to purchase and enjoy

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Luxuries a great spur to Labour and Industry? May not Luxury therefore produce more than it consumes, if without such a Spur People would be as they [are] naturally enough inclined to be, lazy and indolent?”22 Franklin was familiar with Bernard Mandeville’s treatise Fable of the Bees, published in 1714, and drew on this theory of luxury consumption: that personal excess could generate public prosperity.23 As a longtime resident of Philadelphia, Franklin did not need to look hard to see how this philosophy of luxury worked in the American context. The “Commercial Towns upon the Seacoast” were the perfect places to observe the workings of Mandeville’s theory. In these bustling metropolises, luxury spending drove the economy forward, for better or for worse, providing jobs for craftsmen, merchants, and traders. Because of this, Franklin acknowledged the need for luxury in the immediacy of the moment. But Franklin’s vision for America moved far beyond the postwar moment. He argued that America would find its future and its salvation in the “vast Quantity of Forest Lands” that lay beyond the littoral laps of luxury. On these agricultural lands, Franklin believed, Americans would work and live and keep the “Body of our Nation laborious and frugal.”24 Franklin believed, as did Thomas Jefferson in the 1780s, that the nation’s success would grow from the livelihoods of thousands of yeomen farmers, whose independent farms would provide the foundation for a virtuous republic.25 As the nation expanded, the center of the nation would shift west, and at the heart of this new republic would be industry, thrift, and virtuous economy. Such ideas were grand in scope and theoretical in design. They were also riddled with inconsistencies. Franklin was after all the very essence of an urban, cosmopolitan man, who never pursued the bucolic charms of a rural retreat or agricultural labor (Figure 1). Moreover, while living in London in the 1760s, Franklin had worn fashionable European-made clothes, styling himself as a cosmopolitan enlightenment scholar although he was equally well known for his simple brown jacket and his unusual fur cap (Figure 2). Nor was he alone in this ambivalence. Other statesmen, including Jefferson, Washington, and Adams, all grappled with the same challenge. Eschewing luxury might also mean relinquishing their claims to elegance and gentility, something they did not want to do, not only for their own reputation but also for the reputation of their burgeoning nation. What had been profligacy during the throes of the Revolution was an expression of a unique American civility in the wake of the war. Luxury goods, which were still by necessity imported goods in the 1780s, would occupy an uneasy place in the developing American political economy.26

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Figure 1. Portrait of Benjamin Franklin, David Martin, 1767, oil on canvas, 58¾ × 50⅜ in. Courtesy of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia. Gift of Maria McKean Allen and Phebe Warren Downes through the bequest of their mother, Elizabeth Wharton McKean.

Beyond the problems such goods posed to questions of both international economic independence and national economic activity, the pursuit and possession of luxury goods also challenged the very formation of a republican political economy. The demands of republican citizenship, argued New England men such as Samuel Adams and Benjamin Austin, asked American men to cultivate a disinterested and selfless civic identity in order to best serve the nation.27 Yet luxury seemed to seep into every corner of society,

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Figure 2. Benjamin Franklin in Beaver Hat, Augustin de Saint-Aubin, after Charles Nicolas Cochin, 1777, line engraving, 11¼ × 8¼ in. © National Portrait Gallery, London.

threatening the republican experiment from the start. As Jean Pierre Brissot de Warville, French politician, commentator and revolutionary, had commented upon visiting the United States: “they are not found among those patriots of a day, who, while they are preaching the Rights of Man, are gravely occupied with a gilded phaeton or an embroidered vest.”28 A love of lucre had always been associated with corrupt citizenship on both sides of the Atlantic. Forming a republican polity would be challenge enough, but if American

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citizens were to put their love of baubles before their duties to the nation, the task would be impossible. In America, republican equality was not to be achieved in old monarchical ways. Americans did not turn to sumptuary laws.29 Instead, as Franklin’s comments suggested, each individual citizen must take on the responsibility of refusing the siren call of luxury and live a simple, rustic life. Self-abnegation ensured that self-interest could not supersede the dictates of the common good. But such frugality and self-denial posed a further set of problems. If the gentry dispensed with the markers of social standing, they feared they might also discard the cherished habits of deference, undermine the foundations of social stability, and confirm themselves to be a republic of yokels and rustics. Therefore, although proclamations of gentility were still highly valued and rarely abandoned, a new rhetoric of civility had to be fashioned out of the material world. Thus the polite society of the new American nation faced a dilemma that was at once social and political, economic and cultural in its challenges; the dilemma over luxury goods challenged all the foundational principles of the shaky new Republic. Americans had little opportunity to consider these questions of luxury consumption in the abstract. Even as Britain and America teetered on the edge of peace in the early spring of 1783, trade between Europe and the newly independent states resumed with speed. Schooners arrived on American shores daily, their holds full of West Indian and European cargoes. Those goods arriving from London, Manchester, and Sheffield might have occasioned the odd raised eyebrow. Only months earlier, Americans could have turned the pages of their newspapers and found notices announcing the trials of men who had smuggled British goods into the towns and villages of the Eastern Seaboard. These wares were condemned and sold off at sheriffs’ auctions.30 Now, those same readers saw new advertisements beginning to appear in local newspapers. Shop owners boasted that they had large and elegant assortments of British goods in stock, available on the most reasonable of terms.31 Condemnation had turned into anticipation. Merchants were among the first to advertise the material blessings of peace. On April 17, 1783, John Bayard of Philadelphia announced an auction sale at his store on Front Street. The stock, he assured readers, would be “entirely fresh and just imported” from Europe.32 The promise of new stuff would have been exciting. The strains of war and occupation had made the luxury of new goods a source of tension, but by the spring of 1783 an auction sale once again promised a well-remembered pleasure. Bayard’s advertisement, however,

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might have resonated a little differently with longtime residents of Philadelphia, who would have recognized Bayard not as an auctioneer but instead as an elected member of one of the city’s Revolutionary committees of observation and inspection. Formed amid the tensions and suspicions that followed the Coercive Acts in 1774, these committees had been dedicated to enforcing the colonies’ nonconsumption and nonimportation regulations, monitoring the consumer habits of their fellow citizens. Bayard, as one of nine men who kept watch over the northern precincts of Philadelphia, had clearly seen the dangers that luxury goods posed to the incipient nation and was willing to do his part in policing his compatriots.33 Yet with the signatures of the Paris Peace Treaty barely dry on the page, this patriotic merchant, former Revolutionary colonel, and member of the Continental Congress eagerly resumed commerce with Britain. There is little doubt that Bayard understood that the purchase of British goods during the Revolution had undermined the American cause. Yet his perception of that cause changed as peace was announced. Like many other American merchants, he sought to put the Revolutionary politics of consumption behind him and inaugurate a new era of American consumption of imported manufactures. As he was a man of note and a leader of his community, this decision must have resonated deeply. Perhaps his customers took that as a sign that they too could now enjoy the return of foreign goods to the city. The joys of the spring trading season were not confined to Philadelphia. In May 1783, the residents of Albany held a meeting at city hall “to determine whether vessels coming from the city of New York should have permission to trade [there] or not.” This was no small consideration. New York was still occupied by British troops. To allow ships up the Hudson River meant that, in principle, the citizens of Albany would be trading with the enemy. But when the issue was put to the people, they “unanimously resolved in favor of free trade” and marched down to the docks to offer the two sloops from New York City “protection both in person and property.”34 Just as they had done during the Revolution, local communities took charge of deciding what commercial activity constituted a political virtue and what qualified as an unacceptable transgression of the patriotic cause. Such small communal decisions helped to propel America into new trade relations with Britain. In New York and Pennsylvania, as well as further north in Massachusetts and Connecticut, merchants found themselves scrambling to fill orders for British goods to sate the soaring American demand.35 Not all parts of the Eastern Seaboard opened their ports with such alacrity or ease. The residents of the Chesapeake were somewhat more reluctant to

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reestablish British trade. In Virginia, the lasting effects of Lord Dunmore’s proclamation had left slaveholders bitter and resentful, while the destruction wrought by Lord Cornwallis’s campaign was still evident on the landscape.36 The case of the Charleston merchant James Gregorie illustrates precisely how the return of British trade challenged individuals to clarify their obligations and allegiances before old habits of commerce could be revived. Gregorie had immigrated to America from Scotland in 1757. He had begun his new life as a cotton planter in Virginia but journeyed to Britain in 1775, ostensibly on family business and not, as his uncle later testified, “on account of the war.”37 Gregorie returned to America in 1780, settling in Charleston to begin life as an importer of European and East Indian goods. Even as the city lay in the grip of British military occupation, Gregorie’s business seemed to prosper. He was able to receive imported goods throughout the war, even supplying the British army with necessary stores.38 But by late 1781 the fate of the British army looked dim, and Gregorie’s own fortunes became less certain. Lord Cornwallis surrendered Yorktown in October, and by the following July the British had abandoned Savannah. Struggling to avert disaster, British merchants in Charleston brokered a deal with the American governor of South Carolina. Providing they did not abscond with any slaves belonging to American citizens, they could have eighteen months to collect their debts and dispose of their goods.39 Such a deal made a man like Gregorie a target of suspicion for the entering conquerors. Was he a patriot who had simply struggled to get by or a loyalist biding his time before he left with his wealth? Gregorie did his best to weather this storm. Indeed, by February 1783 he was once again advertising that he had a stock of imported European and India goods for sale. Yet this same advert claimed that the goods he was selling had arrived from London in September 1782, only a few months before the British evacuated Charleston.40 It is not certain why Gregorie waited so long to advertise his goods for sale, but it is significant that in the intervening period Gregorie petitioned the Senate of South Carolina to become a citizen of the United States. In his memorial he swore that he had “never directly or indirectly done anything to the prejudice of America.”41 He did not mention his former business with the army. Thus in March of 1783, Gregorie became a citizen of the United States and returned to the business importing British goods into Charleston.42 His decision to claim citizenship signaled his loyalty to the new national venture and thus transformed his business from a dubious enterprise into an upstanding American trade.

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The trials of James Gregorie, the efforts of the citizens of Albany, and the decisions of John Bayard together illuminate the ways in which commercial considerations forced citizens, both old and new, to reckon with the obligations of living in a newly independent nation. All these men and their customers understood that buying and selling imported goods, especially those from Britain, had meanings that extended beyond that of a simple transaction. Timed right, such business was a clarion call of victory. Timed wrong, it was an act of treachery by these merchants and by extension their customers and consumers. Each community seemed to take on the responsibility of judging these acts for itself. Thus while statesmen such as Jefferson and Franklin wrestled with the catechisms of political economy through theory and rhetoric, merchants and their customers were confronting the same questions in their every day dealings, fashioning the meaning of civic obligation out of protean commercial deals. Their answers were both pragmatic and liberal. Old enmities were buried for the sake of resuming old commercial habits, and Americans looked to Europe in the hope that a new era of free trade could commence. A plethora of personal decisions does not add up to a clear foreign policy. The Articles of Confederation gave the United States no mandate for collective action when it came to trade policy.43 Despite the immediate hopes of some, it was not initially clear whether the British would regain their commercial predominance in North America, nor were the terms of trade between the two nations a foregone conclusion. Such uncertainties provided room for anxieties to flourish on both sides of the Atlantic. While the British resolved some of their fears through the reimplementation of the Navigation Acts, Americans harbored a different apprehension. The commercial interests of each state did not add up to a single harmonious whole, and thus the prospect of brokering for advantage threatened to break apart the newly bonded states. If the Revolution had been a moment of crisis that brought disparate communities together, the aftermath of this apotheosis had quite the opposite effect. Individuals and local communities approached these problems on an ad hoc basis, choosing to follow their own prerogatives. But the question of how to trade as a nation was one that Americans had not yet answered as they turned their hand to the business of building a nation-state. These questions did not present themselves immediately. In fact, in the spring of 1783, British merchants had to jostle with other foreign merchants to claim their turf. Both French and Dutch importers sought to establish their

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preeminence with American consumers. But ultimately, as the Philadelphia financier Robert Morris observed in September 1783, American “commerce [was] flowing very fast towards Great Britain.”44 Despite their former enmity, a number of factors meant that British goods quickly became the favored stock in American shops. First, British goods were made cheaper through commercial policies put in place by the British government.45 Second, the widespread availability of British goods in American shops was made possible by the liberal credit that British mercantile houses extended to American merchants and wholesalers. Such credit enabled a rapid increase in the scale of importation, especially in cities, like Philadelphia, where trading partnerships had been well established before the war.46 Third, this attraction to British goods was heightened by the news that powerful British voices were urging their government to reestablish trade on the most liberal terms. Reports of parliamentary business from March outlined plans that promised free trade between Britain and America, while Pitt’s government appeared supportive of creating a special trade relationship with its former colony. Apparently, Britain was not prepared to relinquish the temptations of the American market.47 But above all Americans had a long-standing preference for British goods, cemented by their many years as a colony. These tastes gave British manufactures the edge in the American marketplace. Not all Americans were pleased by these preferences. “Let not that deluded country conclude, that because of the conclusion of the war, English goods being first at market were . . . bought up with avidity [because of ] any particular attachment to their manufactures,” railed one commentator in Charleston, South Carolina, in October 1783.48 But despite this bluster, British goods and British styles remained the preferred mode among American consumers, especially in fashionable centers such as New York.49 The goods that arrived were the familiar necessities and luxuries that had made up their material world before the Revolution. Fabrics from Europe and the East Indies arrived every week. Their names—osnaburgs, “cambricks,” calicos, sarsenets, romalls, nankeens, Bengals, “Indian taffeties,” and dozens more—lined the pages of newspaper advertisements, and soon the textiles themselves sat on the shelves of warehouses from Front Street in Philadelphia to Broad Street in Charleston.50 Also in these cargoes were the accessories that men and women would use to embellish their clothes. Merchants ensured that fancy buttons, gold and silver lace, shoe buckles, gloves, and modish hats were all on offer from early on. Together merchants and ships’ captains also shipped in less fanciful items. Cheap, serviceable “negro cloth” was available

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to slave owners via Charleston merchants, as were a variety of tools that planters, workmen, and farmers up and down the Eastern Seaboard might seek to replace or renew.51 Provisions including wines, liquors, spices, tea, coffee, and preserved fruits also made up part of this grand cornucopia. And household items also found their way back onto American wharves and into American stores. Carpeting and draperies, creamware, porcelain and pottery, silverplated dinner services and Britanniaware, cut glass, plain glass, and window glass all came in, nestled in boxes and barrels, waiting to be rolled in by the draymen and unpacked by the clerks who scurried back and forth across the docks. One New York merchant reported in awe that America’s “warehouses from one end of the continent to the other seem a pile of riches, which the resources of this country cannot answer for in many years to come.”52 But in the muggy heat of summer 1783, the vast promise of the spring trade first languished then collapsed under the weight of a glutted market. Stagnant commerce was always a disappointment, but what caused alarm among Americans was the realization that Britain was about to alter the very foundations of America’s commercial hopes for the future. On July 2, 1783, the Privy Council passed an Order-in-Council banning American ships from entering into the West Indies. This dealt a devastating blow to American hopes for prosperity and exposed the new nation’s commercial vulnerability on the international stage. For New England and mid-Atlantic merchants in particular, the Caribbean islands had always been crucial trading partners. Between 1768 and 1772, 29 percent of all the colonies’ exports went directly to the West Indies.53 These merchants believed that if they were unable to export American and European produce to the West Indies, a significant source of their income would be much diminished.54 The Order-in-Council was thus a major alarm bell, the harbinger of Britain’s long-term plan to permanently alter Atlantic commerce to exclude the United States from the business they had counted on to survive and prosper. The author of this plan was John Baker-Holroyd, Lord Sheffield. In April 1783, he had published a pamphlet that had condemned the efforts of Pitt’s government to establish free trade with America and urged the government to return to the principles of mercantilism. Observations on the Commerce of the American States with Europe and the West Indies was a sneering indictment of Englishmen’s eager desires to resume trading as if nothing had happened. In his opening salvo, Sheffield pointed out that, “by asserting their independence, the Americans have at once renounced the privileges, as well as the duties, of British subjects—they are become foreign states.”55 Sheffield argued

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that American merchants had forfeited the right to the markets of the West Indies and the privileges of trading within the protective embrace of the British Empire. Moreover, a confident Sheffield predicted that Americans would remain in thrall to Britain, captive as consumers, captivated by British goods. “The solid power of supplying the wants of America, of receiving her produce, and of waiting her convenience, belongs almost exclusively to our own merchants,” he noted. “If we can abstain from mischievous precipitation. . . . the industry of Britain will encounter little competition in the American market.”56 Sheffield’s prophecy turned out to be correct. The voracious demand for British goods in America outran the young nation’s ability to pay for them. Richard Hill, speaking to a gathering of the legislature in Petersburg, Virginia, in 1787 concluded in frustration: “All is British! British customs, British manners, British dress, British fashions, British folly and British vice.”57 Indeed, between 1790 and 1807 British imports into the United States for consumption quadrupled.58 As long as that was the case, Lord Sheffield’s confident predictions of American dependence would remain a threat to the new Republic’s economic health and national pride. Sheffield’s policy exposed the fissures already apparent in the new union. The way in which the Articles of Confederation operated meant that each individual state had the authority to establish its own terms of trade with foreign powers. This raised the alarming possibility that any individual state might enter into a treaty with Britain for its own benefit, undercutting the cause of the rest. The fragility of the union was suddenly exposed. “No temporary allurements should induce [the southern states],” urged one writer in the Pennsylvania Packet “to enter into separate treaties for their private emolument contrary to the true spirit of union.” Instead, he argued, Americans would rather “cut off the use of British manufactures, unless [they] share[d] in her commerce on terms that [were] equal and honourable.”59 It was a sentiment that the author clearly hoped to be true, but New England and midAtlantic merchants fretted that southern traders would look to independently rekindle old commercial ties with Britain. These same men doubted whether the union could withstand the strain of these incipient fractures. The Order-in-Council had been a blow to the hopes of American freetrade proponents, and their first response was to attempt to establish an American presence with more force on the international stage. Thomas Jefferson was especially optimistic and believed that it would be possible to forge a free-trade alliance not only with Britain but with all the trading powers of

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Europe. Yet the European powers were reluctant to agree on any kind of agreement with the young nation, which had not yet proved itself to be worthy or reliable.60 Thus, Jefferson had a grueling task ahead of him. Over the course of two years he attempted to barter, broker, and bargain with sixteen different states, including the Barbary powers, seeking to establish free trade with them all. But by 1785 only Prussia had accepted Jefferson’s model treaty.61 Of all these failures, it was the inability to establish a formal agreement with Britain that was the biggest blow. For the United States, trade with its former imperial mistress remained under London’s control, restricted by the Navigation Acts, with any leeway in the hands of the Privy Council. As Thomas Jefferson noted later in 1793, such an arrangement left American merchants at the favor and fancy of the Crown. This was an ignominious relationship that cut especially deep.62 Such frustrations only served to cause deeper fissures to appear in the fragile American union. Writing to the president of Congress, Richard Lee, in 1785, James Madison noted how trade relations with Britain made things especially bad for Virginia. “A comparison of current prices here with those in the Northern States, either at this time or at any time since the peace, will show that the loss direct on our produce & indirect on our imports is not less than 50 per ct.,” he wrote.63 Madison’s anxieties revealed how the failure to establish any commercial predominance in the Atlantic world created a latent jealousy and suspicion between the states. “I cannot speak with certainty as to all the States,” Madison observed in the same letter, “but sure I am that the trade of this was never more completely monopolized by [Britain] when it was under the direction of her own laws than it was at this moment.”64 Lacking a single commercial voice abroad meant that each state sought to create its own international trade policy. As a result, interstate relations were sorely strained by the rivalries generated by each state’s own distinct tariff schedule. Writing in support of a stronger federal government and a national tariff in 1786, an anonymous New Yorker commented: “these different state imposts appear to be but petty commercial wars, to squeeze a revenue out of each other, and are very great embarrassments to a free trade and mutual intercourse.” Worried that his state would soon lose the trade of Connecticut and New Jersey to Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, he begged his fellow merchants to reconsider the virtues of a national tariff: he failed.65 By the mid-1780s, these worries coalesced into a nationalist rhetoric, which blamed individual states for turning their fiscal policies into weapons of competition rather than bonds of union. Jefferson and Madison, as well as

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John Adams and Alexander Hamilton saw this problem through the lens of international relations. Such division weakened the nation on a global stage. East Coast merchants who wanted better terms of international credit and a chance to eradicate the possibility that their neighbors could undercut them could also see the benefit of a commercial union. From these factions came an increased clamor to establish a more united voice for the new nation. The Annapolis Convention of 1786 was the first step in this process. Attended by a number of delegates from five different states, including Madison, Hamilton, and the nationalist writer Tench Coxe, the convention was an attempt to address what was increasingly perceived as the crisis in American commerce. Yet by September, the conclusion that the delegates arrived at was that the Articles of Confederation were unable to provide the tools needed to fix the commercial problems that Americans were facing. Forging the core of a new nationalist consensus, they called for the formation of a group with greater authority and a broader mandate for change.66 The fragility of the bonds of union in the mid-1780s was not surprising. Economically, geographically, and culturally these new states shared little.67 While the shared patterns of consumption that had existed before the Revolution had become a means of connecting these disparate colonies against a common enemy, in the wake of the war these habits of consumerism became more of a liability. Although every state now contained citizens who hankered after British imports, these same citizens did not share the ability to obtain them. Consumption now became one more mark through which Americans could measure and resent their diverging interests. The issues posed by the problems of personal consumption habits tested the connections that held the nation together and found them wanting. Nationalists increasingly argued that the answer to such woes was a single federal tariff that would extract a uniform sum from consumers across the nation for the benefit of the whole union.68 By the mid-1780s the frustration over Lord Sheffield’s prognostications were overshadowed by widespread looming concerns over debt and the direct relationship that Americans saw between an individual’s purchases and the impoverished state.69 “We have erred, greatly erred, since by extravagant importations and consumption of foreign goods, a great part of them, mere gew-gaws and needless trumpery, this has taken away a good deal of our money, which we now want with which to carry on business and pay our taxes. We are smarting for this extravagance and folly,” exclaimed one New

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York author for the Daily Advertiser in 1786.70 As a public debate over imported luxuries escalated, a powerful republican discourse emerged, informing American consumers that each purchase they made tied them to the larger project of sustaining (or undermining) the Republic itself. The intellectual rationale for tying personal consumption to national debt was rooted in a powerful mercantilist discourse that permeated the debates over economy in the early Republic.71 As Benjamin Franklin noted as part of a widely held opinion, “the consumption of goods in every country has its limits.—The faculty of the people, that is, their ability to buy and pay, is equal only to a certain quantity of merchandize.”72 This argument claimed that the purchase of British imports threatened the health of the American financial system as a whole because it drained the economy of specie, the only form of currency that had any intrinsic worth. In the absence of specie, many states issued paper money to keep their ailing economies afloat. Nationalists abhorred this solution. As James Madison explained in 1779, the reason that America’s paper currency was failing to hold its value was because the public could not say with confidence if or when they could exchange their slips of paper for the promised specie, or even if that specie was there to back the currency in the first place. As levels of public trust slipped, currency depreciation followed.73 Nationalists like Madison were quick to make the case that the increased use of paper money was a direct result of too many people buying luxury imports that they could not afford, purchases that were threatening the nation’s credit abroad. Their critiques drew a direct link between the individual habits of consumption and America’s financial reputation in the world. The lack of specie also created domestic problems. By the mid-1780s, a number of communities were facing up to the problem that its citizens did not have the necessary resources to pay their taxes, which in the new Republic were higher than they had ever been. Such personal shortfalls added up to problems at a state level. A state that could not collect the taxes due from its citizenry also faced the humiliation of defaulting on its loans, losing the confidence of its creditors, and above all failing to make the payments of requisitioned funds that the Confederation Congress demanded. By 1787, the national debt stood at approximately $37.8 million (not including interest).74 Yet there was little that Congress could do. Early efforts to impose a national impost had failed, and the process of requisition from each state was a slow and unreliable process, jeopardizing what little faith both national and international creditors had in the country’s resources. Elites across the nation, especially those involved in trade, were acutely aware of the fact that as the

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1780s dragged on, public credit was on the verge of collapse and with it, the reputation of the United States and its republican experiment.75 As Judge Henry Pendleton of South Carolina summed it up 1786, the loss of specie abroad to pay for British “superfluities” resulted in “the loss of public credit, the most alarming deficiencies in the revenue and in the collection of the taxes.”76 The judge concluded his jeremiad against excess and overspending by exhorting newly charged juries to aggressively pursue those citizens who did not pay their taxes and their debts. Without that course of action, he predicted the collapse of the nation. As the economic crisis of the 1780s deepened, elites across the political spectrum persisted in framing personal debt as a public problem. Nowhere was this link between individual consumption and public debt and default more apparent than in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In New England, the orders-in-council had hit hard, and while international trade may not have appeared to be connected to individual consumption on first glance, backcountry individuals were soon confronted with the fact that their personal bills were deeply connected to the larger currents of regional trade. Backcountry farmers bought most of their goods from local retailers, who stocked their stores with the glass, iron, ceramics, and textiles that their coastal partners had imported from Britain. These retailers most often paid East Coast merchants in the produce that their own customers used as currency. When the coastal merchants had been able to use that produce to buy rum and sugar in the West Indies, this arrangement had worked; but by 1784 the merchants were excluded from this commerce and faced British demands for payment in specie only. Coastal merchants soon transferred this demand to the Connecticut valley retailers. Left with little alternative, retailers turned to their customers, cancelled their lines of credit, and demanded immediate cash payment, much to dismay of their clientele.77 This shift coincided with the increased demands of the state’s tax collectors. Farmers in rural Massachusetts suddenly found themselves squeezed between two competing demands for increasingly scarce specie.78 Unable to pay up, these farmers defaulted on their debts and ended up in court. The ordersin-council, combined with the British decision to withdraw credit, had spread like rot throughout the whole region. Community ties festered beneath the strain until eventually, between 1784 and 1786, those relationships disintegrated completely. By the end of August 1786, the commonwealth erupted into violent conflict as farmers began to protest against their prosecution and imprisonment for debt.79

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By the summer of 1786, bands of armed protestors began to storm the courthouses, in a rebellion led by Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck. This was at least in part a response to the humiliation these men felt at being caught in the trap of overspending on material goods in the new Republic. “I am a man that gets his living by hard labor, not by a pension or monopolizing,” wrote one Massachusetts farmer in October 1786, “and I think that husbandry is as honest a calling as any in the world, the last temptation for fraud and lying— and I believe this country would flourish faster is there were less white shirts and more black frocks.” He continued, let “us oblige the merchants to shut up their shops and get their living by following the plough.”80 The eastern political elite was appalled by the outbreak of violence, responding with a strong show of military authority. But beyond this demonstration of force, the elites’ horrified response to Shays’s Rebellion also proves that they too believed overconsumption to be at the heart of the problem. In November 1786, as Boston seethed with fear and outrage, James Bowdoin, the governor of Massachusetts, issued a memorial calling on all citizens of the commonwealth to limit their spending. Reprinted all over New England, with the express hope of inspiring other cities and towns to follow suit, the memorial ran: Whereas the excessive use of articles of foreign growth and manufacture has been attended with the most pernicious consequences by exhausting our circulating medium and by diffusing a taste for extravagance: And whereas it is of the utmost importance to encourage industry, frugality and our own manufactures; to recover a circulating medium; to restore public credit; and to facilitate the payment of public and private debts, and thereby to promote the welfare and happiness of our country . . . we the subscribers do hereby enter into a solemn agreement and association, to refrain from, and as far as in our power to prevent, the excessive use and consumption of articles of foreign manufacture, especially articles of luxury and extravagance.81 The memorial, signed by some of Massachusetts’s leading men, was in part an effort to restore the commonwealth’s credit, but it was not a nationalist maneuver. Rather it was an effort to restore a social and economic order that reflected their concerns as the core of the urban gentry. They were not alone. By the end of November, the United States Chronicle was able to report that

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nearly all the members of the Massachusetts House of Representatives had joined this Association for Economy. The prevailing taste for “foreign tinsel,” these politicians argued, were a “dishonour to Republicans . . . [and] must prove the ruin of the Commonwealth.”82 This association between personal economy and the nation’s political economy was not simply manufactured by Bowdoin to suit the machinations of the moment. The connections he drew between individual spending and the commonwealth’s financial security rang true for elites across the state, and they formed committees urging consumers to refrain from the purchase of foreign goods.83 News of these associations even made it abroad. Writing to her sister, Mary Smith Cranch, Abigail Adams expressed her wholehearted approval of Bowdoin’s exercise even as she feared that she herself may have inadvertently contravened the agreement. “I wrote you by Captain Cushing, on board of whom I got Mr. Elworthy to put a small present for you,” she told her sister. But she continued that she “was much mortified a day or two after to find, by a Boston paper, that they were prohibited articles. I hope you will not meet with trouble on account of them.” She went on, “I cannot but approve the spirit which dictated the measure. . . . The luxury, which has made such rapid strides amongst our countrymen was more criminal than that which is founded upon real wealth, for they have rioted upon the property which belonged to others.”84 Adams’s response reveals the ways in which the elite responded to this problem of luxury consumption at a moment of crisis. Although her criticism of luxury spending ostensibly encompassed everyone, her real opprobrium seemed to be focused on the men and women who had attacked the property of others. Such a distinction exempted those who already owned elegant property and luxury goods. More telling still was Adams’s disapproval of those who had allowed debt to “sap their independence.”85 Her use of such a politically charged concept illuminates the link that women and men in the early Republic made between economic dependence and the collapse of their republican experiment. A citizen free from debt was not in thrall to a debtor, not a slave to the tyranny of another man’s will. This powerful language permeated Adams’s critique of Shays’s Rebellion.86 Although she was clearly disappointed that luxury had corrupted every class of citizen, her anxiety revolved around the nonelite spenders, who could not afford such purchases in the first place. This impulse became a part of the wider antidemocratic backlash that shaped debate across the states as political elites turned to the question of a more powerful national structure of government in 1786 and 1787.

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By the mid-1780s, an East Coast urban elite had formulated a mighty critique of the new nation’s commercial policies and consumer habits to which the only response was for citizens to “look over [their] expences and manner of living . . . [to] shew the truest and reputable patriotism by retrenching superfluities.”87 Against a backdrop of fiscal crisis and uncertain international strength, such individual choices were construed as evidence of patriotic citizenship in action. All the events leading up to 1786 clearly demonstrated that at stake in the wake of Shays’s Rebellion was no less a question than how to define the mode of citizenship in America. As calls for a stronger national government gained in power and clarity from the nationalist camp, the first issue that writers and commentators confronted was the extent to which the responsibility to alleviate America’s problems should fall to government rather than the individual. To some degree this was a problem of sovereignty.88 If power did indeed lie with the people, then surely it was the responsibility of the people to alter the nation’s political economy. Democracy was not simply an act of choice to be exercised at the polls but a habit of political life, where every citizen played a role. Such an active vision of republican citizenship had been the foundation of the ancient city-states that had inspired America’s republic.89 But a formula of personal responsibility was fraught with issues of coherence and effective execution when it came to legislating change. If the events of the 1780s had taught Americans anything, argued nationalists, it was that a stronger government was required, to direct and guide the actions of citizens across the Republic. Yet those who remained wary of a strong national government hesitated to take this step. They argued that it was the responsibility of the individual consumer to rescue the nation from economic duress by eschewing consumption of foreign goods for the manufacture and purchase of domestic wares. “Within a few years the habits of luxury have exceedingly increased,” claimed the General Court of Massachusetts. “While these habits continue the wisest Legislature will not be able to remove our Complaints . . . [and] without a reformation of manner, we can have little hope to prosper in our publick or private concerns.”90 This was not mere rhetoric. Published editorials called on citizens to change their consumer habits and make a difference to the nation’s distressed political economy. In one well-publicized campaign, men were asked to put aside their corduroy breeches and wear leather ones instead, largely because leather could be tanned and worked into clothing in America,

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rather than being imported from Asia. A writer for the Cumberland Gazette calculated that if all the men in Massachusetts gave up their corduroy, then the country could save $350,000, only half of which would be needed to pay off the present year’s tax bill for the commonwealth. In a much-publicized decision, Colonel Miles’s troop in the Philadelphia cavalry decided to wear only leather breeches from henceforth, a decision that was dubbed by editors a “patriotick measure.”91 Another author, styling herself “Fanny Frugal,” condemned female vanity for threatening her “enfeebled country with more speedy destruction than it was in the power of foreign arms to accomplish.” Urging every woman to forgo foreign fabrics, she concluded “in vain will be the best endeavours of the Legislature, unless we retrench our superfluities and apply ourselves to industry.”92 This vision of effecting change was a return to the political stratagems of the Revolution. Calls for frugality and a restoration of what one farmer called “the good homespun way of living” were a resurrection of tactics that Americans had deployed in the 1760s.93 Then, boycotts, plain dressing, spinning circles, and the symbolic donning of homespun cloth had all been used as weapons to attack the British policy of taxation. Therefore, it was no coincidence that as the economic crisis in America worsened, the symbolic spinning wheel returned to prominence in the public sphere. Political commentators exchanged correspondence, calling for women to return to their rightful place at the heart of the household economy. “I am sorry to say the sound of the spinning wheel has of late years been rarely heard among us, and that matrons and maids, instead of attending the duties of the distaff as formerly, are employed in talking politics and haranguing on the necessity of a free importation of gauzes and other vile trash,” snarled a New Jersey man, in April 1786.94 Spinning circles once again took place, and editors reported on them with pleasure. The call to spin also made its way into poetry—likely the part of the newspaper that editors thought would garner female attention. One poet threatened women who could not give up foreign importations with a loss of reputation, claiming that only the “tripping Harlot/ [dressed] In the work of foreign looms.” The same poet even suggested that such a woman would lose her liberty also, writing that the “Nymph who wastes in gay attire/ what her country wants to save/Like one whose silken fetters tye her/Only struts a gaudy slave.”95 Such calls were not an exclusive commentary on the habits of women; they were also a judgment on the success with which men performed their obligations as heads of households. According to eighteenth-century law, men

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had a responsibility to oversee the economic behavior of their household, and husbands had to take legal responsibility for their wives’ financial personhood. Excessive spending by any wife was thus a sign that a husband had failed to regulate his household dominion.96 Yet such masculine control was not always possible in the changing economy of the late eighteenth century. Flexible lines of credit, proxy shopping, and the law of necessaries all enabled women and especially wives, as well as other dependents such as servants and slaves access to the world of goods. These marketplace mechanisms, especially those that allowed women to shop on their own account, coupled with the slow decline of the patriarchal household, meant that male and female responsibilities with regards to consumption became hard to judge.97 Perhaps because of this, women fell under intense scrutiny and were called on to act as citizens with regards to their civic obligations, despite the attending lack of rights that followed. Therefore, while men could change their corduroy trousers for leather breeches, it seemed clear that the citizens who had the biggest task ahead of them were women. In a commentary on America’s government, law, and domestic debt, a Philadelphia Quaker concluded, “When the ladies shall exercise the rights of their sex and say we will give the laws of fashion to our own nation instead of receiving them from another, we will perform our part of the revolution . . . more productive of wealth than all the laws of power, or the little arts of national policy.”98 These debates over gauze, corduroy, linens, and leather were not simply moralizing over a mode of republicanism; they were the material circumstances that defined a specific vision of citizenship founded on individual action and, above all, self-sacrifice. The model of citizenship that emerged from this discourse was that of a patriot-consumer. This mode of citizenship demanded that self-sacrifice be the prime expression of civic virtue. Within this mode, the discourse of rights was buried. Thus, it was something of a halfway house between subject and citizen. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as the definition of civic virtue in this context was taking shape around the habits of female consumers in the first instance. Perhaps unwilling or unable to imagine women as rights-bearing citizens, most male commentators on the subject of consumption created a form of civic behavior that emphasized the importance of obligation to the nation through repeated acts of self-denial and individual self-sacrifice. For this reason, one of the first visions of citizenship to emerge through these debates was one that was gendered female in many ways.99 This resolutely individualistic and self-sacrificing means of altering

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America’s political economy for the better had skeptical critics. By the mid1780s, nationalists had already begun to realize that the United States needed a stronger iteration of the federal government to tackle the problems at hand. Lack of revenue and a weak presence on the international stage were both urgent problems, and neither, thought nationalists, could be addressed by the virtuous behavior of an individual citizen. Nor could personal virtue resolve the predicament created by the inherent instability in the federal structure of the union. As Lord Sheffield had pointed out with such cruel precision, there was nothing to stop each individual state negotiating with a foreign power, thus making any broader national undertakings unreliable. The promise of luxury and great wealth meant that many “could find it in their hearts to divide a nation for the sake of gaining their own private purposes,” warned one author.100 Another summed up the weaknesses of the union with clarity: “Instead of a union of states and measures, essential to the welfare of a great nation, each state is jealous of its neighbour, and struggling for the superiority in wealth and importance, at the hazard of our federal existence.”101 As the delegates to the Annapolis Convention agreed in 1786, the United States’ persistent failure to gain the upper hand with Britain and the urgent need for revenue required an entirely new way of organizing commerce. That new way entailed the creation of a more centralized government that would circumvent the problems of fractured interest that the states collectively faced. The nationalist calls for a stronger government, capable of exercising unilateral fiscal power, thus became a central tenet in the political ideology of the Federalists. These views were of course not without their critics. But ultimately, as the ratification of the Constitution by the required nine states in 1788 demonstrated, Americans were ready to embrace a new form of government. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution made all duties, excises, and imposts uniform throughout the United States and gave Congress the power to regulate trade with foreign nations. America now had the power to raise national revenue to pay down the debt and create unilateral trade policies that would earn more respect in an international context. For Federalists, the Constitution was the way to redeem America from its disastrous economic crisis. As one anonymous toast giver proclaimed, at a Fourth of July banquet held at Mr. Dawson’s tavern in Brooklyn: “May the United States, cemented by a new constitution, rise beautiful as a Phoenix from the ashes of contempt; and may commerce in all its branches flourish unrestricted under its auspices, as long as America has a name amongst nations.”102 The ratification of the

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Constitution confirmed what Federalists had known for a long time. Commerce was too important to the health of the nation to leave it in the hands of a disparate group of state legislatures; as one of the keys to the Republic’s strength, prosperity, and success, commerce must be treated as a national endeavor. The importance of this transition should not be underestimated. By ratifying the Constitution, and especially this clause, Americans were dispensing with one powerful grammar of political action and embracing another. Calls for retrenchment and restraint had operated on the assumption that personal behavior defined American political economy. Under the Articles of Confederation, each state had reaped the benefit of its citizens’ consumption. On the international stage especially, such a fractured political economy had undermined the idea of the United States as a single nation. Moreover, the persistent public scrutiny of personal habits of consumption meant that the acts of thousands of individuals had created a grassroots political economy. It was a theory of government where the ultimate power of shaping the nation’s political economy rested on the choices made by the patriot-consumer. But the ratification of the Constitution signaled that citizens were willing to cede a portion of that responsibility to the national government by accepting that their consumption would be taxed. Citizens still had a moral responsibility to control their consumer impulses. But at the same time, uniform duties, customs, and imposts would raise revenue across the nation, but they would also regulate consumption in such a way that individual citizens would no longer bear the ultimate responsibility for the nation’s balance sheet. Such a transition created a more unified nation in commercial and international terms, but it also created the basis of a national citizenship founded on each citizen’s economic obligations to the nation. The possibilities embedded in this new assumption opened the door to fresh debate over the place of luxury in the United States. Despite recognizing the part that overspending and luxury consumption had played in plunging the United States into financial difficulties, Americans also acknowledged the positive role that consumption could play in a national economy. Here, their frame of reference was Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees. Mandeville’s argument was that the consumption of luxuries might have an adverse effect on the personal morals of each individual shopper, but that overall the money spent on self-indulgent purchases contributed to the overall productivity of a nation.103 Certainly some Americans had their doubts as to the wisdom of this policy. A clergyman writing under the moniker of “Mentor” made his con-

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cerns abundantly clear in the summer of 1787. “Among the many vices which have infested our Commonwealth, luxury and avarice are eminent for having produced the greatest evils to the States,” he moaned. Finishing his argument, he cited Mandeville directly: “If the principle of a republican government be virtue,” he claimed, “then it is impossible that private vices should be public benefits.”104 But other writers saw the virtues of Mandeville’s argument. Addressing a letter to “Mr. Printer,” a certain “Tom Longfellow” wrote, “Before, therefore, we break our tender hearts in lamenting the increase of luxury,” he concluded, “let us consider whether we as a town should not be worse off, if luxury &c were banished since as matters are at present two thirds of the town exist by means of luxury and luxury alone. Private vices are public benefits.”105 Revealing the ways in which his thinking had been changed by December 1786, Benjamin Franklin argued, “If the importation of foreign luxuries could ruin a people, we should probably have been ruined long ago. . . . Our independent government must do what we could not do then [as a colony,] discourage by heavy duties, or prevent by prohibitions such importations and thereby grow richer.”106 Franklin was a pragmatist and did not believe that there was any way in which Americans could be prohibited from buying British luxury goods, if that was what their hearts were set on. Instead, Franklin called for government to harness the power of individual spending. Consumption alone was not the problem, he believed. Instead, he was coming to see that it was consumption unchecked by government that would undermine the nation. Thus, Franklin proposed that luxury consumption be yoked to the benefit of the national purse. The obligation of citizenship need not be restraint or retrenchment; instead civic duty could be framed as agreeing to pay the nation for the privilege of personal extravagance. This was the conclusion that the members of the First Congress also reached. The first item on the agenda was the national impost. Madison, addressing the House of Representatives, reminded them that unless they acted quickly, the opportunity to cash in on the spring season of importation would be lost. Using that rationale, he suggested adopting the tax schedule proposed in 1783.107 This called for a basic rate of taxation of 5 percent ad valorem on every item imported into the United States. In addition, certain items would be subject to an additional tax that would be specified by Congress. Finally, Madison proposed a tax on tonnage that would give preferential treatment to first, American-owned ships entering the United States and then to nations who had brokered a trade treaty with the United States. Understandably

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historians have focused on what generated debate, primarily the effort to impose an additional enumerated tax on salt, rum, molasses, and hemp.108 But it is also noteworthy that the House of Representatives agreed on taxing the following items at 10 percent: shoe and knee buckles, gold and silver lace, gold and silver leaf, looking glasses, window glass, China, and stone and earthen ware. These items were predominantly articles of luxury, made to serve elite desires. They also agreed on taxing the following items at 7.5 percent without any debate: canes, walking sticks, whips, readymade clothing, gold, silver, plated ware, jewelry, cabinet ware, metal buttons, saddles, leather gloves, beaver, fur and wool hats, all millinery, and a variety of iron and leather goods. Finally all manner of coaches and chariots were taxed at 15 percent ad valorem.109 So why had rum generated several days’ worth of debate, while canes, gloves, hats, and coaches had provoked none? In part this was attributable to simple interest politics. While few men opposed the idea of imposing some kind of revenue-gathering mechanism on imports, they were fierce in their guardianship of their state’s specific interest. Yet these politicians did not balk at taxing the jewelry, hats and gloves, and other fashionable accoutrements of elite life, and that was precisely because these goods were considered to be items destined to be enjoyed only by America’s luxurious citizens.110 In that first session of Congress, most of the representatives agreed that while taxing a necessity to raise revenue must be carefully calculated, the taxation of luxuries was a moral responsibility that not only raised revenue but also promoted the kind of political economy that befitted a republic.111 “All taxes on property are burdens on the good citizen, they discourage industry,” wrote Hugh Williamson, the congressman from North Carolina, under the pen name of Sylvious. But, he continued “all excises or taxes on consumption are taxes on luxury and dissipation: they punish idleness and promote industry. Can we hesitate in making our choice?”112 Another commentator for the Connecticut Courant concurred: “An indirect tax, as upon articles of consumption, is perhaps the only kind of those laws which is of any advantage of society. It teaches us to oeconmize not by forbidding us to be extravagant but by making us pay for it if we are so.”113 The idea that politicians and commentators were beginning to embrace was Mandevellian in some aspects: there was a place for luxury in the nation, indeed it could render the Republic a positive good. What pleased the Congressmen in particular was that the taxation of luxury spending could be constructed to spread the burdens of citizenship equally

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among all thirteen states. Indeed, one congressman, writing home to a friend, expressed this exact idea in May 1789: “The duties imposed will be paid by the consumers. . . . Duties will be equal in all the States; they will be laid by Representatives of the people, and be applied for the benefit of all to support the government which they have established and to pay the interest of the debt incurred for establishing their liberties and independence.”114 Such a vision appeared to be the most democratic way of apportioning the tax burden among citizens. The equitable division of the impost counteracted the previous problem that the Articles of Confederation had spawned whereby only those states that could collect customs duties could benefit from them. In The Wealth of Nations, a book that many Americans were coming to grips with in the late 1780s and early 1790s, Adam Smith wrote that “the subjects of every state ought to contribute towards the support of the government, as nearly as possible, in proportion to their respective abilities; that is, in proportion to the revenue which they respectively enjoy under the protection of the state.”115 With the impost, Americans appeared to be following Smith’s advice. Moreover, because these same Congressmen perceived the consumption of luxuries to be a choice, the burden of taxation could be shouldered lightly, taken on only by those who could afford it, once again following Smith’s advice. Although it was clearly acknowledged that some citizens, namely wealthy inhabitants of the seaport cities, would consume more luxuries than the rustic backcountry farmers of the western states, thereby shouldering a greater portion of the burden nonetheless, this kind of tax was for the most part deemed to be the fairest means of generating revenue. In this way the representatives of the First Congress drew up a liberal understanding of civic duty. The impost created an obligation of citizenship that could be voluntarily accepted. Moreover, the burden that the citizen-consumer took on would be rewarded through the resurrection of the U.S. economy, creating national credit, stable commerce, and national prosperity. Echoing the model of the social contract, the individual citizen’s burden was lightened by collective benefits. But what prevented this vision from embracing Mandeville’s theory entirely was the underlying idea that if the impost could be judged correctly, it would also act to curb spending on luxury as well. Although the impost of 1789 did offer the consumers of luxury goods a way to serve the cause of the nation, still the very act of luxury consumption in general sat uneasily with the republican vision of some Americans. “I think it would not be difficult to enumerate a great number of such articles of luxury, pride or mere ornament, which are growing into such excessive use among us, as to become dangerous

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to the wealth, economy, morals and health of our people,” wrote a citizen of Philadelphia for the Gazette of the United States in June 1789. He continued that “distilled spirits . . . imported wines, silks of all sorts, cambricks, lawn, laces &c, superfine cloaths and velvets; jewels of all kinds” were all “capitally dangerous” to the United States. These articles, he argued, should be made so expensive that Americans could no longer afford to purchase them, while “all cloaths and stuffs generally used by the richer class of people” should also be taxed, just enough to limit but not outright prohibit their consumption.116 In this kind of caveat was the essence of the idea that Federalists had given shape to with the impost. The wealthy might consume European luxuries because they could afford to and because such consumption would now prove beneficial to the nation. Those who could not afford to buy luxury goods, now made even more expensive by the tariff, should refrain entirely. Two modes of patriotic consumption thus emerged from the late 1780s. For a small portion of the country, buying imported goods in a responsible way could be construed as a virtuous act. These consumers were wealthy enough to afford the luxury, therefore they could begin to shrug off the selfsacrifice previously required of good citizenship. In particular, wealthy male consumers, who paid not only for their own goods but for the goods of their dependents, were especially entitled to claim virtue through this form of consumption. As for the rest of the nation, those who were poor or dependent, elites prescribed a course of restraint and retrenchment. It would prove to be hugely unpopular. The founding decades of the United States were troublesome ones for America’s political economy. Lacking the framework with which to attack all the economic problems that they faced, Americans struggled to make sense of how they ought to behave as patriotic citizens. During the period when the Articles of Confederation had provided no means for the nation to act as a whole, the overwhelming message of the political elite had been to encourage Americans to respond as individuals. Through personal acts of restraint, retrenchment, and economy, citizens could rescue their nation from the plight of national debt, ignominious commercial dependence, and the corruption of the Republic. Yet even as they advocated for this method, the failures of this approach were clear. The demand for a constitution, bound up with the need for stronger national commercial policy, was an acknowledgement that individually a single citizen whose sole responsibility was to cease consumption could not effect the kind of change that was necessary. Some form of consumption was necessary, and it would take the help of a new kind of

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government intervention to make sure that it was a form of shopping that would benefit the nation. The creation of a national constitution and the passage of the impost in 1789 revealed that Americans recognized that not every citizen’s economic obligation could come entirely from personal restraint. A national framework was necessary, primarily to legitimate a mechanism for collecting consumergenerated revenues. With this approach came the acceptance that there was a limited place for luxury in the Republic. The impost was an implicit rejection of the purist versions of Jeffersonian republicanism. Yet despite this, selfindulgence remained a vice, not only because it displayed the kind of immorality that would not sustain a republic, but because the Constitution and the impost had not solved the problems created by an imbalance of trade and an aggressive British commercial policy designed to humiliate the nation by exploiting its consumer habits. Individual citizens still had a responsibility to combat those things through their personal choices. The question was: would they accept that obligation?

Chapter 2

The Marketplace of Retribution

On July 27, 1812, a Republican mob gathered in the streets of Baltimore planning to demolish the offices of the local newspaper, the Federalist-Republican. The crowd, made up of artisans, mechanics, and the city’s many dockworkers, arrived at the house on Charles Street around twilight, surrounding it and threatening the proprietor, Alexander Hanson, along with the small group of Federalists who had hunkered down inside.1 The standoff lasted through the night, ending in a violent clash that was halted only by the arrival of the militia. By dawn, a tense agreement was reached, and the Federalists were escorted to the city jail under armed guard. But they were far from safe. Delivered into the hands of Republican turnkeys, Hanson and his friends were protected only until nightfall.2 That night, the mob returned and stormed the jail. Punched, stabbed, kicked, and beaten, the Federalists fought to escape. Not all were successful. John Hall was caught by “two rough looking men . . . [who] held [him] by the wrist for about ten minutes . . . cut off or tore off [his] coat, leaving none of it on [him] but cape and the sleeves. Having thus secured [his] pockets, they tore [his] shirt leaving [his] bosom bare.”3 Hall assumed that his attackers were ruffians, simply after his money. But the Republican mob was sending a message. That night each Federalist victim had his clothing stripped from his body. Their attackers assumed that the clothes were foreign and thus deserved to be destroyed. Later, the Federalists reported that the Republican crowd at the jail had “insolently and distinctly justified the conduct of the mob, clearly intimating in the same breath that British goods would next fall under the fury of the populace, as witnessed during the War of Independence.”4 Made by and bought from the British, the clothes signified the Federalists’ proBritish sympathies, their willingness to trade with the enemy, and above all

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their hostility to the Republican effort to secure economic independence for America. The Republicans clearly viewed these Federalist printers as a second generation of loyalists in a new iteration of the American battle for liberty. This was for them, as for many citizens, a “second War of Independence.”5 At stake was the Republic’s political and economic independence, two interrelated claims to power that were by no means a foregone conclusion in the 1810s.6 Indeed, at the height of the Napoleonic Wars, Americans discovered they were once again at the mercy of the mercantilist policies of Britain and France.7 Beginning in 1806, a Republican government, led first by Thomas Jefferson and then James Madison, slowly discarded the tenets of free trade in a desperate effort to protect American commerce. The heart of this attempt was federal legislation that prevented the importation of European goods and their consumption in America. It was a policy that they believed would secure the elusive goal of economic independence from Europe.8 But it was a goal they found impossible to achieve. Struggling to assert their national power, the Republican administration fell back on tactics and assumptions that had informed their pre-Revolutionary politics, formulating policies that were rooted in the old-fashioned tactics of nonconsumption of foreign goods.9 But the government’s strategies were highly problematic in the new national context. By the 1800s, the practice of self-denial as a performance of civic virtue was unpopular. The model of the patriot-consumer no longer made sense to the citizens of the early Republic. Merchants, traders, and farmers, as well as both Federalist and Republican politicians rejected nonconsumption again and again, labeling it as an antiquated approach, one that stripped the nation of necessary revenue and the economy of a prosperous trade. Their reasons for rejecting nonconsumption were many. They pointed to the rise in smuggling as a sign that the Republicans’ policies not only were unenforceable but were corrupting the morals of the nation. And they heaped scorn on the call for an abstemious independence, worrying that it served to make America look foolish, unsophisticated, and uncivilized to the rest of the world. Some argued that commercial prosperity was their rightful inheritance as heirs of the Revolution; others saw Jefferson’s tactics as nothing more than a shameful regression to colonial subservience. A new nation demanded new approaches; the patriot-consumer belonged in the past.10 Jeffersonian Republicans rejected these protests. They had staked the nation’s future on the success of the restrictions and the war. But as

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customshouses and Canadian border towns became conduits for a flood of illicit consumer durables, Republicans faced their failures. By 1815, two things had become clear. First, politicians would have to reassess their understanding of who was consuming what in America. The expectations of the 1780s that only elites should consume luxury goods for the sake of the nation lost all credibility in the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Second, Republican politicians especially would have to reconsider what they could expect from this wider range of consumers in terms of self-sacrifice. The consumer politics of the War of 1812 made it clear that American citizens were no longer willing to subordinate their consumer desires in the name of patriotism. The government and the people would have to agree on a new form of consumercitizenship for the new century. With the tariff of 1789, America’s first cohort of statesman hoped they had solved the conundrum of consumption for future generations. This national impost had established that luxury imports could play a useful role in funding the nation’s debts, provided that those who indulged their desire for those goods could afford to do so. Elite families, who would in any case be keen to conserve their family fortunes, thus concentrated on finding ways to make their purchases a part of a responsible practice of enjoying imported luxuries. Yet as had been the case in the 1780s, these responsibilities were mediated by age and gender. Men, especially those who headed a household, were responsible for their family’s choices, and part of that responsibility was to monitor the purchases made by their dependents. Young women especially were soon taught to balance their desires with the demands that both family and society made on them as consumers. So much is clear from the example of the Trumbull sisters. In December 1800, Maria and Harriet Trumbull, daughters of the prominent Federalist and former Revolutionary general Jonathan Trumbull, arrived in New York City. They quickly made friends with Eliza Sebor, the wife of a wealthy merchant, who like the Trumbulls was originally from Connecticut. It was Mrs. Sebor who became the girls’ guide and patron as they found their bearings in the exciting new world of fancy goods stores, fashionable mantua makers, and enticing dry goods outlets.11 Indeed, within days of meeting them, Eliza Sebor had guided them to New York’s most fashionable retail district and gently suggested that they buy new, more fashionable bonnets.12 The letters that these two teenage girls wrote home to their parents were a litany of desires and a catalogue of imported fashions. “We have been to day

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out a shopping,” wrote Maria to her mother on December 2. “And we have purchased some dark muslin—and some silk for petticoats and I have got some pocket handkerchiefs.”13 By the end of the month the girls were starting to appreciate what was fashionable in New York society: imported textiles. These modish fabrics were an assertion of status that—despite the expense— their Federalist father was keen to encourage but also determined to monitor. “I will enclose my account of my expenses since Brother left us and of the money we have received from Mr. Sebor,” wrote Harriet to her father. “I hope you will think it moderate . . . we don’t wish to appear as some of the young ladies we meet with [do but] to dress handsomely and so as your friends would not be asha[med of us].”14 Like her father, Harriet understood the significance of wearing these imported fashions in America in 1800. As a member of elite society (though as a visitor to New York not necessarily at the center of the social scene), she was conscious of the need to style herself to match her status. Wanting to impress her father’s friends and represent the family well, she and her sister had sought help from the Sebors in acquiring the necessary fabrics to do so. But Harriet’s claim that she did not want to appear as some of the ladies in New York did expressed an understanding that to be too à la mode could be considered vulgar. Excessive extravagance did not send the right message to society friends. When the girls’ friend Weltha Morgan paraded around New York with a pair of new pearl earrings, Maria remarked to her father that the earrings cost “28 dollars!” Continuing her letter, she confided, “And I must confess I think it was a very foolish piece of extravagance. I would not thank my Papa for such a present.”15 Weltha Morgan’s father, John Morgan, was a Hartford merchant and banker, with a reputation for aristocratic pretensions. He was known for having imported a large quantity of made-to-order chinaware bearing his name and coat of arms from China in 1785.16 Such grand gestures were seen as affectation. Harriet, like the politicians before her, expressed the difficulties of maintaining the balance of consumption as a member of the elite. Some luxury was required, too much signaled a lack of taste and distinction. The Trumbulls’ shopping sprees and careful self-fashioning had all been carefully supervised and approved of by friends, family, and society. Indeed, what is striking about the Trumbulls’ experience is how closely they were monitored at every stage of consumption. Their choices, their purchases, and their expenditure had all been scrutinized and approved; the girls had learned how to shop as a result of these lessons. Elite Americans clearly believed these

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lessons to be valuable. They taught a younger generation how to consume luxuries conscientiously, something that ensured family solvency as well as standing. It was this kind of context that made elites comfortable with claiming the privilege of shopping for luxuries in the new Republic, on both a personal and a political level. Beyond the fact that they could afford to buy these goods, they could also argue that the ways in which they taught their children to consume allowed them to act as representatives of sophistication in American society and scions of tasteful restraint. But luxury goods would not remain the province of the elite for long, as the availability of imports became more widespread. By the early nineteenth century, the scale of importations into the United States had grown extensively. Between 1790 and 1807 imports for consumption increased roughly fourfold, a huge leap in a relatively short period of time.17 Trade networks spanned the globe, although it was the arrival of British imports that continued to dominate the pattern of seasonal trade.18 Americans who did not concern themselves with the ebb and flow of customshouse business or trade on the wharves would have sensed this escalation of trade in other ways. Retailers, taking advantage of this new abundance, changed the way they marketed their goods. Beginning in the 1790s, the owners of dry goods and fancy goods stores began to move away from the wharves and the marketplaces, setting up establishments in the center of the city, where they had space to expand their businesses. As a result America’s cities increasingly featured retail districts that emulated the precincts of London’s most fashionable shopping areas: Bond Street and Oxford Street.19 By the 1810s, New Yorkers could find cheap retail dry goods stores in upper Pearl and Chatham Streets.20 Fine specialty shops lined lower Broadway and clustered around William Street, Hanover Square, Smith Street, and Maiden Lane, taking advantage of the newer and wider sidewalks that accommodated foot passage.21 In Philadelphia, the retail stores also stood just back from the waterfront, clustered along Second Street between Arch and Chestnut. Between Second and Third on Race Street, several retail dry goods stores flourished, milliners could be found on Arch Street, and shoe stores were scattered along High Street.22 And in Charleston, the city’s retail district fanned out along Broad Street and into Elliott and Tradd Streets, staying relatively close to the water’s edge but moving into the city nonetheless.23 These retail districts did not simply concentrate the shopping experience; they altered its very nature. Describing in retrospect the opening of the first “brilliant fancy dry goods shop with bulk windows . . . in true Bond street

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style” in Philadelphia, John Fanning Watson remembered the “uncommon sized lights in the two bulks, and the fine mull-mull and jaconet muslins, the chintses and linens suspended in whole pieces, from top to bottom and entwined together in puffs and festoons, (totally new) and the shopman, behind the counter, powdered, bowing and smiling.”24 Watson went on to complain that the shop had been overperfumed and that the style of the clerk was pretentious. His description confirms the ways in which the culture of retail that grew up around these imports encouraged deferential hierarchy from clerks to customers, reflecting the status that these goods bestowed on consumers beyond the store. But the expansion of these retail areas also began the process of opening up the act of buying luxury imported goods to a wider consuming public. The new tactics of display allowed city dwellers who might not entertain the idea of buying expensive luxury goods to at least see them and enjoy them. John Fanning Watson’s recollections of the new hardware store run by James Stokes paints a vivid picture of vicarious delight. “The buck-handled ‘Barlow’ penknives, the gilt and plated buttons, and the scissors, curiously arranged on circular cards, (a new idea) and the bulk windows, lighted up at night, (a new thing) was a source of great gratification to the boys, and the country market people lounging about with arms folded, on Tuesday and Friday evenings,” Watson explained. “One evening, among a group of gazers from about Conestoga, one of them exclaimed to the others in Pennsylvania German ‘Cook a mole, har, cook do’ ‘meiner sale!’ ”25 The question of who might be shopping for these goods thus lay beneath the surface of these decorated counters and windows. This wider consuming public was not monitored or tutored in the same way that the Trumbull sisters had been. In June 1807, for example, a young man named Harmon Wendell obtained a little notebook and began a “cursory account of private expenses.”26 Embarking on a new career as a clerk in Albany, New York, he was probably eager to practice his own skills of accounting and penmanship. As his account book showed, he had decided to purchase a number of items that would enable him to start his profession in the style that he imagined suited his new standing. In this way, his personal account helped him practice his trade as he guarded, as best he could, against overspending. Still, if Wendell did have any anxieties about debt, they did not appear to be paramount. As part of a small spending spree that June, Wendell purchased a “summer hat” and “1 Summer ribbon, bl[a]ck,” as well as a penknife, a cane, two vests with trimmings, and a pair of gaiters with black cuffs.

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But the biggest purchase came on the eighteenth of the month, when he spent over ten pounds on an English silver watch and watch chain. To mark the importance of the acquisition, Wendell wrote down the name of the watchmaker and the watch’s number, alongside the entry recording its purchase.27 Clearly the watch was an important investment, and Wendell’s notation revealed a certain pride in his new possession. Taking advantage of new commercial opportunities unleashed by independence, men like Wendell made new lives for themselves that enabled unaccustomed habits of spending to flourish.28 Unlike the Trumbull sisters, whose engagement in the world of imported luxuries was prolonged and consistent, Wendell’s experience was more limited. After June 1807 he returned to buying smaller items, fabrics to mend clothes or replenish his stock of shirts, small treats in the form of food or outings. But his own epigram, which he had inscribed in the front of his account book, suggested a level of comfort with spending money on silver watches and trimmed vests. “Self-satisfaction is highly commendable even necessary,” he noted.29 These were words that threatened the distinctions that politicians had drawn between who would consume luxury imports and who would not. The architects of the tariff had imagined that only those who could afford these items would buy them. But Wendell, who frequently went into debt after his spending sprees, had deemed his watch, like his other purchases, necessary. As the boundaries between necessity and luxury were challenged by the myriad consumer decisions of nonelite men and women, the tenuous certainties of political economy fostered in the 1780s came under duress. America’s political economy was not yet ready for an expansion of the citizen-consumer class. Moreover, the model of the patriot-consumer would soon crumble if those who were economically dependent by virtue of gender, race, or class did not adhere to the idea that they must accept instruction or practice restraint. It appeared that that the tariff of 1789 had solved one set of problems, only to create another. The increasing numbers of Americans who embraced the pleasures of selfsatisfaction in the marketplace forced politicians to confront once again the question of who should shop and how. Although the 1790s had been an era of intense partisan animosity, the two parties could agree that the purchase and enjoyment of luxury imported goods ought to be reserved to those who could afford them. In this respect, neither party espoused a particularly democratic philosophy. Politicians from both sides of the aisle believed that only the

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nation’s elite would be likely to find the financial reserves needed to sustain the consumption of imported goods in a way that would not harm the country. Other Americans should either refrain or sustain themselves in a glorious isolation of rural self-sufficiency. Such a philosophy did not reflect the reality of market engagement in America.30 But it was a fiction of political economy that, before 1805, both sides agreed on. Nevertheless, there were subtle differences embedded in this shared assumption. Federalists cherished this principle through an innate conservatism, a suspicion about the excesses of capitalism, and a desire to preserve social order.31 Republicans, on the other hand, were deeply ambivalent about the role of imported British goods in their economy. Although Republicans accepted the need for some imports to fund the national revenue, just as many excoriated those who participated in the flooding of American towns and cities with the vile fripperies of a corrupt aristocratic society. Fueling this ambivalence was their attitude toward trade more generally. Republicans, especially those in the South, encouraged imports as part of a broader commerce that would guarantee American farmers a foreign market for their products. But increasingly some Republicans, especially Jefferson himself, could see a role for small-scale manufacturing on their shores.32 Domestic manufacturing could help the nation prove its independence from Britain and release the nation from the “tyranny of foreign fashions and destructive torrent of luxury.”33 Imports, to the Republican mind, were a poisoned chalice and a necessary evil. These subtle partisan differences would become more acute as the coming war forced both sides of the debate to reconsider their ideas. In particular the conundrum of consumption became more perplexing as imported luxuries became enemy productions. In the first instance, the Napoleonic conflicts seemed to present the United States with an opportunity. When war between Britain and France broke out in 1793, these long-standing adversaries turned their attention and resources to the conflict at hand, focusing their efforts on blockading and banning enemy goods from entering their ports. But these restrictions made both Britain and France dependent on neutral nations for the bulk of their commercial transactions. American merchants pounced on the opportunity to enhance their own business. Taking advantage of their new position as noncombatants in the Napoleonic Wars, they commenced a newly lucrative “carrying trade,” which ferried sugar, coffee, fish, wheat, lumber, furs, finished goods, and, until 1808, slaves back and forth between Europe, the Caribbean, the American mainland, and Africa.34 Like practiced dancers, they neatly

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stepped around the problem of carrying the product of one empire into the ports of another by breaking their journey in the United States—a move that allowed them to redefine their cargo as “neutral.” As a result, trade boomed.35 This prosperity came to a sudden end in 1805. Under pressure from merchants and plantation owners in the British West Indies, who believed they were losing too much money to the American merchants, the British government sent instructions to the West Indian governors to close their ports to American goods except in the case of great necessity.36 The British also cracked down on the “broken voyage” subterfuge. A decision by a British court in 1805 concerning the American ship the Essex stipulated that simply transporting enemy goods into a neutral country did not make the cargo neutral. Instead, a full duty would have to be paid. Any refusal to comply would result in the cargo being subject to seizure. It was a decision that seriously injured the commercial prospects of many Americans. Furious, a group of northern merchants, led by two Republicans, Jacob Crowninshield from Massachusetts and Andrew Gregg from Pennsylvania, began to demand that America assert its maritime and commercial rights through the implementation of a nonimportation act.37 For Jefferson and his Republican colleagues, the Essex decision was the final straw. Since war had broken out, cordial relations between England and America had existed on a knife’s edge.38 Against this backdrop of ill will, the Essex decision was, as James Monroe suggested, “an act of hostility” designed to humiliate Americans. Moreover, Monroe was quick to inform Jefferson that the Essex fiasco was entirely connected with the ongoing efforts of the British to curtail American trade. Reporting to Jefferson in late 1805, Monroe commented that in the wake of the Essex verdict, Lord Mulgrave, the British foreign secretary, had “sustained in conversation the principle as exempli[fi]ed in the [Essex decision], & seemed to press with decision the resolution of the cabinet to confine [U.S.] importation to the home consumption.”39 The implication of Mulgrave’s comments were arrogant yet clear. According to Monroe, the British still believed that they had the capacity to dictate the terms of trade to America. The Foreign Office vision of the U.S. economy reduced Americans to helpless consumers once again, denying them a place in the world of international trade and treating them like the dependent colonists they had been under British rule. The U.S. response was to reply in kind. Acknowledging their role as consumers of British goods, Jefferson and his government attempted to convert consumer dependence into purchasing power. On January 29, 1806, Andrew

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Gregg proposed a Non-Importation Act, which specifically banned an array of British goods from entering the country.40 The Non-Importation Act was intended to harm Britain’s commercial prospects by depriving English manufacturers of their best customers, forcing the British to reinstate America’s commercial privileges. In one way, this law was an echo of the Revolutionary politics of nonimportation and nonconsumption. By cutting the British off from their best market and by refusing to import and consume British goods, the Americans once again hoped to teach the British a lesson and force them to bestow the political goal of privileged commercial status on the United States. However, as a nation-state, America was in control of its trade. This meant the government did not need to rely on the patriot-consumer to act voluntarily as they had during the Revolution. Instead, they believed they could use their control of the borders to prevent British imports from ever reaching American consumers and thus cut Britain off from their best market. It was the first step toward designing a new marketplace, one that they hoped would exact commercial retribution on the powers that had attacked American prosperity.41 America’s new citizen-consumers would shoulder the burden of deprivation in return for the long-term benefits of a more prosperous and powerful nation. The question of whether to implement Gregg’s resolution was fiercely debated in Congress, particularly among Republicans themselves. Unsurprisingly, as consumers’ desires and demands were implicated in this act, the rights and obligations of the citizen-consumer generated some debate. Invoking the consumer in different ways, both supporters and opponents on nonimportation attempted to make a case for what the consumer should do for the nation. On the one hand, Republican sponsors of the bill made the assumption that consumers would cooperate with this legislation because ultimately it was in their best interests to protect the trade of the United States. Trade, argued Nathan Williams, a Republican congressman from New York, was “the most natural and most fruitful source of revenue and riches” in the United States and therefore had to be protected. This protection was paramount not only because trade generated wealth for the nation’s merchants and farmers, but also because trade provided a “mode of fiscal exaction, most in unison with the spirit and feelings as well as the interests of the American people, that is indirect taxation.”42 Although Williams had not set out to do so, his speech delineated his understanding of how American consumers ought to serve their country. As

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Williams pointed out, it was through their consumption of imported goods that American consumers could “contribute freely and copiously to that fund which is destined to the payment of the national debt and this too without feeling in a great degree the weight of the contribution.”43 Williams’s formulation exposed his preconceptions about the fundamental identity of the citizen-consumer. The ability to afford the “copious” consumption of foreign goods assumed a wealthy man who enjoyed buying imported luxury goods for himself and his family. Williams’s argument echoed the earlier case made by the Federalists of the First Congress. They too had looked to the elite to raise revenue through a tariff on imported luxuries. Although nonimportation sacrificed trade and elite consumer freedom in the short term, it would preserve both in the long term, ultimately protecting the poor from the burdens of generating revenue. As Jefferson himself explained in his State of the Union speech at the end of that same year, the impost was paid primarily on “foreign luxuries, purchased by those only who are rich enough to afford themselves the use of them. Their patriotism would certainly prefer its continuance and application to the great purposes of . . . public improvement.”44 Here was a fiscal model that asked wealthy consumers to fund the national debt and support the nation through their shopping. On the other hand, opponents of the bill mounted a range of critiques, all of which invoked the consumer in a different way. Republican Joseph Nicholson of Maryland worried about the loss of revenue, but he also spoke out against a law that deprived Americans of the goods that they had become reliant on to ensure a basic standard of living. Consumers in the United States needed coarse British woolens, West Indian rum, and hardware from Birmingham and Sheffield to survive. Nicholson especially singled out the needs of the middle and southern states in his speech. The consumer he invoked was not the elite raiser of revenue, but the ordinary farming American, whose lifestyle deserved protection.45 Josiah Masters, a Republican from New York, mounted an even clearer defense of the citizen-consumer. He argued that in prohibiting the importation of British manufactures, Congress would be undermining one of the central “interests of the great body of people” in America, the ability “to buy whatever they want of those who sell it cheapest.”46 Because British goods were the cheapest, they could not be removed from the marketplace. But by far the biggest Republican critic of the bill was John Randolph of Virginia. His angry denunciation of a bill designed to protect the loathed

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“carrying trade” discredited the fundamental principle of protecting merchant interests at the expense of other Americans. “Slippery mercantile eels can slide over or under [the Non-Importation Act] and leave the whole burthen of suffering to fall on the planter, the farmer and the real American,” he raged. “The whole revenue (we are told) is derived from commerce,” he scoffed. “Who pays it ultimately but the consumer?”47 Such furious rhetoric revealed a vision of a victimized consumer, held to ransom by the depredations of America’s mercantile classes. In Randolph’s view the citizen-consumer, whom he most often imagined as the gentrified southern planter, did not owe such service to the nation. But these attacks ultimately failed. The majority of Republicans agreed that all Americans could do without luxury goods for a short time, in order to serve the long-term interests of the nation. The NonImportation Act was approved 87–35.48 The goods targeted by the Republicans constituted a large majority of the items that middling and elite Americans, men and women, bought and enjoyed on a regular basis. The list included: “all articles of which leather, silk, hemp, flax, tin, (except in sheets) or brass was the material of chief value, all woolen cloths ‘whose invoice prices shall exceed 5/sterling per square yard’ woolen hosiery of all kinds, window glass and glassware, silver and plated goods, paper, nails, spikes, hats, ready-made clothing, playing cards, beer, ale, and porter, pictures and prints.”49 Noticeably missing from this list were the cotton goods that came from the East Indies, a trade that continued unhampered until 1807, despite efforts by the British East India Company to control it.50 Other items were also missing. Staffordshire creamware, for example, was also still legally permitted to enter the United States. But despite these exceptions, the Non-Importation Act was designed to send a clear message to Lord Mulgrave and his minions: the violation of American sovereignty and the flagrant disregard that the British exhibited toward America’s commercial ambitions would not go unnoticed or unpunished. Jefferson hoped that American citizens would once again join together and use the decision not to consume British goods as a weapon against overbearing imperial might. As he would see, he was mistaken. The Non-Importation Act was simply the beginning of a much longer struggle over trade and power. Over the next nine years, Congress, led first by Jefferson and then Madison, enacted a series of laws that used American commerce as a weapon against Britain and France. These laws politicized the products of those countries but failed utterly to prove America’s independence from the Atlantic marketplace. Unfortunately for Republicans, the Non-Importation

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Act lasted a mere five weeks before Jefferson was forced to suspend it. Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin had quickly discovered that the loose language of the act made the law impossible to administer and enforce.51 Given the clumsy wording of the law, the suspension of the Non-Importation Act in December 1806 was hardly surprising. On December 14, 1807, nearly a year after its first passage, Congress reinstated the Non-Importation act and added a new bill to clarify the trickier portions of the act. But by this time the act was almost irrelevant. In June 1807, British naval forces had fired on the USS Chesapeake, in an attempt to recapture supposed British deserters. Most Americans saw the attack as unprovoked and illegal, and Jefferson was particularly alarmed. In November 1807, Britain passed a new set of orders-in-council, which prohibited America from trading with any continental port. American commerce was now unequivocally under attack. Jefferson’s response signaled his growing anxiety. He chose to embargo all American shipping, preventing American ships from leaving the United States in an attempt to keep their merchant fleet safe and ultimately prepare the nation for war. The Embargo Act passed Congress in December 1807.52 Between December 1807 and March 1809 Americans endured both nonimportation and the embargo, although the two acts did not throw as tight a net around the country as Jefferson might have liked. Ships that left foreign ports before the embargo’s December 14 deadline, but arrived in America after that date, were still allowed to land their goods.53 The continued confusion over what the Non-Importation Act actually banned meant that many British goods made their way from warehouses to retailers. Philadelphia, for example, saw thirty-three vessels arrive from British ports in 1808, with twenty of those arriving after that act’s June cutoff date.54 Their manifests revealed cargoes of British goods that teetered on the edge of legality. Philadelphians, it seemed, were not feeling the ban as acutely as the laws might have suggested. It is also worth noting that neither law prevented British ships from bringing permitted goods into American ports, and as a result even those newspapers that were staunchly pro-Jefferson, such as William Duane’s Aurora, published advertisements that announced the sale of British goods in the spring of 1808.55 In fact, the law had so many loopholes that Albert Gallatin warned all collectors in November 1808 that any reports they made should “distinguish those of persons who have clearly contravened the laws, from those against whom the proofs may be doubtful,” in order to expedite the large number of pending appeals that merchants were filing against the confiscations.56

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These haphazard laws were replaced on March 1, 1809 by a NonIntercourse Act that released American ships back onto the waters but prohibited all trade with Britain and France. Both Jefferson and the now incoming president Madison hoped that these laws would be easier to enforce and end the unpopular embargo. But this new law came with its own complications. Resuming the maneuver of the “broken voyage” but turning it back against their own government, American ships made their way to neutral Scandinavian ports, such as Gothenberg and Tonningen, where they picked up British and French cargoes, before returning to the United States.57 Worse still, Gallatin found it hard to keep up with the changing geopolitical realities of an Atlantic world at war. “I have not sufficient information respecting the Ports of Biscay to give positive instructions,” he wrote to New York collector David Gelston in May 1809. “But, if, as we have understood, that province has been annexed to France, vessels entering its ports would be liable to the penalties of the non-intercourse act.”58 Things became so bad that the port collectors themselves began to sympathize with the merchants. The collector for the port of Salem publically acknowledged that “so numerous and so complicated were the various restrictive laws with respect to commerce that it was almost impossible for the most honest man to construe them correctly.”59 By May 1810, nonintercourse was abandoned against both the British and the French. Britain’s increasing attacks on American ships and commerce throughout that year pushed Madison to reinstitute the ban on trade with the British in February 1811. Yet once again, the policy reversal and mercantile eagerness to make money meant that a large number of ships full of British goods were already on their way to the United States. Legal loopholes once again meant that British goods had arrived in America in spite of the law’s intentions.60 The outbreak of war in June 1812 brought with it a new wave of commercial restrictions. Many of these were focused on preventing American merchants from supplying the British military forces with provisions. But in effect, they still attempted to prevent British merchandise from entering the United States. Moreover, the pressing need for revenue also prompted Congress to pass a law that placed double duties on imported items. This too had the effect of depressing the small amount of trade that continued. Nonetheless, the expectation that these laws would soon be lifted prompted many American merchants to ship their goods from Europe to the United States despite the restrictions. Once their ships arrived in American waters they were seized, only to be released by sympathetic federal judges and port collectors.61 By the end of 1812, seasonal fall goods were widely available, and the

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government had remitted most of the fines they had collected, making the ban on British goods moot in every way. In the early days of 1813, a revised nonimportation bill died a legislative death in the Senate, and the law limped on—present in the letter but not in the deed. By late 1813, a frustrated Madison and his Republican supporters passed the most stringent law yet. Recognizing that many British goods were entering the United States under a different flag, Madison prohibited certain products altogether: rum and woolen and cotton goods. He argued that these were almost always British in origin and thus should be entirely banned from American ports in order to prevent confusion.62 These restrictions remained in place for a few short months. In March 1814, with Napoleon defeated at Leipzig and northern European ports once again open to trade with the British, no one in America could see the point of Madison’s embargo. All restrictions were repealed by the summer of 1814, and American merchants hoped that finally they could return to the business of importing and exporting. But there was one final burden to be borne. Kept under blockade by the British and embarrassed by the smuggling that sustained British troops in Canada with American supplies, Republicans felt themselves to be humiliated and browbeaten by the British, as well as their own citizens. Infuriated, the Committee of Ways and Means wrote the most draconian bill of the entire conflict, which permitted customs officials to search any vehicle without a warrant. Any persons suspected of trading with the enemy were liable to have their goods seized. Moreover, buildings that were suspected of storing imported enemy goods or domestic goods ready to be shipped to the enemy could be searched and the goods confiscated. The Enemy Trade Act of 1815 was Madison’s pièce-de-résistance. It was the apotheosis of commercial restriction, intended to harm the enemy through its stringent curtailment of American trade. It made British goods into an absolute signal of treachery. But as the final act in a series of failed attempts to impose might through commercial legislation, it is fitting that this law never got a chance to even be tested. The Treaty of Ghent ended the war only a few weeks later, and the commercial restrictions ended along with it.63 These restrictions, despite all their limitations, reversals, and failures, constituted a coherent expression of Republican political economy between 1806 and 1815. The necessities of war led first Jefferson and then Madison to temporarily abandon their cherished dream of free trade in the short term in the hope of securing better conditions for American merchants in the future. Both presidents believed that given the circumstances imposed on them, trade

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restrictions would provide sufficient leverage to allow them to bargain for a more equitable commercial relationship with both Britain and France in the long term. Certainly there were many other Republicans who subscribed to this view. Reducing the essence of these restrictions to their core, these supporters explored what the practical ramifications of these policies might be for ordinary Americans. For the everyday citizen, the heart of the Republican strategy was a legislated self-denial. Republican pundits were quick to explain to the public that such self-denial gave Americans a marked advantage when it came to relative commercial strength. Contrasting the situation between America and Britain, one author queried, “which [country] imports articles of sheer necessity and which articles of mere luxury? Are the flour and provisions of the United States imported by Britain and her colonies articles of luxury? Can they do without them? . . . Is cotton a luxury to Britain?” This barrage of rhetorical questions was intended to imply that the former colonial mistress could not survive without the supplies from her old colony. Satisfied that this point was clear, the author continued by shifting his attention to America. “Are the fine laced muslins and cambrics, and chintzes of Britain articles of necessity—would our citizens starve or go naked without them? And would not our manufactures furnish all articles of real necessity?”64 The ironic tone supplied the answer. Nothing that the Americans imported from Britain was a true necessity. Habits may indeed have made them feel indispensible, but if it came to a war, giving into habit was nothing more than a betrayal of one’s country. As these debates became more antagonistic, Federalist sympathizers who had at first countenanced governmental intervention as a means of protecting their long-term commercial interests began to worry that these restrictions were something more than commercial warfare. Reflecting on the mistakes of the Jeffersonian administration in the summer of 1807, one frustrated Federalist wrote, “our present rulers . . . flatter themselves, on the one hand, with the practicability of starving England, when the provisions we furnish her with would not support the population three days out of three hundred and sixty five; and on the other hand, with the facility with which we could dispense with those things which we receive from abroad, though habit has rendered them essential and we have no competent means of making substitutes at home.”65 Federalists’ anxiety centered entirely on their own habits and abilities as elite consumers. They were certainly not worried about the consumption of the great number of Americans, only about the possibility that they

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and their families might be cut off from the world of refined consumption that they knew and enjoyed.66 As the Federalist critique of these legislative efforts gathered force, Republicans responded with a new and updated vision of what American nonconsumption might look like in the nineteenth century. One man who addressed this problem in particular was William Duane, the editor of the Republican organ the Aurora. This Philadelphia newspaper had grown in popularity in the early 1800s, and, by the end of the decade, the Irish-born Duane had a solid and reputable publication in which he could despise the British, criticize the Federalists, and support the Republican cause. Duane’s daily publication distilled the criticism of British goods into a scathing attack on the imagined wants of individual consumers. Duane blamed the mindless habits and subservient customs of middling and elite urban Americans for the continued desire for these ruinous foreign luxuries. The articles he published implored Americans to relinquish their luxuries for the good of the nation.67 In their stead, Duane urged Americans to consume the products of their own country. Duane’s approach, as that of the Republicans, was to update the Revolutionary politics of nonconsumption. In doing so, Duane tried to amalgamate the old model of the patriot-consumer with the newer vision of the citizenconsumer. In the 1760s, nonconsumption had effectively meant the consumption of homespun fabrics, and a refusal to consume anything else. In the intervening five decades, American manufacturers had improved, so that nonconsumption of British goods could in fact enhance the consumption of some American-made finished manufactured goods, in particular textiles and ceramics.68 Over time, Duane’s newspaper became the mouthpiece for promanufacturing boosters as well as the mechanics, artisans, and manufacturers who were attempting to answer the rising demands for domestic-made luxury goods.69 These small businesses offered a little something for everyone. Those in the market for finely wrought goods could buy A. Vitry’s gold and silver lace, or Caldcleugh and Thomas’s American-made wallpaper hangings. For those who were looking for a cheaper item, the newspaper offered up birchbark hats: a cheap homemade alternative to the fur, chip, and straw hats that came from abroad. But Duane did more than aid with advertisement. He also advocated on behalf of new enterprises. One reader, writing from Ransom’s Bridge in North Carolina, found the newspaper a useful place to promote his plan to establish a textile mill and solicit support from adventurous businessmen whose efforts offered direct competition to British and European manufacturing prowess.70

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By advertising these newly established businesses, Duane not only offered an alternative to imported goods; he also offered access to a marketplace that represented an escape from old imperial ties. By generating support for American manufacturing and providing American-made goods, he believed he was freeing Americans from the grip of dependence on British manufacturing. Duane’s efforts modified older Revolutionary policies of nonconsumption with a politics of expanded “domestic” consumption. Instead of asking elite Americans to refrain and sacrifice, he asked them to redirect their consumer desires toward the burgeoning manufacturing endeavors of American producers.71 Duane’s vision of the perfect consumer was thus a simple rustic, a farmer who promised to wear homespun cottons and linens and embraced the idea of “get[ting] quit of what city folks call fashion . . . [and] the handy dandy folks that look so fine and do nothing.”72 By weaning themselves off imported luxuries and turning instead to American-made necessities, the United States could effectively wage the kind of commercial war that Jefferson really hoped to fight. The new Republican citizen-consumer would give up imports, as patriots once had, but not necessarily lose out on life’s comforts. The payoff would be a stronger economy and a more powerful nation. Duane’s strategy was hopeful and indeed not entirely fantastical. By the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, the effect of the trade restrictions and especially the embargo had given American manufactures a chance to flourish in the absence of competition from abroad. Perhaps because of this, there were very few public calls for women to return to their spinning wheels, as had been the case during the Revolution. With textile manufacturing expanding in New England and the mid-Atlantic, female patriotism was less wrapped up in the production of homespun by the 1810s and more fixed on the practice of consumption. The changing economic context was altering the meaning of female citizenship in the first decades of the nineteenth century, shifting the demands of female patriotic consumption away from retrenchment and self-sufficiency and more toward the marketplace. But even with this progress, advances in industrial production were uneven. Observing the state of American manufactures in 1810, Tench Coxe, one of America’s most ardent supporters of manufacturing, noted that despite the great advance in national capabilities, there was still vast room for improvement.73 Coxe’s report presented a vision of a nation that could provide itself with basic goods but could not supply itself with what its middling and elite citizens understood to be the finer things in life. In terms of woolen textiles,

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for example, Coxe described limited successes. He noted that Americans remained dependent on European sheep for their supply of wool, and he hoped that in the following years Americans would make better use of their land resources to raise sheep, particularly merino, Barbary, and other long-wooled sheep.74 However, even with a better wool supply, he noted that Americans remained unable to produce “scarlet, purple, garnet, crimson, claret, mauve and pea green” wools. Instead, American dyers were having success only with “drabs, bottle greens . . . and browns.”75 Coxe seemed sure that Americans were not interested in these fancy colors, but perhaps this was wishful thinking. Americans still followed London fashions, and they could not have failed to notice that following the spring of 1808, red-toned hues were all the rage. “Many splendid, appropriate and tasteful dresses are predominant,” noted a report from London reprinted in the Federalist newspaper the United States’ Gazette. “Amaranth, ruby, purple, cocquelicot and bright amber are universal.”76 Given that textiles in these tones had to be imported, they would have provided a vivid visual cue to any casual observer that a dress or coat in this color was not made in America. In fact, Coxe’s report revealed that in nearly every area of industry Americans were experiencing at best a limited success. Coxe’s conclusions must have been common knowledge to most Americans, who were well aware of what items came from where. Fabrics especially were easily read for provenance.77 In a community that was highly textile literate, recognizing these materials and the items from which they were made was not a difficult job, particularly when American observers contrasted the foreign textiles with American-made cloth or homespun.78 Because of this, the printed debates they read over the virtues of domestic manufactures versus free trade spilled out into their material world. Political debates over consumption were played out in the public spaces that they inhabited. Citizens who wore British-made goods were subject to the judgmental glares of newspaper reporters or even at risk of attack, as had been the case in Baltimore. The shops, warehouses, and wharves of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia became battlegrounds in the fight over America’s political economy. Commonplace transactions were invested with broader meaning. Perhaps because of this, some artisans and retailers chose to adjust their advertising and engage directly with the question of trade restrictions. Such alterations might have been a strategy to attract consumers who sought to protect themselves and support the national cause through the purchase of domestically manufactured goods. It might also have been a means for the shopkeepers themselves to promote their own brand of patriotism. Certainly

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it was a way to further their individual interests in a competitive marketplace. In Boston, for example, John and Abraham Bazin, hardware and looking glass merchants, had proudly advertised in 1802 that they sold imported goods from their shop at 39 Cornhill in Boston. The style of the trade card emphasized the role that desirable imports played in making up his stock. The two transatlantic schooners that adorned this advertisement were encircled by a banner that read: “London, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield GOODS” (Figure 3). Thus it is significant to note that in 1809, at the height of the Republican commercial restrictions, John Bazin very deliberately altered the text of his trade card. It now read: “John Bazin. . . . Importer of Hard-Ware GOODS, in general, Sells Wholesale and Retail. Also, keeps constantly for Sale, a variety of Articles of AMERICAN MANUFACTURE” (Figure 4). The introduction of this particular phrase—especially at the height of the commercial restrictions—was a clear indication of Bazin’s engagement with the debates over America’s political economy. Bazin’s decision to include this phrase might have been a simple reflection of failing supply lines and the restrictions’ success. But in 1809, this was not in fact the case. The nonimportation laws’ loopholes meant that imports were still available to the consuming public. Thus shopkeepers, like Bazin, had to

Figure 3. “Import, London, Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham and Sheffield GOODS, Hardware goods for sale, wholesale and retail by Bazin and Poignand, no. 39, Cornhill, near the market, Boston,” Boston: Russell and Cutler, 1802, billhead, 5 29/32 × 7 31/64 in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 4. “John Bazin, no. 39, Cornhill, Boston, Importer of Hard-Ware GOODS in general, Sells Wholesale and Retail. Also, keeps constantly for Sale, a variety of Articles of AMERICAN MANUFACTURE,” Boston, 1809, trade card, 315⁄16 × 529⁄32 in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

gauge what they thought consumers would be willing to buy. In this context, Bazin’s decision to advertise American manufactures in particular could be read as an attempt to support Jeffersonian restrictions, albeit in a modest manner. It could also be read as an effort to entreat customers to support the Republicans’ efforts to fight a commercial war against the British. In the city of Boston, with its strong Federalist contingent, this in itself was an act of bravery.79 But retailers were certainly not uniformly patriotic. Only three months after the passage of the Non-Intercourse Act, the hat, glove, and hosiery firm of Boott and Farron used some rather provocative stationery for their invoice. Not only did the bill clearly proclaim that the firm sold imported goods; their company motif was an image of Britannia. In other words, Boott and Farron made no effort at all to disguise the provenance of their stock (Figure 5). Other firms also continued to promote the sale of imported goods. Retailers correctly discerned that there would still be a market for them. Indeed, more generally, beyond the pages of the Aurora, there was a marked lack of support for this Republican vision of consumer-citizenship. Jefferson and Madison’s cherished hopes that Americans would choose domestic manufactures and

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eschew the temptations of the foreign market were sorely disappointed. Examining the failure of their policies and the reasons behind those failures suggests the extent to which Americans had changed their ideas about the obligations that consumers had as citizens. The assumptions the Republicans had made were rooted in the 1760s. But for many citizens, these aspirations were hopelessly out of date. Jefferson’s political economy of retribution failed because East Coast Americans remained unconvinced that nonconsumption, even in its updated form, was effective, desirable, or acceptable in the new nation. At the most basic level, merchants, customs officers, judges, and even politicians circumvented the laws that the Republicans had put in place. They did so out of self-interest for the most part. But friends, acquaintances, or officials who felt a certain amount of sympathy for America’s beleaguered merchants also helped to bend

Figure 5. “M[rs.] Boston [June 16th 1809] Bo’t of Boott & Farron, importer of hats gloves & hosiery,” Boston, 1809, billhead, 2¾ × 35⁄32 in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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or break the laws that were poorly constructed. Commercial solidarity, often fueled by partisan division, went a long way toward undermining the Republican vision of consumer-citizenship. But these laws also failed because merchants found a market of willing consumers for these illegal imported goods. Although consumers might have been forgiven early on for being unable to navigate the complex and confusing marketplace created by nonimportation and embargo, as the cold war of restrictions ignited into outright conflict, these uncertainties must have dropped away. American citizens thus colluded with merchants on one level, buying their wares and defying the Republican vision of the marketplace and rejecting the legal obligation of self-denial. Finally, politicians from both parties began to find fault with Jefferson and Madison’s particular vision of America’s political economy. Objecting to the humiliation of regressing to a colonial mode of politics, some members of Congress argued that Americans had a right to buy what they pleased. The sum total of these activities was a rejection of the idea that American citizens had an obligation to stop their shopping for the national cause. It was America’s merchant community who led the vanguard of opposition to these restrictions, although they did so in a variety of ways. Some merchants, like the firm of Tuckerman and Rogers, circumvented the spirit of the restrictions while strictly adhering to the letter of the law. By following the workings of Congress on a day-to-day basis, waiting for a snippet of information on new legislation, this firm attempted to take advantage of the short interludes of reprieve that punctuated the long periods of restriction.80 Although it is likely that they well understood the premise of nonimportation as a means of weakening the British economy, they felt no remorse for anticipating the end of the restrictions. On the contrary, they felt proud that they had resisted the temptation to trade and made their fall order in good conscience. In 1810 they wrote to their agent: “Government can not however rob us of the consolation of having done our duty to our Country as well as our consciences, and we must now be content to rest on the hope of doing as much better in the fall as will in some degree make up the loss.”81 Some firms were clearly not as observant of the letter of the law, and British and French goods did arrive in America even when they were supposed to be banned. Pleas from merchants that shipments had arrived in port late owing to bad weather usually persuaded customs officials that they should permit the goods to land. More often, late shipments would be confiscated only to be restored by a sympathetic judge or because of powerful connections.82 As stories such as these began to circulate, mercantile strategies for

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getting British goods into the United States legally became well known. These stories generated a great deal of consternation. The merchants’ acts were clearly wrong, and the newspaper reports made no bones about that. But consumers were somehow free from blame, because the newspaper editors concluded that individual shoppers had little way of telling which goods had arrived legally and which had not. The message that many of these newspapers communicated to readers was that as citizens, Americans had only to obey the law of the land. There was less expectation that they sacrifice their interests in a display of republican virtue, something that they had been called on to do when they were imperial subjects rebelling against a colonial authority. One reason that consumers were not held to public account in the years before the war broke out was that many doubted whether citizens could reasonably be expected to know which goods were legal and which were not. In particular, there was a large degree of confusion over what items had entered the country legally and which goods had slipped in through illicit means. Auction sales were one source of confusion. On the one hand, customs agents used auction houses to sell off British goods brought in by American privateers. This meant that the goods had been forcibly taken from British ships, and thus their presence in the U.S. could be interpreted as an economic blow against the enemy. Moreover the sale of these goods meant income for the government, because the goods captured by the privateers became in part the property of the U.S. government.83 On the other hand, auctioneers were also notorious for allowing merchants to dispose quickly of contraband goods. Because retailers bought both these kinds of goods at auction and then undertook to sell them to the public, consumers who believed they were buying the spoils of war could in fact have been purchasing smuggled goods.84 Although consumers were capable of identifying British goods and in all likelihood knowing when the entry of those goods to the United States was illegal, they had no way of knowing if their goods had entered legally or illegally. As a result they could never be sure if what they had just bought was a symbolic blow to their nation or a strike against the enemy. These uncertainties over provenance and legality faded as the war dragged on. Governmental concerns about smuggling had become more noticeable in late 1811, as the effects of the nonintercourse law took hold. But by 1813 the newspapers were full of tales that described the sheer magnitude of America’s furtive trade in forbidden goods.85 Smuggling in North America was of course a well-established pastime, part of a broader network of Atlantic trade.86

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Enforcing the payment of customs duties not to mention policing the border had always been Sisyphean tasks. Before the war, merchants were periodically censured for these activities, but the consumers of smuggled goods were not. After all, under normal circumstances, shoppers would have had little idea if their items were smuggled in or not. Yet during the War of 1812, smuggling was publicized, foreign goods were recognizable, and consumers would have been well aware of the origin of imported goods. Seeking broad public support for the government’s restrictive measures, one editorialist practically begged readers to stop buying imported goods. “The representatives of the people, at the instance of a virtuous chief magistrate have magnanimously determined that individual interest shall yield to the general good—that speculators, knaves and traitors, shall no longer enrich themselves at the expense of the community.” Given that, this author was at pains to point out that “it only remains for the people to support so wise a measure.”87 Indeed, given these circumstances it would have been easy for consumers to take the decision to buy no imported goods, giving merchants no reason to continue their vast illegal importation of such foreign luxuries. Instead, the opposite happened, and merchants who anticipated consumer demands and desires could smuggle safe in the knowledge that there would be a market for these illegal goods. It is impossible to say how much smuggling existed between 1806 and 1815. Yet anecdotal evidence suggests the scale of operations did increase during this period as merchants, innkeepers, farmers, and sailors all involved themselves in this illicit trade. One New Brunswick merchant calculated that half a million pounds worth of contraband goods went through his warehouse and into the American market. Similarly, a Boston customs collector reckoned that by late 1814 there was some $3 million worth of goods set to enter Maine from Halifax and Castine.88 The routes that smugglers used to get their goods into the United States varied widely during the war. The swampy borderlands of East Florida, including Amelia Island, provided one convenient entry point.89 Some smugglers were more brazen, taking advantage of the complexity of the restrictive laws to fool customs officials. American merchants colluded with British manufacturers, who packaged their textiles to look like the products of neutral countries like Portugal before shipping them via circuitous routes to the United States. They paid their bonds in order to maintain the illusion of legality.90 On other occasions, smugglers would attempt to exploit the poorly policed shorelines of New Jersey and New York.91 If caught, they could always

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claim they were blown ashore by bad weather and then rely on sympathetic judges to protect them and their cargo.92 Yet by far the most profitable route for smugglers remained the route from Canada into the United States. This trip was particularly lucrative, as both British and American importers chose to keep large stockpiles of British manufactured goods on hand in New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, ready to be moved into the United States at a moment’s notice. These merchants had two options: either wait and trade legally during a suspension of the restrictions or take a risk and move their goods in illegally if other means proved impossible. But the latter was no easy feat. James Buckley, a New York dry goods merchant, warned his brother in England that the act of smuggling goods from Canada was not to be taken lightly. “I would advise you not to ship any goods to Canada,” he wrote in November 1811. “As I suggested before, it has become difficult to smuggle goods into this country, several people have had their goods seized and no doubt will be condemned even after they have got them into this City in that the country swarms with spies and informers and I think it would be very imprudent to attempt to do anything that way.”93 Abel Buckley clearly did not take his brother’s advice. In September 1812, James wrote to tell Abel that the ship Euphrates had been captured off the coast of Newfoundland by American privateers and brought into Newport, where she was libeled in breach of the Non-Importation Act. The British goods on board, which belonged in part to the Buckleys, were confiscated, and James had to pay very heavy fines to get them back. James noted sourly that some of the goods had been damaged by rats, but he was able to sell them off for the most part. It was a sorry end to their adventure.94 Nonetheless, it is worth noting that these British manufactured goods still made it into the American marketplace. Even unsuccessful smuggling ventures could provide a means for forbidden goods to make it to American customers. If the Buckleys were unsuccessful, hundreds more managed to navigate the routes from Canada into Vermont, Maine, and upstate New York with alarming ease. Newspapers reported mile-long lines of wagons bearing loads of British goods wending their way through Saratoga, Waterford, and Troy.95 The particular lure of this route was that anyone with a little cunning and ingenuity could make a successful run. Newspapers reported smugglers with sleighs crossing into Vermont and others coming down Lake Champlain in rafts and boats.96 Eastport became the epicenter of smuggling activity as men made the short hop from Canada back to Maine with ease.97 As stories in the newspapers increased, it must have been clear to the consuming public that

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many of the new British goods for sale must have been smuggled in. Yet far from acting as a deterrent, there seemed to be public support for smugglers and their illicit hauls. Smugglers and the communities that helped them believed that they would easily be able to sell these luxury imported goods on to retailers who in turn would ultimately sell these goods to consumers. Merchants could hardly be blamed for the belief that their efforts at smuggling would be profitable. Between 1806 and 1815, newspapers continued to publish articles that informed readers of the latest updates in London and Paris fashions. These articles didn’t just advise as to cut or length. They were practical guides that provided instructions on fabric choice and color, both factors that demanded imported textiles. Thus, one such article from May 1814 instructed interested consumers that a fashionable promenade dress for April must be made of fine cambric and trimmed with “blossom colored muslin”; that stylish morning dress should be composed of “fine jaconet muslin” and “small buttons”; and that evening dress should consist of a “Frock of the finest India muslin . . . and white lace.”98 For anyone interested and wealthy enough, here was all the information needed to dress as any fashionable lady of London would in the spring of 1814. All the textiles that the article listed were beyond the capabilities of American producers. But such articles indicated that there remained throughout the war a demand for these goods, which were clearly recognizable as enemy productions. Moreover, articles like “April Fashions,” combined with the continued efforts to smuggle goods into the United States, implied that despite the war, Americans would still buy British goods. Indeed, it is notable that these articles, so clearly aimed at wealthy American women, were an implicit rejection of the Republican vision of the self-sacrificing citizen-consumer. In a marked shift away from the consumer politics of the Revolution, women in the War of 1812 were not actively encouraged to display their virtuous citizenship through the habits of domestic production. Instead, articles like “London Fashions” endorsed the Federalist idea that those who could afford to buy the latest trends should not only be allowed to do so, but also aided in their quest for sophistication and gentility. If women (or their husbands for them) wished to buy British goods, no policy or law should prevent them from doing so. In the end, William Duane and the Republicans’ vision of domestic consumption failed to convince elite consumers; but this was hardly surprising. What was significant was Duane’s failure to attract the support of a larger number of American citizens, like Harmon Wendell, who ignored their patri-

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otic obligations, preferring instead to enhance their social standing and satisfy their personal desires through the consumption of imported goods. The failure of the marketplace of retribution taught the Republicans some hard lessons about the limits of civic obligation in the new Republic. The rejection of the nonconsumption of British goods, the embrace of smuggling, and the continued interest in British fashions all pointed to the fact that Americans had come to believe that it was not their responsibility to fight the nation’s battles by abstaining as consumers. Nor would citizens regulate their consumption to reflect the demands of their government. Although many Americans were willing to do their civic duty at a time of national distress, their actions articulated a clear understanding: that they had disconnected acts of patriotism from acts of consumption. Civic virtue was no longer to be expressed through material self-denial. Instead the political economy of war, combined with the self-interest of merchants, retailers, and consumers themselves, reinforced the lessons American politicians had begun to learn in 1789 when they passed the nation’s first tariff. The consumption of imported goods generated revenue, a highly valuable commodity for a fledgling nation. Just how valuable became quickly apparent as the Republican restrictions began to take effect. At the end of 1806, revenues had been $15 million. By 1811 that figure stood at $13.3 million, and by 1812 it was down still further to $9 million. In the same year, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin noted that federal expenditures were up to $22 million.99 Without some system of taxation, Americans would soon return to the anxious years of financial crisis that had marked the 1780s. Even the strongest critics of government interference and federal systems could see the need for a revenue source. John Randolph, the Virginia congressman who had voiced some of the greatest opposition to Jefferson’s plans for commerce and foreign policy throughout the 1800s, summed up America’s position with acuity in 1809. Challenging the efficacy of the Embargo, the cantankerous statesman asked: “[Is] the course to be pursued by us, a free sovereign and independent nation, for the purpose of coercing all the rest of the world . . . that which it became the colonies to take in order to coerce the mother country, possessing the monopoly of their commerce? . . . What is [now] our condition? Entirely altered. We have now to fulfil the engagements we have made—to pay the price of our independence.”100 Although Randolph was making a case against the embargo, his choice of phrase provides an excellent summary of the problems Americans faced by 1815. Having waged a second war for independence,

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this time in the hopes of asserting their nation’s commercial freedoms and economic rights, Americans now had to pay for the costs of that conflict. Although Randolph hated the principle of taxation generally, he believed Americans no longer had a choice. As colonies they had been able to manage without revenue, but as an independent nation, they had bills to pay. Thus, Jefferson’s policies were not only impractical, they were an embarrassment, and Randolph confessed “that [he] was mortified at seeing the proceedings of the first continental congress resorted to, to justify the proceedings of an independent America.”101 In 1812, Gallatin attempted to bypass the problems that Republican legislation had created for the nation’s revenue streams. He introduced treasury notes to fund the war and used bridging loans to keep the country afloat. But by 1815 it was clear that this approach had failed. In January of that year, the Republicans had taxed everything they could think of to keep the treasury and the war effort afloat. A direct tax was levied on all property, land, homes, and slaves, to the amount of $6 million.102 Domestic manufacturing was taxed for a period of ninety days, and even household furniture, paintings, plate, clocks, and silver and gold watches had a tax levied on them.103 In the absence of new consumption to tax, the government turned to taxing past acts of purchasing to help generate funds. Given the scale of this taxation, it is telling therefore that as soon as the war ended and trade resumed, the government reverted to taxing the citizens who bought imported goods. In February 1816, the government placed a 42 percent ad valorem tax on all imported merchandise.104 Such a high figure suggests that the exigencies of war had made one thing clear to politicians: a tax on the consumption of imported goods was the easiest way to raise revenue. The abject failure of the Republicans’ import restrictions taught Americans something else about their national consumer habits. No one who had witnessed the snaking lines of wagons bearing British goods illegally into the country, or had watched a frenzied crowd threaten to tar and feather customs officers for confiscating cambrics and chintzes, could accept that desiring and purchasing luxuries were the sole province of the elite.105 The disappointing adherence to Republican calls for self-sacrifice prompted Republicans to reconsider whose desires for luxury ought to be endorsed and accepted. Their conclusion was that the narrow Federalist vision of luxury consumption confined to the elite was hopelessly limited. More forward-looking Republicans started to imagine a far broader swath of consumers living and shopping in America. These citizens were not

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necessarily the consumers of imported goods but instead were the part of the population who were taking advantage of the advances in domestic manufacturing. Republicans like William Duane and Tench Coxe had already championed this vision of American consumption. But as the war came to an end, the vision of the productive consumer, who worked to buy American goods, became more prominent. Discussing the imposition of the taxes in January 1815, a writer for the Daily National Intelligencer noted, “It is . . . the natural tendency in a free nation, of taxes to raise the prices of the objects taxed. The manufacturer of them charges the duty upon the consumer, who in his turn, charges it either in the price of his labor, or in whatever else may be the source of his maintenance; and thus a burthen, ostensibly heavy, is not only equalized but to a vast extent lightened and diminished.”106 This was a vision of an internally self-sufficient economy that had the momentum to sustain itself through a balanced arrangement of consumption and production. It was a version of political economy that subtly undermined the idea that only the elite should shop for luxuries, imported or otherwise. This idea was of course not uniformly embraced. Federalists continued to argue that luxury consumption should be confined to the elite. Ezra Sampson, the Yale clergyman and editor of the Connecticut Courant, argued that “the rich have . . . one exclusive privilege: they have a right to make a splendid appearance in the world, because their circumstances can well afford it . . . the profusion of their expenses is beneficial to the community, as it gives employment and affords sustenance to industry.”107 But, as he admonished his “common rank” audience repeatedly, that same privilege did not belong to the majority of people. Reminding them that frugality and thrift were republican virtues, he warned that “a free people whose passions are set altogether on the pursuit of gain, can hardly remain free very long.”108 Better to restrain the impulse altogether, leaving luxury consumption to the social class that could afford it. By the same token many other Federalists argued that because of this, luxury consumption should not be taxed at too high a rate, because this would prohibit even the elite from making purchases and would stem the flow of revenue altogether.109 It was an old-fashioned refutation of what was increasingly becoming an old-fashioned party view. Slave owners also rejected the high tax that their party had put on consumption. Bitter that their loyalties had gone unrewarded, planters and adherents to an agrarian republicanism objected to their characterization as “Southern Nabobs” or “Haughty Grandee[s].” They argued that despite their wealth, they had an obligation to clothe, feed, and house their

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dependents, a circumstance that made their consumption something to be protected, not burdened with taxation. John Randolph was especially angry to be cast as the unfeeling master. He dismissed as fantastical the image of the dissipated planter who “reveled in ‘luxury’ ” while “the necessary wants of his wretched bondsman” were ignored. The reality, according to Randolph, was that slave owners were having to sell off their prized heirlooms and family treasures, as new taxes were levied on the “decent comforts of life.” Randolph’s objection was not just his own financial difficulties (although he pointed furiously to the fact that government taxes meant that the “master [was] consumed by cares from which even the miserable African is free”). His other objection was that by impoverishing slave owners, the government was in fact punishing the slaves. As a result of the wartime regime of taxation, wrote Randolph, “the searching miseries of war penetrate even into the hovel of the shivering Negro.”110 Plantation owners, Randolph argued, had a responsibility to guard and conserve their wealth so that they could maintain their standing in society and of course consume on behalf of those who required their protection and care. Slave owners, Randolph seemed to be suggesting, had an obligation to their slaves that was more important than their obligation to the nation. Randolph’s solipsism reflects the fact that white Americans could not imagine slaves as consumers in their own right.111 Seen as a species of property, slaves were primarily designated as goods for consumption, a status that was confirmed by their sale at auction.112 In ideal terms then, a slave was imagined as the passive recipient of consumer goods, not someone who could make a choice: whether that choice was to refrain from a purchase or actively engage with the marketplace on his or her own behalf. However, this fiction had long been troubled by the fact that slaves did interact with the world of consumer goods, most obviously through their use of stolen clothes.113 Runaway advertisements provided material proof that slaves did make choices about the goods they wanted, choices that reflected their ability to discern a good’s value and quality. A stolen coat listed in a runaway advertisement was more than just a tool through which readers could identify a fleeing slave; it was also a sign that slaves were fully aware of how consumer goods conveyed status and identity and carried a market value. Even if the slave had not purchased the coat, he or she had acted as a discerning consumer in every other way. Slave choice, in this sense, very subtly eroded a comfortable conviction that black men and women did not participate in a marketplace and thus could have no direct impact on the nation’s political economy.

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These concerns rarely surfaced in the debate over slavery, but they did erupt into discussions about the place of free blacks in the United States political economy. John Bristed, for example, in his survey of the resources of the United States in the wake of the War of 1812, argued that free blacks lacked civilization and the capability to be independent citizens. Instead, he argued that they survived through being “house-breakers, highway robbers and forgers.” It is telling that Bristed chose to enumerate these crimes; all three showcased the fact that free blacks stole property rather than earning the money to buy it. Thus they were not only framed as nonproductive parasites; they were also accused of failing to contribute to the national economy through their consumption. No tax would be paid on stolen goods.114 Yet such crimes could also be read as proof that free blacks coveted the same goods and property as white Americans. According to this fiction, they might not be able to buy household furnishings or lavish personal possessions, but they could still desire them. Like many others in the 1810s, Bristed was not sure how to deal with this aberration in the model of American political economy. Convinced that emancipated slaves could not be converted into citizens, he was in favor of removing this population from the nation entirely through the process of colonization.115 The supposed crimes of black Americans—free or slave—posed an uncomfortable proposition for white Americans: that consumer desires might not be easily differentiated by racial identity. Such anxieties added weight to what were, by 1815, deeply rooted concerns that material possessions as expressions of refinement were not enough to divide the “civilized” population of America from the “savage” peoples that inhabited the same land.116 Worryingly, black interactions with the marketplace blurred racial identities in ways that threatened the distinctions between populations that white Americans were trying to create in the wake of the Revolution. Even as new laws, such as the Naturalization Law of 1790, drew racial boundaries around the possession of American citizenship, the actions of African Americans on the fringes of the marketplace eroded those distinctions.117 Perhaps because of this, the rhetoric that excluded black men and women from the marketplace, defining their choices as wanton, extravagant, and irrational, would only escalate.118 White Americans would not countenance black consumers. Nonetheless, the idea of limiting the role of the citizen-consumer to only elite men was losing purchase after 1815. Jane Haldimand Marcet, for example, provided an especially clear view of how useful the hardworking nonelite consumer could be to a nation’s economy. Marcet, who was a political economist associated with the circle of intellectuals working at Edinburgh

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University, wrote in 1816 a text that promoted her own particular vision of Adam Smith’s philosophy to young readers.119 Adopting the persona of an instructor to a young woman named Caroline, Marcet informed her youthful audience that “capital cannot produce revenue unless it is consumed.” But Marcet was not endorsing all consumption. Instead, she was careful to conceptualize the ideal consumer as hardworking and productive. “If [revenue] be consumed by industrious persons who work whilst they are consuming it, something of superior value will be produced and that product whatever it may be will be exchanged against other productions. . . . Whatever is saved from the extravagant consumption of the rich, is a stock to contribute to the comforts of the middling and lower ranks of society.”120 It was not an accident that Marcet addressed a young woman in her text on political economy. As women were gradually excluded from the realm of activities deemed to be productive at the start of the nineteenth century, the growing emphasis on the productive consumer made it more important to monitor female consumption.121 Throughout the war, both male and female consumption had been targets for attack and censure. But in the wake of the war, older habits of attacking female consumption took on a renewed energy, and female shoppers were once again subject to attacks on their moral and indeed their civic virtue. However, the war had produced a subtle shift in ideas about women’s patriotic consumption. Their obligations were no longer framed primarily as retrenchment and self-sufficiency. Instead, their choices in the marketplace could be held up as virtuous. Those women who chose goods that were long wearing, good value, and above all useful were due all praise. Those who indulged in cheap goods for the sake of a bargain or were seduced by novelties were condemned.122 Political economists and moralists argued that a woman’s individual abilities to keep her household on budget and sustain her family’s standing was deemed to be the building block on which the nation’s economy would stand or fall. As Marcet put it: “I once heard a lady ask a philosopher to tell her in a few words what is meant by political economy. Madam, replied he, you understand perfectly what is meant by household economy; you need only to extend your idea of the economy of a family to that of a whole people—of a nation, and you will have some comprehension of the nature of political economy.”123 Such a relationship between the household and the nation gave women a unique civic obligation: when it came to choosing what to buy and how to spend their family’s money in the early nineteenth century, they were as citizens performing an act of patriotism.

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However, the shifting emphasis on women’s civic obligations toward the marketplace did not do much to alter women’s civic rights. Economic independence did not accompany these changing ideas about female economic responsibility. Women’s civic roles remained enclosed within the household, and their relationship to the nation remained largely mediated through their identity as wives and mothers. The choices they were making did not entitle them to full citizenship. They still operated as patriots without rights.124 In the crucible of war, the divisions of party and class and the interests of slaveholders, as well as the ever-present dichotomy of gender had been melted down and molded into a newly emerging set of ideas about consumption and its virtues in the United States. The war thus became a catalyst for a new confusion over who should consume in America, amplifying the anxieties that were also products of the broader changes taking place in the ordering of society between 1770 and 1820. The gap between the elite and the middling ranks was starting to narrow, and the boundaries between the two had certainly started to blur by the end of the eighteenth century. As the nation’s economy shifted, old patterns of social standing were altered as sons took on new professions and daughters married either to promote the standing of their family or endorse the reputation of a man on the make. Such blurring of boundaries meant that old injunctions to confine the consumption of luxuries to an elite lost precision and force. The question of what entailed a luxury and who was entitled to consume such goods was increasingly confusing. The only thing that these two blurring classes could agree on was that the lower sorts should be excluded from the ranks of society and kept from the delights of consumption as completely as they ever had been before.125 Postwar America presented a landscape that was both exciting and unnerving. Old commercial relationships and practices were being swept up into the swirling currents of new capitalist activity. Speculation and risk taking became the talk of American towns. New businesses and small industrial endeavors flourished along the banks of rivers and against the backdrop of thunderous waterfalls. Turnpikes and canals replaced wagon tracks and footpaths. Boys and young men, like Harmon Wendell, tramped to the city to start new lives as clerks, young professionals, or apprentices. And perhaps most important, as the boundaries of class frayed along the edges, the identities of American consumers changed. Those who visited the city to buy goods were increasingly men and women like the Conestoga gazers whom John Fanning Watson had chronicled so faithfully in Philadelphia at the start of the nineteenth century. These were rural business people or country dwellers, in town

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for the day to shop and do business. Unlike the Trumbull sisters, whose elite network had provided them with guides to the city’s shopping districts, these rural consumers had no person to turn to for guidance, advice, or protection. The Trumbull girls had been consumers who could be taught to shop, safely and wisely, under the guidance of their father, mother, and friends. But the new generation of American consumers had no one to show them how best to consume. Protecting these shoppers from the market and from themselves and teaching them what to do would become the work of a new generation of merchants, manufacturers, pundits, and political economists as the nineteenth century got under way.

Chapter 3

The Perils of the Public Auction

In 1817, one anonymous defender of New York auction houses made a statement that had unexpected consequences for the fate of the American consumer. Eager to deflect the criticisms of jealous and indebted merchants whom auctioneers had displaced as the center of economic activity in American cities after the War of 1812, this champion of the auction house claimed that “the right to purchase [was] as free as the right to sell” and that merchants who attacked the auction did so because it forced them to compete for the consumer’s attention and coin.1 The statement was an accurate assessment of mercantile interest and easily recognized as part of the struggle between East Coast merchants and auctioneers for market share, a struggle that endured over twelve years. However, the apparently simple defense of the “right to purchase” was not so straightforward. In ways that surprised everyone involved, the rights and responsibilities of the consumer became a lightning rod in this self-interested tussle, galvanizing political opinion on all sides. The auctioneers’ defense forced Americans in the early Republic to consider whether the “right to purchase” was really part of the spectrum of rights that citizens in the new nation were entitled to claim. And although the retort was in part simply a rhetorical flourish, beneath that lay something more. Embedded in the phrase was a signal that Americans were beginning to consider the civic entitlements and obligations of consumers more broadly, as part of an effort to define more precisely the place and nature of the consumer in the early Republic. Inadvertently, the self-interested merchants and auctioneers transformed their commercial turf war into a larger debate over the complex relationship between consumption and citizenship in the early Republic. Amid the rapidly changing political economy of the early nineteenth century, multiple competing visions of the American consumer had already

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emerged. While Republicans championed an agrarian consumer who barely needed or wanted the goods from the transatlantic marketplace, the Federalists jealously guarded a vision of a refined elite consumer, whose access to the material worlds of Europe was to be cherished and protected. The conflict with Britain had not really vindicated either of these ideals. In fact, the war had merely demonstrated that the full gamut of American consumers defied easy characterization and that their actions fit no specific political theory. At the same time, beyond the halls of power, quotidian acts of consumption challenged political preconceptions about the duties of the citizen-consumer. Elite consumers had certainly failed to live up to their obligations, as defined by the commercial restrictions. It had seemed as though demand for imported luxuries had not diminished during the war years. But the War of 1812 had also illuminated the fact that elite consumers were not alone in defying the Republicans’ commercial vision of civic obligation. Instead, the conflict had proved that a wider class of male citizen-consumers existed in the United States, whose demands had dismantled the exclusive rights of the elite to enjoy luxury goods. Yet the duties and privileges of these consumers from the middling classes were far from clear and their relationship with the marketplace and the state remained protean. Female consumers had also taken on a more active role as civic consumers, even if they were not as yet imagined as fully fledged citizen-consumers. Indeed, it is worth noting that as women from the middling ranks of society became ever more closely identified with the domestic sphere, their duties as consumers became increasingly apparent, despite the fact that this sphere was intended to shield them from both the political and commercial world.2 Such contradictions were testament to the challenges that women posed to American political thought in the early nineteenth century. Although they were legally not considered to be full citizens, their actions in an expanding marketplace had significant ramifications. This confusion over identity and responsibility persisted as new economic opportunities, changing commercial structures, and shifting partisan loyalties left the role of the consumer as citizen open to continued debate.3 Between 1817 and 1829, this discussion assumed a different form, as it became part of a protracted argument over the perils that consumers faced at public auctions. These sales, which were staged in cities up and down the East Coast, had always been an important mechanism for American merchants to shift overstock or unwanted consignments. But in the wake of the war, these sales assumed a greater importance as both British agents and American auctioneers found new ways to exploit this commercial site. Touched off by the

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commercial conditions of postwar trade, quarrels began between merchants and auctioneers over the need for taxing and regulating auction sales. But what began as an effort to guard commercial advantage soon became something more. Indeed, as this squabble over auctions gained momentum, two interrelated issues became cause for contention. The first was the persistent question of consumer identity. As merchants and auctioneers struggled to gain the commercial advantage, they manipulated the identity of the consumer to suit their needs. Out of this rhetorical contest a vision took shape. Unlike the figure that dominated earlier debates about American habits of consumption, this individual was not defined as a member of the elite who was confident and capable in the world of goods and responsible with his or her funds. Nor was this figure the frugal farmer, whose restraint was a virtue. Nor yet was this newly imagined figure the suspect dandy or the contemptible belle. In fact, female consumers hardly appeared in this discourse. The context for this discussion was the commercial world; it was imagined as an exclusively male province. Instead, auctioneers and merchants imagined the consumer to be a rural man of middling ranks, susceptible to deception and at risk of being undermined by the vicissitudes of the marketplace. This was a new, troubling figure in political debate. The second issue hinged on the question of what rights or obligations this newly imagined consumer had as a citizen. This debate, unresolved by the exigencies of war, took on new dimensions as merchants and auctioneers appropriated the rhetoric of citizenship to make a case for their own particular commercial cause. Arguing over the question of whether these newly vulnerable consumers ought to be shielded from the dangers of commerce and saved from the consequences of their own desires, auctioneers and merchants attempted to define the extent to which the American consumer was entitled to protection. As auctioneers made an increasingly convincing case that every consumer had “a right to be ruined in his own way,” the place of the consumer in American political economy shifted.4 Defined by the auctioneers as an interest in their own right, these imagined consumers challenged the idea that America’s political economy was fashioned only around productive interests. Beginning in the mid-1820s, those involved with this debate increasingly factored the demands of the imagined consumer into the careful balancing act of fashioning a new political economy. By the 1830s, the debates over auctions had subsided, but the quarrel over consumers’ rights to purchase had left a lasting impression on cultural and political understandings of who the American consumer was and what this consumer might expect in terms of protections and freedoms.

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The auction house debates challenged the preconceptions and loyalties of those involved in a variety of ways. Merchants and manufacturers found themselves forging alliances over tariffs that they might never have made but for their shared hatred of the auction sale. The principles of political economy that had been inspired by partisanship in the 1800s no longer held as old allegiances broke down and new ones formed. Men from different political parties found themselves voting together to make or break the auction sale, for very different reasons. Leaving behind the tenets of political economy that had guided them through the first decades of their existence, East Coast Americans struggled to understand the imperatives of a shifting transatlantic marketplace. By the 1820s, they were contending with two competing visions of the economy and the body politic that were neither fully liberal nor wholly republican but rather an uneasy amalgam of the two. Such a combination resulted in a complex set of ideas about consumers’ identity and the role they should play in boosting the nation’s economic strength and shaping the nation’s culture. Auctions had always existed and had generated no small amount of controversy in American society. As the vehicles that sheriffs used to sell debtors’ personal goods to pay creditors, they were uncomfortable reminders of the harsh realities of economic life.5 As Benjamin Franklin argued in The Way to Wealth, auctioneers were well known for whipping up individuals into a buying frenzy, persuading them to spend unwisely. Franklin’s widely circulated condemnation suggests that “the public vendue,” as early Americans called auctions, generated a good deal of public ambivalence about market morality in colonial towns and cities.6 By the late eighteenth century, auctions’ shifting commercial purposes sparked further contention as they became indispensable to wholesalers as outlets for imported dry goods. Local retailers did not welcome the change, because they often found themselves at a disadvantage in the frenzied salerooms. Returning home with poor-quality goods provoked a great deal of frustration, prompting several local protests against the auction house. In 1770, for example, disgruntled Philadelphia shopkeepers instituted a partial boycott of the city’s auction houses to try to curtail the sale of dry goods at auction, which met with little success.7 Despite this failure, auctions were regulated by the state, and auctioneers had to be licensed by local government. Stipulations ranged from paying special taxes to the prohibition of sales after sunset. In short, the auction had always been a market mechanism that generated intense interest and suspicion simultaneously. It was unsurpris-

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ing, then, that as a result of the War of 1812 this watchful tolerance became more fully antagonistic. At the outbreak of war, American merchants and auctioneers alike had looked on with dismay as the nation slowed to a commercial standstill. Three years later, East Coast merchants welcomed the resumption of trade with relief, believing that they could pick up business where they had left off. Unfortunately for them, these men had badly miscalculated the ways in which the war had changed the marketplace. British manufacturers, whose warehouses were overflowing with the unsold goods of three long years, inundated the American marketplace with their merchandise.8 Despite saturating the market by 1816, British manufacturers continued to pour their chinaware, textiles, and hardware into the United States through the following year. As orders from the United States began to dwindle, the impatient manufacturers, frustrated with the cumbersome apparatus of transatlantic trade, sent their own agents to seek new outlets. These agents found American auctioneers, who quickly made the most of their new opportunity.9 The auctioneers’ unexpected success hinged on their ability to outpace and outsell the merchants in a saturated marketplace. This was not so much an issue of skill as commercial strategy. While merchants offered their clients long lines of credit, allowing their country customers to stock up and pay up to a year later, auctioneers had always insisted on cash or provided only short lines of credit. As a result they were able to stay solvent more easily, and they could refurbish their stock more often than their mercantile counterparts could. Unsurprisingly, the auctioneers’ willingness to buy for cash was a quality that attracted British manufacturers. Over time, British interest matured into outright preference, a shift that enabled auctioneers to sell only the newest and most fashionable items. The auctioneers capitalized on their fashionable reputation by combining it with the ability to sell at comparatively low prices. The insistence on cash payments allowed auctioneers to shave off the added cost of interest from their prices. Auctioneers also kept prices low through less legal means. In collusion with British manufacturers, auctioneers would often create two invoices; one for their own records and one for the customs office. Making sure the latter was considerably lower, auctioneers were also able to deduct a percentage of the cost of duty from their prices.10 By 1817, the auction house had become a center of commercial energy on the East Coast, drawing both old hands and newcomers to the city into its orbit. One young man, arriving in New York in 1821, tried to describe the irresistible pull of these sales. “As one goes further down towards the shore on

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Pearl Street, Water Street and Front Street,” he wrote, “the crowding of merchants becomes greater and the noise more diversified and grating; one person stands on a cask calling off by auction hogsheads of tobacco; another from the Tontine Coffee House is selling some thousand acres of land to the highest bidder; a third at the corner of the street is knocking off a ship or bales of cotton with the hammer.” In awe, this youth watched the salesmen. If the trader “pushes his body in a store to learn what is going on,” noted the bewildered young man, “he gets wedged fast into the corner and overshadowed by leghorn hats which cover him like so many umbrellas.”11 Probably crushed and buffeted himself, this visitor, like many other New Yorkers, was still excited by the sheer thrill of the auction and the opportunities it offered to men of commerce. By 1817, merchants in New York began to claim that auctioneers had the “whole trade of the city” firmly in their hands. Their self-interested protests were only a partial exaggeration: one historian has calculated that as of 1821, 44 percent of all imports into New York were sold at auction.12 The bitter rivalry that sprung up between the auctioneers and the merchants of the two port cities in the 1810s was purely commercial. Ironically, very little otherwise divided the two groups, and in fact most of New York’s and Philadelphia’s auctioneers had at one time or another been merchants themselves. Consequently, auctioneers not only competed for market share but also muscled in on much of the merchants’ social capital, undoubtedly considering themselves members of the mercantile classes. New York auctioneer Charles Town, for example, not only was a director of the North River Bank along with Peter Jay—son of the wealthy merchant John Jay—in 1836 but also was the president of the Aetna Fire Insurance Company, which had a capital of $200,000. Others, like Martin Hoffman, belonged to old mercantile families that were just as at home in the precincts of the Tontine Coffee House as the most well-established merchant. Some, such as Frederick Montmollin and Robert McMenomy, married into eminent families that brought them social standing and access to new wealth. Montmollin, for example, married Hannah Phile, the daughter of a prominent Philadelphia physician and landowner, while McMenomy married Elizabeth Salter, the daughter of Manasseh Salter, a wealthy New York merchant, who undoubtedly helped him get established by giving McMenomy a position as a clerk in his store. Many auctioneers had also served in the Revolutionary War, and some, like Mordecai Myers, had attained officer status, which set them up later for political careers. Myers, like several other prominent auctioneers, was also Jewish, but this was not a dominant characteristic of New York and Philadelphia

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auctioneers. Instead, these men came from all walks of life and used auctioneering to either make or augment a family fortune. After 1815 in particular, when times were hard, merchants believed that those fortunes cut into the profits they felt were rightfully their own.13 Nonetheless, this commercial rivalry might have continued to simmer beneath the surface had it not been for a decision made by a small group of merchants in the winter of 1817 to publicly denounce auctions. In part, their efforts were simply a jealous response to the success of men like Philadelphiabased auctioneer Silas Weir, whose own correspondence for the postwar period attests to just how busy auction houses had become in the two years following the conflict. Weir had done well with British cassimeres, calicos, and cambrics as well as Irish linens, and had even been sought out to sell American-manufactured printed table covers, woolen shawls, and fine flannels from his commission rooms on South Front Street. But it was not this kind of success alone that prompted the merchants to act. Rather, it was the news in December 1817 that Congress was debating whether to repeal the 2 percent tax on all sales at auction, a wartime tax and part of a raft of taxation measures that politicians now believed were no longer justified.14 The threat of repeal proved to be the last straw for the struggling merchants, who finally chose to publicly condemn the system of sale by auction. Not long after, news filtered through to Weir that was far from welcome. As three of Weir’s New York colleagues informed him, a group of merchants and traders had organized to pressure Congress to pass a new tax bill, calling for a 10 percent duty, one that would cripple the business of auctioneers. Anxious to circumvent this disaster, the New York auctioneers begged for Weir’s cooperation, asking him to join with them to thwart the efforts of the “dangerous combination.” Weir, eager to protect his own interests, agreed, thus joining with a group of other auctioneers from Boston to Baltimore who hoped to put an end to the merchants’ attacks.15 The auctioneers’ decision to form an interregional combination was a sensible one. From the very first, the question of whether auctions ought to be taxed captured national attention, with newspapers up and down the East Coast noting the substance of the debate.16 With such attention, the auctioneers quickly realized the fight was going to be waged on an open stage. “Our apprehensions are alive to every movement of theirs publicaly,” wrote New York auctioneer Martin Hoffman to Silas Weir, “but we are by no means acquainted with their secret machinations.”17 Hoffman was clearly being pragmatic. There was little chance of discovering what the merchants were doing

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to undermine auctions privately. Hoffman seemed more concerned about the pamphlet that the merchants had published. In it, merchants attacked auctions as a violent, unnatural, and destructive mode of business, arguing that “every sober and correct judge of business, must perceive nothing in prospect but confusion, desperation and ruin” if auctions were not checked. The angry merchants argued that auctioneers not only undersold hardworking American merchants—which divorced commodities from their natural and ostensibly stable value—but also served English interests before their own nation’s. The merchants’ pamphlet revealed a group of men horrified by the ways in which the logic of supply and demand could overtake their own interest. But it also suggests the degree to which, unable to compete with the auctioneers’ entrepreneurial abilities, the merchants found themselves cut out of a marketplace where old business relationships were supplanted by commercial opportunism. As a result the merchants complained bitterly that the auctions created a marketplace that did not serve the country’s best interests and was thus unnatural. These were serious accusations, and they would now be judged on a public and national stage. By the very force of its public and political nature, the discussion became a means to critique the successes and failures of American political economy and the citizens it helped create.18 The anti-auction arguments in 1817 failed to convince Congress, perhaps because the auctioneers were so swift to repudiate the merchants’ claims. Weir himself wrote to Adam Seybert, the Republican congressman from Pennsylvania who sat on the Committee on Commerce and Manufacturers. Other auctioneers also fought hard to prove they operated a “fair & most useful trade for public good & public convenience,” a phrase used to counteract the merchants’ accusations that their business was selfish and opportunistic.19 It was also a reply that suggests that not even the auctioneers were comfortable with the idea of sacrificing the balance of interests and the public welfare to the imperatives of the market. In fact, New York auctioneers responded particularly effectively by answering the merchants’ attacks with a pamphlet of their own, one that ridiculed the traders as self-interested and hysterical. How could it be, the auctioneers asked, that thirty-six men, the only licensed auctioneers in New York, could bring the greatest commercial entrepôt of the West to financial ruin?20 It was a strong case, made stronger because each state benefited individually from sales at auction, raking in funds from duties, bonds paid, and licensing fees. Few congressmen wanted to be responsible for depriving their state coffers of such monies.21 Fewer still wanted to take responsibility for voting to keep a law that perpetuated a wartime tax. In the

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end only five congressmen voted against the bill that repealed the tax on auctions; the repeal of the federal taxation of sales at auction became law in January 1818, and the discussion of a 10 percent tax on auctions never even materialized. The auctioneers breathed a sigh of relief.22 This skirmish proved to be the opening act in what would be a ten-year debate over the place of the auction in American commercial life. No one involved in this conflict had any illusions. The battle over auction houses was motivated by self-interest on all sides. The huge sums that auctioneers paid to the state in taxes suggests the scale of their business. In 1822, Philadelphia auctioneers paid $70,491 to the state of Pennsylvania; by 1826, that sum had more than doubled to $142,929. In New York a similar leap took place. In 1818, New York auctioneers had added $105,000 to the state coffers, and eight years later, that sum stood at $285,845. These figures confirmed the merchants’ belief that they were fighting for their livelihoods, while auctioneers were fighting to hang on to prosperous profit margins.23 With so much at stake, both sides chose their positions very carefully. Thus it is important to note that in the early stages of the debate, merchants seemed to care very little for the consumer. In fact, their main objection was that the auction, as a “fashionable machine of polite and licensed swindling,” was a system that methodically undermined regular trade.24 Of course, they were happy to lodge specific complaints. They protested that they were unfairly undersold, that the quality of goods sold at auction was inferior, and worst of all that auctioneers deliberately evaded legitimate legal expenses. Yet in spite of this litany, merchants did not argue that a better class of auctioneer would solve the problem. On the contrary, it was the very nature of the auction as business practice that became the merchants’ chief target. Their first concern was that the auction encouraged speculation, duplicity, and downright immorality, chiefly from America’s commercial citizens. Painting a bleak and hopeless picture, anxious merchants declared that “when a nation sinks down from the habits of order, the rules of morality and the dictates of religion, they never rise again.”25 But the merchants’ concern did not end with the immorality of individuals. At the heart of their objections lay the claim that over time, auctions would destroy the business of all merchants, decimating the commercial interest and fundamentally disrupting the balance of all interests in America. Regulating the auction was not simply about preventing individual misdeeds. The merchants believed that unless Americans managed the economy to ensure that every interest, commercial or otherwise, was

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equally served, the nation would not hold together.26 Adhering to a vision of republican political economy, they called for commerce to be protected in the name of civic equity. It is not surprising then that auctioneers under attack in 1817 defended their trade by claiming that it served “the public good and public convenience.”27 To auctioneers, who had operated so long in the shadow of merchant monopolies, the mercantile hysteria must have appeared self-serving. By their lights, the auction served to balance America’s political economy by stopping the merchants from dominating transatlantic trade. For both sides, the question of what constituted a balanced marketplace was clearly at stake. Moreover, because of the connections Americans made between balanced trade and the state of the nation, the question of what constituted a balanced— or equal—nation was also up in the air. The balanced nation was more than a concern over economic harmony. The equal treatment of economic interests acted as the material basis for the creation of a democratic polity in the United States. It prevented the rise of a financial aristocracy and permitted all citizens to remain equal to one another—as befit a republic. Thus when the proauction propagandist wrote in defense of his cause “that the right to purchase is as free as the right to sell,” he was more focused on balancing interests than championing an imagined consumer, because in the final analysis it was the balance of interest that created a republican political economy in the United States and ensured equal citizenship for American men in the early Republic.28 The preoccupation with creating a perfect union of interests meant that the consumer appeared hardly at all in these early conflicts. Where mentioned, the consumer was a shadowy figure encompassed somewhere within the broad spectrum of agendas that both sides claimed to be advocating for. The consumer’s initial absence from the debate was in part because of choices made in rhetorical strategy. Yet it was also because the consumer, who ended up buying and using the goods sold, was not in fact present at auction houses in the late 1810s. Instead the auctions attracted city retailers, country store owners, and perhaps the odd peddler, all those who had previously bought from the urban merchants. It was these retailers who flocked to the auction house, buying up all the cheap goods on offer and then selling them on to urban and rural consumers across the East Coast and the Ohio valley.29 In 1817, focused on the loss of their business, merchants did not think to raise the question of the consumer. Auctioneers, who rarely came into contact with the individuals who bought the set of Staffordshire crockery or selected winter weight fabrics

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at the dry goods store, had inadvertently acknowledged the consumer in their self-defense but had not planned to champion the shopper’s rights. Nonetheless, the phrase “right to purchase” seemed to strike a chord. By 1820, when auctions once again came under the spotlight, the consumer, though loosely defined, had a new place in the debate. A second round of public debate over auctions came as a result of the economic devastation caused by the Panic of 1819. In the immediate aftermath of the crash, the commercial auctions of New York did not garner much attention. Instead it was the old specter of the sheriff’s sale, the auction at which the bankrupts’ goods were sold off, that imprinted itself on the public. As visible reminders of the reality of debt and bankruptcy, auctions seemed to encapsulate the horrors of an unstable economy (Figure 6). More broadly, the

Figure 6. “Brother Jonathan’s Soliloquy on the Times,” [1819? Also dated 1812, 1832], print engraving with some hand coloring (Kensett, Pinx et Sculp.), 725⁄32 × 13 in. This detail of the print illustrates the role of the Sheriff ’s Office in administering the forced sale at auction of the goods belonging to bankrupt debtors. The sheriff ’s sale was a recognizable symbol of panic and commercial hard times in the antebellum period. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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panic caused Americans to doubt that “unfettered freedom of exchange would bring prosperity and rough equality of opportunity.”30 These misgivings translated into vicious debates over how best to regulate the economy and spawned arguments over banks, tariff, specie, and bankruptcy laws, as well as, of course, the auction itself. By May 1820 a wave of anti-auction memorials had reached Congress, directed to the chairman of the Committee of Manufactures, Henry Baldwin from Pennsylvania. Baldwin, a staunch protectionist, had already put together a legislative package that would have placed a 10 percent tax on the sale of foreign goods at auction, dramatically increased tariffs, and ordered that customs duties must be paid in cash.31 The stringent regulations that Baldwin proposed touched off a flurry of debate in Congress that was oriented around the question of whether regulating the economy would in fact promote the nation’s collective interest. The anti-auction contingent argued that the public vendues represented a monopoly because only very few men were licensed and allowed to make money as auctioneers. They also protested not only that auction sales undermined the business of American merchants and manufacturers by leaving them open to unfair competition, but that these sales also converted trade into “a system of hazard and chance,” which induced “gambling and speculating habits.”32 The auctions represented the worst kind of marketplace to these protestors, one that promoted national immorality and unfair privilege, and that unchecked would prevent Congress from providing “parental care” to “the sinking American manufacturer and merchant.”33 In contrast, those in favor of the auctions argued directly against regulation, pointing out that to legislate against auctions would privilege merchants only at the expense of manufacturers and farmers. In fact, they argued vociferously that to permit auctions was in fact to undermine the commercial monopoly that merchants maintained on transatlantic trade, a monopoly that allowed them to sell their commodities for unreasonably high prices. Some politicians also pointed out that any taxation of the American people amounted to an attack on an American’s sacrosanct right of property. Over the course of five days the debate over auctions became a clash of two understandings of the marketplace, out of which emerged a new vision of the consumer. While Baldwin, representing the anti-auction voice, claimed that he wanted America and by implication the federal government to be in “full command of [its] consumption,” his real interest lay in protecting the interests of the merchant and manufacturer.34 In contrast, his opponents began to experiment with the concept of the consumers’ rights. They suggested that the

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unregulated marketplace allowed Americans to make economic decisions and choices that as citizens they were entitled to make without interference. Republican James Johnson of Virginia made this case with particular gusto. He argued that “the old fashioned way was the best [and] left to the good people of the United States to judge for themselves of what would best promote their interest.” Reiterating that point only a few days later, Johnson pointed out that while he conceded the need to tax citizens during a time of war, “in time of peace, he was disposed to let every man tax himself what he pleased by his consumption of articles of foreign growth or manufacture.”35 Johnson’s argument was not only in support of states’ rights; it was also an endorsement of individuals’ right to make their own economic decisions. Consumers approached the marketplace with full knowledge of the higher cost of foreign goods. Should they decide to buy more expensive goods, that was their decision. But Johnson would not countenance the federal government imposing an added obligation in the form of taxation on the citizens of the United States. As to the charge of immoral and foolish purchasing, Whig congressman Albert H. Tracy of New York argued that private sales by merchants were just as likely as the public sale at auction to promote immoderate consumption—more likely in fact because people could buy on credit. The implication of his argument was that regulation of sales was unlikely to alter consumer behavior and that as a result it should not be attempted.36 Although Baldwin finally convinced the House that Johnson and his pro-auction ilk were wrong, his supporters in the Senate did not have the same success. By the end of 1820, auctions remained untaxed at the federal level. These arguments painted a specific portrait of a consumer who was selfinterested and deeply engaged with the commercial economy of the urban East Coast marketplace. Moreover, this picture was of an independent male consumer, whose purchases contributed to the nation’s economy through the payment of higher prices via the mechanism of indirect taxation in the form of the tariff. Such a portrait pushed other types of consumers into the background. Female shoppers were not included, because they were not imagined as equally rational and well informed. Nor did this picture acknowledge the consumers who bought their goods secondhand, from pawnshops, clothing dealers, or market vendors. These poorer consumers who navigated these connected yet different networks of exchange were not imagined as part of this debate, as their purchases were not considered to be contributions to the national coffers.37 However, Johnson’s assertions demonstrate that a new vision of the

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consumer was emerging, one that was slowly starting to imagine the consumer as a political interest akin to the farmer, the merchant, or the manufacturer. By opening up the model of republican political economy to emphasize something more than the harmonizing of the productive trinity, the auctioneers created a space for Americans to imagine a national economy that served its people in a different way. Instead of requiring the government to create a collective balance, this model privileged freedom of choice. Suggesting the individual had a right to purchase goods unhindered by the federal government’s efforts to regulate the marketplace was a small step in this direction but a significant one.38 In 1821, as merchant advocates continued to dwell on the ways in which auctions upset the balance of trade and deprived merchants of their livelihoods, auctioneers began to experiment with a new line of debate. They drew on the idea that regulating consumption broadly was important but in particular capitalized on the idea of the rights of a consumer in the American marketplace. Looking to highlight how auctions drove down prices for consumers by introducing legitimate competition in the dry goods market, New York auctioneers such as W. W. Wetmore and Robert McMenomy accused merchants of trying to levy a “tax upon the yeomanry of the country.” The choice of vocabulary was surely deliberate. It signaled the auctioneers’ attempts to link their cause to a specific vision of American political economy, one that championed the agricultural interest and supported a self-sufficient male farmer that helped render the nation independent through his faithful labor on America’s “fertile but uncultured soil.”39 The emphasis on the yeoman’s production was no accident. These auctioneers were experimenting with new ideas about what a consumer might be entitled to, and it surely helped them to couch the figure of the consumer in the familiar terms of a producer’s identity whose labor earned him his entitlements. This ensured that their audience would understand that the auctioneers were promoting the cause of hardworking male citizens and not dandies or spendthrift women. As the auctioneers pushed at the boundaries of what the individual could expect as a citizen-consumer, they used the language of production to anchor their arguments in an older politics of virtue.40 The figure of the yeoman-consumer was a fiction. Auctions were patronized by and large by commercial middlemen, the city or country retailers who bypassed the wholesale dry goods merchants in their quest for a better deal. But the auctioneers seemed to believe that their promotion of the imagined

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figure of the yeoman-consumer would garner extra support for their cause. Thus they cultivated an image of the simple consumer, who preferred the plain and substantial fabrics he bought at auction, rather than the “shewy” and expensive ones that merchants pressed on rural consumers, corrupting them with luxury.41 The powerful web of associations that auctioneers sought to weave around the issue of taxation at auction was certainly an invention. Auctioneers were just as capable of selling luxury goods and retailers and consumers knew it (Figure 7). But their efforts to connect their business to a fight for low prices and the antimonopoly cause was an effort to reach out to a prominent antiprotectionist contingent, both in government and in a wider public audience. By creating an imagined consumer that figured as the lynchpin in a popular fiction of nation and good citizenship, the auctioneers struck a powerful blow for their cause. The auctioneers’ achievement is hard to measure. In part their success in persuading the public that they served a yeoman-consumer is reflected in the continuing success of the auction. The total percentage of U.S. imports sold at auction rose from 13 percent in 1820 to 16 percent in 1821, reflecting a broad base of support and interest in the auctioneers’ business.42 What is perhaps more striking was the marked failure of a commercial boycott of auctions that merchants in New York attempted to orchestrate in 1821. Attempting to turn public opinion against the auctioneers, a group of merchants called the United Dry Goods Mercantile Association placed an advertisement in the New-York Gazette. In the advertisement, merchants recommended to importers that they deliberately advertise their sales as private, giving retailers a chance to avoid the public sales at auction houses. After five months the merchants gathered together in Washington Hall in New York to discuss the progress of the boycott. Despite the bombastic tone and the slightly desperate agreement that they had struck a symbolic blow, the merchants had to concede that their efforts had done very little to stop the proliferation of auction sales in New York.43 Perhaps it was this frustration that prompted the merchants to shift their angle of attack on auctions. If they could no longer compete for the consumer’s attention in terms of price and variety, they could and did continue to highlight the inherent immorality of the auction sale. In this way they began to style themselves as the guardian of the consumers’ interests, promising to protect shoppers by exposing the perils of the auction house. Proving that auction houses were dens of iniquity was not particularly hard. The auction house already had a reputation as a place that facilitated crooked business practices. Any citizen who browsed the pages of the New

Figure 7. “Great attraction! Rich spring goods from New York auctions! C.A. Upton & Co. are now receiving from auctions and other sources, the largest variety of Rich Goods for the Spring trade that have ever been offered in Worcester,” C.A. Upton & Co. ([Worcester, Mass.]: Tyler & Hamilton, printers (Palladium Office) 11 and 12 Central Exchange, Worcester, [1849]), broadside, 18½ × 1219⁄32 in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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York City Hall Recorder would have soon learned of the many accounts of cons and robberies that took place either near the auction house or within its walls. Thieves lurked at the back of the crowded auction room, waiting for the buyer to be distracted by the buzz of the sale, before picking his pockets. Burglars frequently used the auction to sell off the stolen goods before they could be detected.44 The question of the auctioneers’ collusion in these illegal activities remained open to question. They were certainly willing to conspire with their suppliers to ensure that they avoided the costs associated with duties and fees. Silas Weir, the Philadelphia auctioneer, received a letter from a colleague in March 1817 that illustrated just how simple it was to bypass the payment of duty. “Prior to the sale,” wrote the vendor, “we wish the Goods advertised as the effects of a Bankrupt (who formerly transacted business in your city.) This will save the State and U States duty.” In all likelihood, Weir complied with the request. It was an easy way to save money.45 Yet the merchants’ real invective was saved for the double-dealings that directly harmed the consumer. Despite the auctioneers’ claims that they conducted honest sales, it was clear that they often bypassed legal regulations. Schemes to confuse buyers at auction were rife. Otis Swan, a New York merchant with whom Weir did regular business, concocted an elaborate scheme to try to raise the prices on fabrics he sent to Weir in the summer of 1817. “We have an Idea,” wrote Swan, “that these goods will bring more money sold as bombazettes than Wildbores—if they are called Bombazetts & shown out[,] people would see them & judge for themselves—& we think the being called Bombazettes would induce them to give a little more for them than to call them Wildbores.” It was a classic ruse that played on the very nature of sale at auction. Relying on the speed at which sales were conducted, and the retailers’ greedy desire for a bargain, Swan argued that Weir could simply nudge clients to fool themselves into thinking that they were buying fabrics that were worth more than they actually were. Because well-informed clients would see through the ploy, it would be only the simpletons who would be deceived.46 Merchants and traders therefore felt justified when they accused auctioneers of “infusing [their] baleful influence into all commercial transactions and poisoning all the channels of fair and honorable trade.”47 It was this attitude that merchants chose to highlight over the course of the 1820s. In their earlier efforts to promote their own interest, merchants had focused on the systematic and un-American defrauding of the customshouse, which deprived the nation of its rightful funds, in order to provoke public fury. By 1822, the auctioneers’ duplicitous lack of concern for the consumers’

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rights also caused a flurry of outrage. Merchants argued that auctions afforded men the opportunity to sell “spurious and deceptive articles of Merchandise . . . [and] conceal[ed] from public censure those practicing or attempting to practise fraud.” Worse still, merchants pointed out that auction sales had the capacity to “tempt the buyer, who ha[d] been deceived by the purchase of a spurious instead of a genuine article, to pass the cheat, and deceive another, who in turn shifts to a third, till the cheat goes round and is at last fastened upon the consumer, who is generally the person least able to bear the loss.” Placing the consumers’ plight at the heart of their critiques, merchants struggled to regain the political advantage and the moral imperative they appeared to have lost in 1820 with the failure of Baldwin’s auction bill and the indifferent results of their boycott the following year. Invoking the rich language of rights, they argued that the auction system was a monopoly that shattered commercial equality. “In a republican government like ours,” they warned, “great care should be taken that priviledges calculated to exalt one class of the community at the expense of another, should not be tolerated. Equal rights and priviledges are secured to all by the Constitution.” From this lofty position they felt they had a winning argument. Not even the auctioneers could refute the claim that their sales defrauded the retailers and sparked a chain of events that eventually led to the innocent country consumer paying the price for the auctioneers’ cunning and deceit.48 The merchants’ faith in the strength of their own argument was misplaced. They had formulated an attack that relied on a public agreement that retailers and consumers had a right to be protected from such frauds. But the auctioneers had already anticipated this move. They fully acknowledged that buying at auction came with some risk. They readily conceded that all too often fabrics sold under the hammer might be shorter than advertised: dressed, glazed, and decorated in an effort to make them appear richer and more valuable than they actually were. But because auctioneers by law had to offer a warranty on goods sold, most retailers and country storekeepers accepted that business at the auction house entailed some risk but that the reward of a low price was worth the occasional poor deal. If some of this cost was transferred onto the consumer, then so be it. As the auctioneers argued, those who did business at auction did so knowing full well what was going on. “The misrepresentation has become sanctioned by universal practice and is innocent because notorious,” claimed the vendue masters.49 Drawing on a long-standing legal understanding of caveat emptor, the auctioneers made it clear that they were not responsible for making sure that a country innocent or first-time

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retailer knew the ins and outs of city trade. Their task, as they began to define it, was simply to bring down the price of commodities for the savvy middlemen and retailers who then passed on the benefit to the individual consumers, buying textiles, domestic furnishings, or trinkets for themselves.50 The auctioneers’ arguments had taken care of the rights of the retailer. The force of the caveat emptor assertion rendered the merchants’ protests about the duplicity of auctioneers futile. If retailers knew the risks and continued to buy at auction, then as the failed boycott of 1821 suggested, there was nothing that merchants could do about it. However, some anti-auction campaigners still believed they could damage the auction through continuing to fight for the right of the ultimate consumer, the figure that auctioneers had framed as the farmer. For several years, auctioneers had claimed that farmers were well served by auctions. But anti-auction campaigners now began to refute that claim. They argued that cheap prices meant nothing if all that farmers could buy were the shoddy offerings of auctioneers. In a series of letters addressed to the citizens of Baltimore, one anonymous author pointed out that farmers were being offered “quantities of rubbage which in reality [were] not worth the expence.”51 The ranting tone of this tirade might have discredited the author, but in fact the accusations were accurate. In more measured tones, New York merchant Lewis Tappan reported to Senator Daniel Webster and the rest of the Committee on Manufactures in 1823, confirming these suspicions. “There are several Englishmen who are constantly here,” wrote Tappan “importing & selling great quantities of Woolens at our auctions. The goods are manufactured especially for such sales.” It was information that made for dismal reading. Earlier in his report, Tappan had explained that these imported cloths were made largely from the leftover wool that littered the floor of British textile factories. Because of this, the fabric, known as Plains, could be made for very little money and sent directly to the American market. “I have heard these persons boast of their profits,” Tappan noted glumly, “while American cloths could not be sold for any profit.”52 Similarly, a group of Philadelphia merchants complained to Congress in 1824 that “the fact is notorious, that goods are now made expressly for sale by auction, so extremely deficient, that the most heedless consumer, is convinced on trial that he has been defrauded.”53 Tappan’s report signaled that angry merchants were increasingly able to count on the support of American manufacturers, especially men involved in the American woolen industry. Entirely unable to compete with the British

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titans of textile, sheep farmers and woolen manufacturers eagerly sought to close down the routes by which British woolens entered into the United States. Auctions were notorious as outlets for these cheap cloths, as Tappan’s report suggested. Thus, as the 1820s wore on, manufacturers of woolen cloths, as well as other items such as cotton webbing, petitioned for a punitive tax on auctions. These manufacturers also voiced their concerns about the consumer. “A duty of 10 percent on all goods sold at Public Auction . . . will prevent in great measure the sale of defective and spurious goods . . . [and] insure the consumers a sufficient and fair supply and good articles at moderate and regular prices,” claimed the Haight brothers in their petition to Congress in December 1823.54 Unfortunately for merchants and manufacturers, their outrage was not shared by consumers. Country store owners even tempted shoppers into their stores by advertising that the goods on offer were ones they had bought at auction in New York at “auction prices.”55 The merchants’ decision to highlight the poor-quality cheap goods was not simply a concern for the innocent consumer. The criticism arose out of a broader anxiety that auctions allowed goods to enter the United States that were designed simply to be sold rather than be of use to anyone, or as one author put it, “made expressly for sale by auction.” It reflected a growing discomfort surrounding individual consumers’ desires and how they reflected on the nation’s economy and its international reputation. Commentators worried that poor taste and the purchase of substandard items made Americans look foolish in European eyes. Auction critics believed that public sales encouraged people to purchase on an impulse and fulfill capricious desires. Magazine articles commented that it was all too easy to be deceived by the excitement of the sale, leaving individuals with purchases they did not want. Indeed, those who bought at auction were known as the “here and there” folks, people who could not settle to anything honest and sustained. Critics contrasted this uncontrolled behavior with the calm, orderly purchases people made at private sales, where, they claimed, consumers bought only what was necessary, high quality, or useful. By providing rooms full of cheap goods that inspired desire but had no use, auctions allowed individuals to surrender to their own consumer cravings at the expense of good judgment. As this mistrust matured over the 1820s, critics dwelled on the practiced theatrical skills of a good auctioneer, who could whip a crowd into a frenzy, inducing them to buy poorly made goods they had no use for. It was, after all, no coincidence that the auctioneer sold from “the stage.” But the logic of this argument had unexpected consequences. By the late 1820s, critics found themselves unable

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to blame only the auctioneer for the evils of the system. Merchants had to confront the problem that people kept buying from stores that had gotten their goods at auction.56 As retailers continued to reel in their customers by promising them goods brought at auction, merchants struggled to prove that “the innocent consumer [was] the real sufferer.”57 Critics could not deny that retailers regularly advertised their new goods successfully by crowing that they had just received new stock by buying from New York auctions. It appeared that even those consumers well removed from the frenzy of the commercial auctions in New York and Philadelphia, simply looking for cheap manufactured goods, believed that auction sales would provide them with new items at cheaper prices. In fact, merchants were forced to acknowledge that if farmers looked for quality rather than quantity at a cheap price, then the problem of poor merchandise and a “vitiated public taste”58 would disappear. They hoped that farmers could become better “economists” by learning that their interest would be better served if they stopped buying the cheap but showy fabrics for sale at auction.59 It was quite a leap from their earliest arguments, in which they had demanded only that auctions be regulated by government. Now merchants began to demand that consumers themselves take responsibility for the shape and nature of the American marketplace, buying more expensive goods to “employ the American merchant and manufacturer” and to benefit the nation.60 But after the debates of the earlier years, not to mention the lessons learned during the War of 1812, it was clear that merchants had little faith in their fellow Americans’ ability to regulate themselves. They knew that just like the retailers before them, the ultimate consumers seemed happy to embrace a marketplace of uncertainty with the promise of a bargain always hovering around the corner. Finally, merchants had to face the fact that consumers themselves believed they had a “right to purchase” whatever they wanted and that efforts to control auctions had to start with the consumers themselves. Charging the consumer with the task of regulating the auctions was hardly effective. By the mid-1820s, auctioneers were by all appearances going from strength to strength. In 1825, auctioneers across America sold 21 percent of the entire inventory of U.S. imports, a portion of the trade that added up to just over twenty million dollars worth of business. Nor were the auctions’ successes confined to imports. Between 1824 and 1826 auctioneers sold an average of $3,167,045 worth of domestic dry goods a year in New York: an increase of just over two million dollars since 1818.61 Business was booming, and urban retailers, country store owners, peddlers, and even the occasional

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consumer showed no signs of forsaking the auction rooms and the bargains they offered. Moreover, the auctioneers’ arguments had also gained some political legitimacy. In 1824, East Coast merchants had pushed another bill into Congress, this time attempting to place a 7.5 percent tax on all sales. It went the same way as its predecessors, with Congress taking no action and the antiauction groups forced once again to admit defeat. They were running out of options but had not quite given up yet. They decided to stage one more political assault, a decision prompted by the passage of the “Tariff of Abominations” into law in 1828.62 In the normal course of events, merchants would have viewed the institution of this tariff with horror. But as anti-auction lobbyists they could see a potential gain. The passage of the tariff galvanized one of their chief allies in the fight against auctions. Protectionists had long hated auctioneers for their capacity to channel cheap imports into the country and edge American merchandise out of the market. By the late 1820s there were a number of organizations that the merchants could have turned to, but they chose to ally themselves with the New York–based American Institute. This institution was a new member of the ranks of institutions that promoted domestic manufacturing in America. Indeed, it had formed only in 1828, headed up by James Tallmadge, a former congressman who had spoken out against auctions in 1817. The institute’s campaign against auctions had always been premised on the belief that tariffs of any kind would cripple auctioneers and leave the way free for American manufacturers. Merchants, desperate to try to curb the auctioneers’ successes, threw aside their usual disdain for the supporters of the tariff in order to make the most of the protectionists’ political power. United by personal interest and a desire to end what they saw as the corrupting and unpatriotic commercial dealings of the auctioneer, they constituted a formidable alliance.63 On the May 2, 1828, eighteen merchants calling themselves the New-York Anti-Auction Committee gathered at the Masonic Hall to formulate their campaign.64 Their efforts were led by the well-connected merchant Thomas H. Leggett, whose family had a history of objecting to auctions. Twenty-eight years earlier, Leggett’s cousin, claiming his word of honor to be enough, had deliberately refused to provide guarantors of his credit, a condition of purchase at auctions in 1800. His obstinacy provoked the wrath of powerful auctioneers but did little to prevent auctioneers demanding credit guarantees.65 Thomas H. Leggett’s own opposition to auctions went far beyond a personal stand. With the committee in place, Leggett and his band of merchants

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formulated a cogent attack on the auction system. Like its predecessors, this attack began in a pamphlet. But Leggett and his allies had seen pamphlets fail before. Thus they went one step further. At a second meeting in October, Leggett turned the pamphlet into a political platform, and the meeting of mechanics and merchants nominated a slate of three men who would run for Congress on the anti-auction ticket.66 In the month before the elections, the anti-auction constituency worked tirelessly to whip up support for their cause. A committee of fifty men was created to circulate memorials, particularly to skilled craftsmen, demanding a 10 percent tax on auction sales, and to gain signatures for anti-auction petitions.67 Their efforts met with extraordinary success. Meetings were held in Philadelphia and Baltimore, and more than fifty memorials, from nearly every state, reached Washington that fall. The petition organizers managed to obtain over ten thousand names, men who demanded that the auction system be dismantled. Leggett’s committee also began to publish their own newspaper, entitled the Anti-Auctioneer. The paper devoted itself to denigrating the auction and highlighting in particular its monopolistic nature and its tendency to encourage speculation and luck over honest hard work.68 As a result, antiauction merchants and protectionist manufacturers were joined by a third ally—the urban artisan. A small group of tradesmen, whose products were edged out of the market by cheap British textiles and commodities, objected to the auction with the same passion as Leggett, although for different reasons. The “get rich quick” attitude that pervaded auction sales was one cause for disgust. A second was the auctioneers’ financial power, which enabled them to offer or deny men a line of credit, giving licensed auctioneers an astonishing amount of power over others. This thinly veiled monopoly on credit provoked unmitigated disgust for auctions among working men, who viewed financial elites with deep mistrust. The Anti-Auctioneer skillfully appealed to all these sentiments, and Leggett even made sure that his committee and the election ticket included some members who had serious credentials among working-class men to increase the movement’s credibility. It seemed that the auctioneers had finally met their match, opponents inspired by something more than financial gain. The anti-auction coalition was fighting against a system they believed to be intrinsically un-American in its lack of democracy.69 But despite their astonishing unanimity, their efforts failed once again. Their failure turned on the fact that auctions brought immense trade and thus immense wealth into New York City. It was not simply the city’s retailers who

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benefited from public sales. The auction trade drew merchants from all over the country, like moths to a flame. Once in the city these visitors stayed at hotels and enjoyed the delights of New York’s theater and other entertainments. Auctions made work for porters, carters, clerks, and errand boys. Sailors and ships’ captains found work thanks to auctions. Above all, the auctioneers continued to emphasize just how much they paid in taxes to the state, money that furnished other projects, such as the construction of the Erie Canal, that the financial elite in New York did not want to see collapse. Thus, although the anti-auction candidates enjoyed a modest popularity in the mercantile wards of the city, none were elected. As an added blow, Congress chose not to act on the memorials, claiming that a rush of other business had swept the auction issue aside. This crushing defeat left merchants like Leggett at a total loss. With no other options, they retreated to their warehouses to lick their wounds.70 By the end of 1828, only the mechanics of New York remained in the ring. Abandoned by the merchants, they nonetheless continued to criticize auctions through published attacks and political action. As part of that effort, a small group of men organized themselves into their own Committee of Fifty, which met in April 1829 to reconsider their options. But as they formulated a new platform, auctions began to take a back seat. The printers, machinists, and shoemakers who gathered in 1829 concentrated more on the monopoly practices of state-chartered banks, which had all too often denied them loans and failed to take care of their hard-earned deposits. Auctioneers, while condemned as part of the “banking aristocracy,” ceased to be the focus of attention.71 The obvious outcome of these failures was that auctioneers continued to enjoy the relative commercial advantages of low-duty sales. But there was another, more intangible result as well. The auctioneers’ political successes added up to an endorsement of their vision of America’s political economy. The auctioneers had argued in 1828 that “in this free and happy republic, every man has a right to be ruined in his own way.” Despite the clear risks that commercial consumers took at the auction house on the behalf of the ultimate consumers, the right to take such a risk, unfettered by the federal government’s efforts to shape the economy, was something they were entitled to as Americans. By once again invoking a language of rights, the auctioneers helped to articulate the idea that Americans were independent citizens and as a result had a right to make economic choices as they saw fit. “The retailers and consumers do not want guardians,” argued the auctioneers.72 By making consumers’ independence the lynchpin of their argument, they bolstered the consumers’ ability to

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claim the civic privilege of free choice in the marketplace. The public decision to eschew candidates that might indeed have provided consumers with guardians, along with Congress’s failure to pursue legislation that would ensure the same, seems to suggest that a majority of Americans agreed, despite the merchants’ anxieties about the kind of economy this might yield. In fact, by connecting the figure of the consumer to the retailer instead of the farmer, the auctioneers had effected a subtle yet profound shift. As champions of the yeoman-consumer, auctioneers had promoted the idea that the consumer’s rights were embedded in the labor he did as a citizen. By shifting the identification of the consumer toward the commercial retailer, the auctioneers were suggesting that citizens expected to be left free to take personal risks and seek self-serving opportunity. As free citizens, they imagined a set of economic rights that existed outside the parameters of a citizen’s production. Moreover, by the late 1820s, it was clear that these same Americans had rejected the idea that consuming citizens were obliged to help in the task of balancing the country’s economic interests and protecting the nation from the depredations of foreign commerce. It was one of many realizations that would help to wear down the republican vision of political economy in the antebellum era. After 1828, auctions ceased to be such a lightning rod in debates over American political economy. Larger proportions of American merchants sent agents abroad, soliciting trade directly and buying goods on their own accounts, thus providing English merchants and manufacturers with immediate funds. This deterred English sellers from shipping goods to America and waiting for the auctioneers to remit the funds back to them. In this way, American importers were finally able to cut the auctioneers out of their previous business. New credit arrangements reinforced this shift. Merchants used foreign partners to guarantee the European sellers their money directly, thus providing new security in the transatlantic marketplace for European merchants and manufacturers and boosting the proportion of trade that Europeans conducted with American merchants.73 American wholesalers also began to do a better job of courting the American retailers. They employed men who sought out the country traders when they arrived in the city. These agents would entertain and then retain the visitors’ business. They also began to offer their buyers a one-price system, which eliminated the guesswork that went along with buying at auction. For young men who came from increasingly far afield to buy their stock in the emporiums of New York and Philadelphia, these new

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techniques and strategies were attractive and over time helped redistribute their custom. In this way, American merchants were finally able to regain what they considered to be a good proportion of trade.74 By the 1830s auction sales were more often used by wholesale merchants to clear their warehouses of old stock, or, as was increasingly common, they were used as sites to sell secondhand goods. Vendues became the place to buy the goods of a bankrupt family or the unredeemed items from the local pawnshop. As a result the clientele of the auction house shifted away from the retailers and middle merchants and became largely composed of less wealthy individuals who hoped to furnish their homes cheaply and efficiently. The individual consumer took over the auction house at last. The reputation of auctions as sites for commerce also became less respectable, as mock auctions became more common in cities like New York and Philadelphia. These illegal sales were used to con shoppers into buying worthless, often stolen goods. The figure of Peter Funk, the shifty auctioneer, became the symbol of corrupt market practices. But instead of rallying critics to the defense of the consumer, he was used instead as a cautionary tale, with commentators demanding that consumers protect themselves from Funk’s swindles.75 As a result of this shift, the auctioneers’ claims that the consumer did not deserve special protection in the marketplace became part of the ethical lens that Americans began to apply to their understanding of the marketplace. In fact, after 1828, as the type of consumers to attend auctions became less wealthy, their consuming habits were subjected to greater scrutiny and censure in the pages of newspapers and magazines. This pattern of criticism was reminiscent of the elite condemnation that had been leveled at poorer consumers in the 1780s. It was a stark reminder that ideas about who could really claim the status of virtuous citizen-consumer were still defined by wealth and standing. Overall this cultural shift meant that consumers’ actions as individuals came under scrutiny in a way that had not been the case through the first two decades of the nineteenth century. By the end of the 1840s consumers were lampooned for their participation in auction sales and ridiculed rather than pitied when they were deceived by the wily auctioneer.76 This sea change in attitudes is apparent in a story on auction rooms that appeared in both the New-York Mirror and the Poughkeepsie Casket in 1834 and 1836 respectively. The piece took the reader on a tour of the auction room, describing the cast of characters that assembled there on the lookout for a bargain. If the auction house of the early 1820s had been a thunderous crush of commercial energy set in the precincts of Pearl Street, then the auction

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house of the mid-1830s assumed a very different location and character. Auction houses in New York now nestled along Broadway and Fifth Avenue, set apart from the old center of commercial activity, and the scene that the story revealed was a domestic one: the former home of a family that was now bankrupt. Instead of hardheaded merchants and jobbers, this auction room was filled with young couples trying to furnish their home with meager funds and miserly dealers looking to buy up cheap furniture to offload on a different family on another day.77 These kinds of sales, called forced vendues, were not new to the 1830s; on the contrary, they were familiar terrain on the American economic landscape. Indeed some auctioneers had always specialized in forced vendues, eschewing the frenzy of the dry goods trade and its speculation. In New York, one auctioneer, Solomon Seixas, focused only on selling off secondhand goods that he characterized as bankrupts’ sales, as well as taking advantage of his family’s pawnbroking store, which gave him an ample supply of unredeemed pawns to sell off at auction. What had changed by the 1830s were people’s attitudes toward these kinds of auctions.78 The story in the New-York Mirror characterized the auction sale as a violation of the domestic sphere. “What a different kind of company,” noted the article, “has often sat around these tables, enjoying the use of many of those articles which are now coolly looked on as matters of merchandise . . . all disgraced by the unrespective hands of brokers and bargain seekers.” The transformation of cherished family possessions that had materially constituted the private home into commodities shocked the sensibilities of readers who understood the conventions of sentimental literature. Not only did this story reveal the ways in which auctions sullied the sanctity of the home, but it also highlighted the ways in which the advantages of the sale came at the expense of another family. Although this had always sent an undercurrent of unease through the buying public, it had previously been related to their concern that they might also end in ruin by speculating at auctions. By the 1830s this discomfort was centered on the immorality of consumers who took advantage of another family’s adversity. The story described the different buyers who pushed each other out of the way in order to secure a bargain. Impoverished young women, forced to the auction in their attempt to furnish their first home, were pushed to one side by seasoned bargain hunters and tradesmen. These consumers, whose self-interest overrode any concern for the family who had lost their home, and whose greed caused them to deny an opportunity to those whose need outstripped their own, were severely chastised. Female consumers especially were targeted for their participation in these

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immoral sales. Women, imagined as patriot-consumers, had previously had their buying habits regulated by their husbands, their fathers, their communities, and even their government. Yet in the frenetic and unregulated space of the auction sale, these restrictions had less impact. The frenzy of the sale meant that there was no time to check the choices of those who thronged the stage in search of a bargain. The implications were unpleasant. In this microcosm of the marketplace, no one was there to regulate the consumer and ensure that everyone was treated fairly. Without government or regulation, the ethics of the marketplace were now in the hands of less reliable consumers, and they could not be counted on to behave fairly.79 With consumers shouldering new responsibility, older complaints about regulating auctions to prevent trickery and deception now became cautionary tales about the stupidity of consumers who did not know any better.80 The conviction that consumers also represented the agricultural interest also disappeared, to be replaced by a new conception of the consumer as status seeker. One of the more popular tropes of auction story by the 1850s was the tale of the young couple who attempted to elevate their social position by furnishing their home with luxurious goods bought cheaply at auction from the homes of bankrupt families (Figure 8). Youthful husbands and wives would hurry to these sales, attempting to salvage an elegant bureau or fine French clock from the wreckage. But bargains were not easy to acquire. All too often, the couple would find themselves in possession of shabby or useless articles, either tricked by the auctioneer or simply swept away with the frenzy of the sale. These stories, which ended with a chastened couple swearing that they would no longer attempt to cut corners in their efforts to purchase fine things, sent a clear message to potential consumers about the nature of class and status. Fine belongings could earn one social status and respect only if they were truly earned.81 Women in particular were condemned in periodical literature for their inability to virtuously acquire only what was necessary to create a flourishing household economy. Embedded in these cautionary tales was a critique of women as consumers. These choices did not create stable households, and therefore by extension these women had not fulfilled their civic duty. Such narratives indicated that women continued to occupy the status of patriotconsumers, their obligations to the nation’s economy far outweighing any rights they might claim to the freedom to buy as they liked. Cultural commentators who wrote these short satires aimed their indignation at overeager or grasping consumers, and their failure to regulate themselves. But these critiques also revealed a deeper anxiety over the ways in which

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Figure 8. “An Auction of Splendid Household Furniture, To Be Sold Without Reserve,” Harper’s Weekly, April 3, 1858. Illustration accompanying the article “How We Furnished Our House.” © Alexander Street Press.

auctions exposed the tenuous nature of social order within American communities. Not only did auctions make manifest the economic destruction of wealthy or respected families; they also provided the opportunity for those who were lower on the social scale to acquire the accoutrements that Americans used to read status and then confer good standing. Depictions of auction sales made these tensions clear. The crowded room, where bearded Jews could rub shoulders with respectable young men and women, signaled the complete disintegration of propriety and order. The possibility of acquiring a bargain affected all humanity in the same way. Jostling for the chance to bid and win was a great leveler, and in the confines of the auction room Americans faced the democratic tendencies of their marketplace. Despite the fact that many went to acquire status possessions, the auction room revealed a microcosm of an unregulated marketplace filled with competing consumers. The conflict over auctions left a lasting impression on American ideas about the consumer as a citizen. First, the debate had fundamentally changed how the commercial world imagined the consumer. At the start of the decade, merchants and auctioneers had both taken their cue from the political economists

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of the day. As a result they had barely conceived of consumers, concentrating instead on an economy oriented around three intersecting interests, commerce, agriculture, and manufacturing, where the needs and actions of the consumer hardly intruded. As the exigencies of the debate took hold, merchants and auctioneers chose to alter their impressions. They constructed a consumer who was a hardworking rural innocent, representative of an agricultural interest that deserved protection from the vicissitudes of the marketplace. It was a vision that served their interests as well. But by the mid-1820s, both sides had realized that this vision did not correspond to the reality that they faced, nor did it suit their agenda. Ultimately, the consumers’ actual desires and decisions forced both merchants and auctioneers to radically reformulate their understanding of the consumer. They were left with individuals whose rights were claimed not only as producers but as consumers too, and whose choices shaped not only their own lives but the market as well. As this new vision of consumers began to gain currency, new ideas about their rights and responsibilities took hold. The consumer’s right to purchase meant that each individual shopper could make whatever choices he or she wanted in the marketplace. Federal regulation could not interfere with consumers’ ability to pick out whatever they desired, even if that good was less well made or did not serve what cultural and political elites perceived to be in the interest of the nation more broadly defined. By removing the process of choosing and purchasing goods from the spectrum of duties that a citizen owed the nation in the name of the “public good,” the auctioneers contrived to remove consumption from the context of a republican political economy that balanced interest and need against one another to protect civic equality. However, the outcome of the auction conflicts also confirmed a different understanding of citizenship. Merchants had successfully suggested that the right to purchase came alongside new civic responsibilities. Drawing on the belief that citizens had economic duties and obligations, the merchants began to hint that citizens had a responsibility to make purchases that represented the nation well. A consumer’s choice reflected the nation’s broader values, and poor choices undermined the progress the young country was making toward civilization. “I have heard it remarked by foreigners,” fretted one American, “that in no country are so many flimsy goods sold as in this, although no country possesses such ample means.” Anxiety over this kind of embarrassing disparity could be allayed only if consumers, both men and women, took on the civic responsibility of making their choices in a manner that reflected well on the nation.82

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The anxiety that surrounded auction sales was in part a wider discomfort with the ways in which the marketplace was changing. As older networks of business dissolved and new money meant changing markers and categories of status, the ways in which Americans navigated the marketplace and used commercial culture to get ahead became increasingly worrisome.83 As highly finished manufactured consumer goods began to compete with property and labor as markers of status, the question of who could buy those goods, and indeed, how they got them, became more important and consequently more likely to generate anxiety. But what is clear from critiques of auction sales that date from the 1830s and 1840s is that the individual consumer had become the focus of popular criticism. In part, this was because the auction houses were now frequented by consumers acting on their own desires, rather than by others buying on their behalf. But it was also because Americans now understood consumers to have a new responsibility to themselves. But this new responsibility was quite distinct from the duties that had come before it. This was an obligation that was rooted in the politics of representation and appearance, rather than in the pursuit of a balanced political economy. By the 1830s writers for magazines and newspapers were making tentative efforts to graft this new obligation into older understandings of good economic citizenship. While consumers were free to choose in the auction house, they also had new responsibilities, to choose goods that reflected the cultural progress and economic power of their country. Acutely aware that the United States was under constant observation, some critics worried that consumers’ right to choose what they wanted might reflect poorly on American society. Thus the unexpected outcome of the auction conflicts was not only that they reshaped American understandings of political economy but that they opened up a new realm for Americans to practice good citizenship. The freedom to consume unfettered by regulation became a facet of the many privileges that American citizens could hope to enjoy. But at the same time, their choices became subject to a new cultural scrutiny. While Americans still measured a great deal of their civic worth through their labor, their consumption slowly became meaningful in new ways. But, as with all concepts of citizenship and inclusion, new hierarchies of belonging were created over the course of the nineteenth century. As the mercantile world lost faith in the idea that the government might regulate their citizens’ consumption, the arbiters of taste would come into their own, shaping new meanings of good citizenship out of the consumer choices that the people made.

Chapter 4

Of Tariffs and Taste

In early July 1824, five men gathered at the home of Philadelphia silversmith Thomas Fletcher, full of good intentions and importance.1 James Ronaldson, Adam Ramage, William H. Keating, and Samuel V. Merrick along with Fletcher himself were some of the founding members of the Franklin Institute, a society created to promote domestic manufacturing in the United States. Their task on that warm summer evening was an ambitious one. They had met to organize a grand exhibition of manufactured goods the likes of which Philadelphians had never before seen. But what would make their exhibition truly worthy of note was that every item on display would be made, manufactured, crafted, or created by American hands. Such a spectacle would be both a material monument to America’s growing productive capabilities and a reminder that, despite its progress, the United States had more to learn about the industrial arts if it wanted to compete on an international stage. The timing of their meeting was no coincidence. Only three months earlier, Congress had passed a tariff deliberately designed to protect America’s fledgling industries.2 For perhaps the first time since the end of the War of 1812, federal legislation was now in place that actively encouraged the efforts of America’s manufacturers and mechanics.3 But despite the tariff’s passage, the supporters of manufacturing believed there was still much to be done. Eager to do their part, the founders of the Franklin Institute began planning their exposition, one that they claimed would showcase all the “products of national industry” to Philadelphia and the nation at large.4 Their aim was to “afford producers and consumers of all manufactured articles an opportunity of becoming acquainted with each other, [w]ith a view to further develop the resources of the Union [and] increase the national independence.”5 The exhibition they proposed was thus part of a larger educational project, one that

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would help manufacturers improve their industrial skills but, more important, teach consumers what to buy for the sake of the nation. These promoters of manufacturing were proposing a new vision of America’s political economy. In deliberately attempting to introduce American consumers to American producers, the organizers of the institute planned to teach the public how to support economic nationalism through their individual purchasing habits. Reanimating and updating an old type of civic virtue, one that had surfaced during the Revolution, during the constitutional crisis, and again during the War of 1812, the founders of the Franklin Institute asked consumers to set aside their personal preferences and their individual taste in material goods and instead channel their consumer desires toward the service of a higher national cause: buying American-made goods even when they preferred items made abroad. Hoping to promote the cause of the tariff, these promoters of American manufactures imagined that their exhibitions would stand as testament to the possibility of a fundamental reimagining of the balance of interests in the United States. Their goal was to implement a new American economy, one that would privilege the work of America’s manufacturers.6 Beyond national self-sufficiency, the institute intended to foster an economy that privileged utility over ornament. To this end, the committee in charge of the exhibition sought a variety of utilitarian goods, offering premiums for iron, steel, copper, and brass manufactures, as well as chemical dyes, mechanical objects, woolens, cottons, and leather goods. This list conjured up a consumer whose preoccupations were pragmatic, industrial, and unrefined.7 But this consumer never really materialized. Instead, the committee’s carefully laid plans unraveled. In the few days before the exhibition opened, the goods that flowed into Carpenters’ Hall were not the goods they had been expecting. While some manufacturers had submitted “Blister Steel . . . Bar Iron . . . [and] Negro Cloth” as requested, other artisans had submitted carpets and clocks, pianos and tea trays. In a mad scramble, the organizers started to revise their plans, adjusting the prize-giving committees to match what they had. Judges were dropped and replaced; other committees disappeared altogether. After three hectic days the fair closed as planned, and the institute handed out its awards in a grand public ceremony. But the prizes they offered seemed to be glaringly inappropriate, as hardly any of the exhibition items matched the steel, iron, and broadcloths they had asked for. Of the thirty awards they finally handed out, only nine were on the original list published in the weeks before the exhibition.8 Manufacturers were not alone in influencing the course of the institute’s

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activities: the visitors themselves challenged the institute’s intentions. At the same exhibition, the men from the Committee on Premiums noticed that one object in the hall seemed to be attracting a great deal of attention. They soon discovered that it was a “beautiful maroon work box, manufactured by William Tait.” The committee quickly deemed the item as “deserving of much praise for the ingenuity and taste displayed in its design, and the neatness of its execution, rivaling the best specimens of imported articles of similar kind.”9 But clearly this interest came as something of a surprise. The managers had hoped that they would inspire interest from consumers to be sure, but not an interest in these luxury items. “Although your Committee do not conceive fancy articles of so much importance as objects of utility,” the judges noted, “they form an important branch of domestic industry and where they are distinguished for excellence of workmanship, they ought to receive the encouragement of the Institute. Your Committee therefore recommend that BRONZE MEDAL be awarded to Mr. Tait for his elegant work box.”10 Surprised as the judges were, they could not ignore the interest generated by Tait’s workbox, though they conveyed their belief that this was not truly a superior good by awarding only a bronze medal and not a silver one. The committee’s original list of premiums had encompassed iron, steel, cottons, woolens, leather, glass, and even straw bonnets.11 They had not anticipated promoting a fancy workbox. Yet this was apparently the kind of item that American consumers who visited the fair wanted to see. Beginning in the 1820s, proponents of manufacturing in the urban North planned to usher the United States into a new era of prosperity, calling for a protective tariff to help reorganize the nation’s political economy. But as industry diversified in the United States, so too did the organs of boosterism that supported the growth of the manufacturing sector. By the 1840s, a small number of manufacturers in the South also banded together to form an institute, not in support of the tariff but rather to promote regional manufacturing as a means of strengthening the plantation economy. Both groups however were pulled up short by the demands and desires of the public they planned to educate. In the exhibition halls of urban institutes across the nation, as at the Philadelphia fair of 1824, the advocates of tariff and the supporters of manufacturing were forced to confront a quite different public understanding of personal interest and civic obligation than the one that they had formulated. Among those glittering displays of newly made goods, in ways that were both messy and quite uncoordinated, visitors and exhibitors alike challenged one vision of political economy and proposed the outlines of another. Ultimately

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the public forced the advocates of economic nationalism to acknowledge that the imperatives of taste would overpower the injunctions of tariff. The founders of these manufacturing institutes all came of age in a moment when the concept of national wealth was being subjected to a new and intense scrutiny in the United States. In part this interest was generated by the obvious growth of a new economic sector in America, the industrial arts. The appearance of manufactories in the United States was a checkered business, but where these new workshops and factories appeared, their presence was unmistakable. The thundering noise of water-powered textile mills rang out along the banks of New England’s rivers and streams. Across the mid-Atlantic, the reek of tanneries stung the air; mines and metal works added the dust of rock and the tang of furnace to the atmosphere; and new dyeing works blotted old landscapes with the chemistry of making color. Even the fields of the South slowly transformed into something different under the mechanical genius of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin, although the laborers remained the same enslaved workforce that had always tilled that land. While some factories were entirely newfangled, other workshops were simply injected with new energy. And although old modes of production persisted, by 1815 Americans were turning to new enterprises with alacrity.12 Such industrial energy combined with a renewed interest in political economy in American society. Between the end of the wars in Europe and the start of America’s own Civil War, pamphlets and treatises, textbooks and tracts poured off the presses of American printers, all dedicated to the elucidation of how best to generate national wealth.13 One recurrent theme in all these tracts and treatises was the nature of consumption. The overlapping, often conflicting ways in which all writers of political economy made sense of the term consumption must have bewildered even the most educated of readers. Yet despite this, these same readers must have been aware that making sense of the role a consumer would play would be absolutely key if they were to successfully establish the means by which they could attain national wealth. If, as Adam Smith had argued, “consumption [was] the sole end and purpose of all production and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer,” then the interest of the consumer would have to take on a new importance for Americans hoping to secure their claims to national power and prosperity.14 The rising interest in laissez-faire liberalism that circulated through the Atlantic world in the early nineteenth century demanded that political economists

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engage in new ways with the figure of the consumer.15 In fact, free-trade doctrine was striking in that it positioned consumers as an abstract interest group, whose needs should be taken into consideration in the endless balancing act of political economy.16 In America, the needs of the merchant, the farmer, and increasingly the manufacturer had dominated earlier debates over how best to order the nation’s economy. But increasingly, the rising discourse of free trade injected the interests of the consumer into this debate, upsetting the already precarious balance of interests that existed within the economic landscape of the early nineteenth century. Because the aim of republican political economists was to maintain the balance of interests in order to ensure civic equality, the introduction of the consumer into this framework posed a problem for those who supported protectionist policies. Tariffs clearly penalized the consumer, sacrificing their interests on the altar of industrial development. The difficulties that protectionists had in balancing out the needs of the consumer with the demands of their doctrine was quite clear in the works of the American political economist Daniel Raymond. Raymond, a lawyer from Baltimore, was one of the few Americans who attempted to take on the established political economists of the day, arguing that European thinkers had misjudged the needs of an American population. Publishing his Thoughts on Political Economy in 1820, Raymond claimed that he was breaking loose from “the fetters of foreign . . . theories,” which he told readers were “altogether unsuited to our country.”17 Ultimately Raymond allied himself with Henry Clay and Mathew Carey, supporting the American System and the policies of the emerging Whig Party.18 More than any other political economist of his day, Raymond pointed to the importance of unfettered consumption, identifying the impulse to consume as the key to national wealth and economic growth. Raymond’s theories centered on the fallacy he saw at the heart of European political economy, which mistook individual wealth for national wealth. Instead of identifying national wealth with surplus capital, Raymond chose to identify national wealth as whatever enabled “a nation to provide its citizens with the necessaries and comforts of life.”19 This definition shifted the grounds on which individual production and consumption should be judged. As Raymond argued, his definition of national wealth placed consumption at the very center of the pursuit of national prosperity because it stimulated the need for labor, a demand that in turn provided industrious citizens with a comfortable livelihood. Instead of praising parsimony (something he mistakenly accused Adam Smith of doing), Raymond made a case for decadent spending.

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According to Raymond, it could “be very good economy for a man, who is fond of dress and display, to spend a large portion of his revenue in the gratification of his propensity because it is an innocent enjoyment and causes a consumption of the product of industry, and thereby encourages labour.”20 Raymond, like so many other political economists of the day, equated virtuous consumption with male choices in the marketplace. Echoing the dictates of Franklin’s Mandevillian musings from nearly fifty years earlier, Raymond found a place for consumption beyond necessity in the United States of America. Raymond stopped short of endorsing luxury itself, something he called an “effeminate indulgence of appetite,” associated with sensual gratification and the purchase of food and alcohol.21 The consumption of clothing, carriages, and household goods however were innocent pleasures providing the individual did not bankrupt himself in the pursuit of these items. Such purchases were productive. By the time Raymond proposed his theory, dictates limiting luxury consumption to the elite were crumbling across the board in American prescriptive literature and advice manuals. Indeed, his ideas gave these popular conceptions a formal foundation. His theory of political economy endorsed and explained the benefit to America’s political economy of a broader base of middle-class consumers enjoying the purchase of fancy clothing, elegant household furnishings, and the other comforts of life such as pianos or carriages. Raymond ran into difficulties, however, when he tried to combine his enthusiasm for unbounded consumption with his support of protective tariffs. Raymond’s backing for protectionist policies was rooted in his understanding that a nation’s wealth stemmed from labor not capital. “If a nation has not full employment in its ordinary vocations,” he noted, “is it not better to employ its unoccupied time in manufacturing cotton and woolen cloths than in doing nothing?”22 Yet he could not avoid the stark truth that a tariff, no matter how well intentioned, penalized the consumer. His only recourse in such debate was to claim that individual costs were offset by the greater benefit of the nation. Thus he wrote, “suppose a nation has so much unemployed time as is necessary to manufacture . . . goods, as would cost a million dollars. . . . It matters not,” he argued “at what prices these goods come to the consumers, whether double, triple or quadruple the price. . . . The saving to the nation will be a million of dollars.”23 There could be no mistaking Raymond’s view that the needs of the nation must outweigh those of the individual citizen-consumer. “Upon all subjects

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relating to political economy, and especially upon the subject of protecting duties it is ever to be remembered that the public interests are paramount to individual interest—that a private mischief or inconvenience must be endured for the public good,” he wrote. He continued using the strongest imagery that came to mind. “In military tactics, it is a fundamental principle, that the army is ONE, and the general the head; no soldier is permitted to have a right, or an interest, opposed to the general good of the army. So in political economy, it should be a fundamental principle, that a nation is ONE, and the legislature the head; no citizen should be permitted to have a right or an interest, opposed to the general goods of the nation.”24 Raymond’s defense of the tariff was thus rooted in more than simple economics; instead he espoused a theory of civic belonging in which a citizen’s right to property and prosperity would always come second to the obligations, military, economic, or otherwise, that an individual owed to the nation. It was a tightrope walk between far older ideas about patriotic consumption and the newly established ideas regarding the rights of the citizen-consumer. Addressing the issue of civil rights head on, Raymond argued: “People . . . seem to suppose, that the right of property is absolute in the individual, and that every one has a right to sell to whom he pleases and to buy of whom he pleases; and that any interference by the government, in restraining the exercise of this right, is arbitrary and tyrannical. . . . This is a manifest error. Individual right to property is never absolute, but always relative and conditional. . . . If this were not so, the social compact would not be sustained.”25 Raymond’s work thus offered protectionists a political philosophy of citizenship that legitimated the tariff. Moreover, the tone and formulation of this philosophy sanctioned the idea that consumers, despite their importance to the economy, should be prepared to be directed in their consuming endeavors. Individuals may be able to discern their own needs and requirements. But like the lowly foot soldier that could not see the whole battlefield, they should expect, even welcome, the directions of a general or a government. Raymond’s formulations encouraged the idea that consumers required guidance, education, and advice so as to be able to act in the best interests of the nation. Raymond’s formulation arrived at the right moment for the supporters of tariffs. In 1820, congressional protectionists led by Representative Henry Baldwin from Pennsylvania were preparing to wage a battle to pass the first overtly protectionist tariff that Americans had ever seen. Backing them were men who had spent the last five years attempting to marshal public favor and political support for the promotion of manufacturing. Raymond was thus

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addressing a growing group of manufacturers, entrepreneurs, mechanics, and intellectuals who were looking to find a way to translate his theories on consumption, protection, and citizenship into direct political action. Somewhat removed from the rarefied air of philosophical debate that characterized Daniel Raymond’s world, the practical promoters of American manufacturing such as the founders of the Franklin Institute faced a different problem when it came to championing the interests of mechanics, craftsmen, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. In the absence of much-needed support from the nation’s politicians, their battle was to convince the American public that manufacturing would not corrupt the yeoman’s Republic.26 That American manufacturers did not receive more political support, despite the success they had enjoyed during the War of 1812, demonstrated that many Americans still subscribed to this Jeffersonian vision of an agrarian republic and regarded manufacturing as a corrupting influence. Even the advocates of factory labor believed that an economy based on manufacturing had the capacity to cause societal sickness.27 Despite their own interests, even America’s most sympathetic supporters of manufacturing worried about the full-scale importation of mechanized industry into their virtuous republic. It was not until the bubble of postwar economic prosperity burst in 1819 that some Americans began to look seriously at protectionist policy as a means of transforming the American economy into something more productive and less unpredictable.28 As winter thawed to spring that year, a panic hit the nation. With credit contracting and prices for agricultural staples plummeting, the Panic of 1819 caused many to question whether the fantasy of free trade was in fact a malevolent chimera. Supporters of manufacturers argued that by allowing the agents of commerce to act as they pleased, America’s political economy had become perverted, an unnatural and monstrous version of what it should and could have been. In a memorial sent to Congress in November 1819, the Convention of the Friends of National Industry moaned that “the peace of Europe” had brought with it terrible consequences. “Infant manufactures were blighted in the bud, the spirit of speculation spread through [the] country, seducing her votaries from the paths of quiet and laborious industry by promises of sudden wealth.”29 The predominant metaphors of blasted nature and corrupted spirit were matched by imagery that compared America to a sickening body. Turning the tables on those who had accused manufacturing of spreading the contagion of vice, advocates of industry began to charge unchecked commerce of the same pernicious effects. Thus, one New York author, writing under the pen name of “Seventy-Six,” likened the massive

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injection of bank notes into the American economy to a “consuming disease.”30 Such conceptions of the economy prompted some Americans to look for a cure for their ailing nation, hoping to restore the country to a state of natural and harmonious balance. The solution they proposed was protectionism. Their hope was not only that the tariff would regulate the great flood of imports and influx of foreign specie into the nation but also would help to restore virtue to the struggling Republic. Mesmerized by the vision of an internal market with strong barriers, the protectionists began to create a coherent vision of a new nationalist political economy, which placed the interests of citizens before the needs of foreign merchants and the demands of international trade. For the men in the vanguard of protectionism, the fight for higher duties was a war for the soul of the nation. Like Daniel Raymond, when they called on citizens to support the tariff, they believed they were asking them to perform a civic duty. Such language makes it clear that most protectionists did not see their struggle as simply one of self-interest. The discourse that they used connected the work of the manufacturer to the economic independence of the nation. Indeed, as the incubus of economic depression settled on the land, these men argued that America needed to defend itself from the ongoing commercial war that Britain was waging against America’s economy. They imagined the institution of a protective tariff as a “second Declaration of Independence,” one that would save the United States from “degradation and dependence.”31 Theirs was an old discourse, based on mercantilist understandings of economy that demanded a strict adherence to a balance of trade and a keen appreciation for the protection of market share. But they were also adapting a Revolutionary rhetoric that associated freedom from imports with political independence and moral virtue. Protectionists saw imported goods as the modern mind might see a disease vector, bringing with them feverish desires that upset the balance of the economy and the order of the body politic. Quarantined from the corrupting influence of frivolous imports, Americans could maintain their civic virtue. Harking back to the Republican policies of the 1810s, the new generation of protectionists issued a call for the government to impose that constraint permanently from above. Tariff would be the tool whereby protectionists would forcibly restore the economic harmony of the Union. The citizen’s duty was to comply. It was in this context that new political associations flourished. In June 1820, after Baldwin’s first attempt to shepherd the tariff through Congress failed, committed protectionists established the National Institution for the

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Promotion of Industry in New York. The institution was intended to be a permanent body of men, dedicated to cultivating nationwide support for the tariff. Longtime champion of manufactures Mathew Carey was elected vice president. He quickly set up a biweekly newspaper, the Patron of Industry, that he hoped would provide a means of unifying the many disparate groups across the country that supported tariff legislation. These same men also began to organize conventions, meetings where like-minded people could gather to trade opinions and galvanize political support.32 Manufacturers also turned to one another for practical advice and professional support. Two years after the National Institution for the Promotion of Industry was founded, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York opened its doors, its members having secured a dedicated building on Chambers Street.33 This group was less concerned with political action and more concerned with building up the skills and abilities of its members. Part school and part mutual association, the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen was one of a range of organizations designed to provide support and a safety net to members of an associated trade or profession. All these kinds of associations enabled disparate mechanics, manufacturers, and craftsmen to cultivate a collective identity, one that could easily be translated into political interest. Thus in 1824, when a new debate over tariffs reached the halls of Congress, protectionists had both a doctrine of political economy that pointed to the importance of educating and regulating the consumer, and a political manifesto that called for the implementation of a protective tariff that would encourage Americans to buy domestically made products. What they did not have was an organization that could translate these ideas into the material realities of the marketplace. In the 1820s, two separate but similar organizations seized the task of translating the philosophy of protection into a material reality. The first to embark on this work was the Franklin Institute, founded by the Philadelphia men who had met at Thomas Fletcher’s home in July 1824. The second organization was the American Institute, which was established in New York four years later, in 1828. These two institutes had much in common with their associational antecedents. Their members supported the principle of protectionist tariffs and worked to secure support for such a policy. Their organizers also set themselves the task of providing educational resources for mechanics and manufacturers, establishing libraries full of pamphlets, treatises, and model objects for study.34 But the founders of both institutes could see a gap in the market; thus

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far no organization had thought to tackle the education and encouragement of the American consumer. Those founders were men who were ambitious for themselves and their nation. Manufacturers, mechanics, and artisans who had come of age during the War of 1812, they were individuals who had seen possibilities in the protectionism imposed by the Republicans during the conflict, and they now sought to take those opportunities further. Focused as they were on education, they also saw the speed with which America’s manufacturers were implementing new technological advancements. Consumers could be forgiven, they thought, for not buying American because they did not even know that the product they sought existed in American-made form.35 Perhaps it was because of this understanding that the founders chose spectacle as their means of persuasion. No previous society had thought it possible to visually demonstrate the vitality and importance of American production through an exhibition, a spectacular, tactile marketplace, that not only rewarded the best producers for their innovation and skill, but physically embodied America’s “enlightened national policy and the patriotic individual spirit” of its citizens.36 Unsurprisingly, one of the first members of the Franklin Institute was the inexhaustible Mathew Carey. He assumed the position of joint vice president with a town clockmaker named Isaiah Lukens in 1824, remaining involved in the institute at least through its first year.37 Less well-known to the protectionist lobby was the president of the Franklin Institute in that first year, James Ronaldson, who got his start in life in the metal-working business. He and his partner, Abraham Binny, owned a Philadelphia type foundry and supplied the type used to print newssheets to some of Philadelphia’s leading newspapermen, including William Duane and John Poulson. Ronaldson and Binny had also jointly owned a pottery manufacturing company, Columbian Pottery, between 1808 and 1814, a time when restrictions on British imports made it easier to sell American-made pots and earthenware. Acquainted with some of the leading luminaries of the protectionist movement, including Mathew Carey and Hezekiah Niles, editor of the influential protectionist periodical Niles’ Weekly Register, Ronaldson had plenty of reasons to become interested in manufacturing societies. Small wonder, then, that he was a supporter of the Franklin Institute’s goals.38 Ronaldson also headed up the committee who arranged the first exhibition for the Franklin Institute. The biographies of these committeemen reveal a roster of entrepreneurial urban mechanics.39 The first man on the list of members was Samuel V. Merrick, who had become a mechanic by accident.

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Born in Hallowell, Maine, into a family of merchants, he had moved to Philadelphia in 1816 to work for his wine-merchant uncle Samuel Vaughan. During Merrick’s apprenticeship, his uncle had acquired a workshop for making steam fire engines and, utterly uninterested, had passed the running of it over to Merrick. Having made a quick success of it, Merrick by 1836 had established the Southwark Foundry at Fourth and Washington. This foundry flourished, making fire engines, municipal gas equipment, and heavy machinery. By the end of his life, Merrick was the first president of the Pennsylvania Railroad.40 The second member of the committee, Adam Ramage, was an old friend of Ronaldson’s. Ramage, a printer’s joiner and cabinetmaker, had made rulers and composing sticks for Ronaldson’s foundry, as well as a coffin for Abraham Binny’s first wife, Elizabeth.41 Ramage was well known in Philadelphia for his skills as a carpenter and would later have a printing press named after a model he created. Thomas Fletcher, the third member of the committee, was also a successful craftsman. A silversmith, who during the War of 1812 had made pieces of commemorative silver plate to celebrate American naval victories, he was a well-established business owner by 1824.42 The only man on the initial committee who did not fit the category of successful urban mechanic was the final member of the committee, William H. Keating. Keating was a University of Pennsylvania alumnus, who had graduated in 1816 and returned in 1822 to join the faculty of the Chemistry and Mineralogy Department. Keating certainly had the most experience in participating in urban educational institutes. He was an active member of both the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the American Philosophical Society.43 The makeup of this small group of organizers demonstrates the close professional, personal, and political ties that these men were forming as they embarked on their effort to promote American manufacturing. United by their aspirations, both economic and ideological, they provided the Franklin Institute with a solid core around which they built a successful and flourishing institution. The officers of the Franklin Institute hoped to attract members like the founders themselves: artisans, mechanics, and professionals. By the 1820s this was necessarily a broad category. As the modes of production began to change in America and craftsmen and artisans were joined by the owners of larger workshops and factories that produced textiles, pottery, and glass, the men of the institute believed they had to seek a wide range of male producers to reflect that shift.44 Significantly the member roles did not include wage laborers,

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either men or women. Nor was it intended to do so. The institute’s hope was to foster a gentleman-mechanic, a complementary figure to Jefferson’s independent yeoman farmer. To this end annual membership fees for the Franklin Institute were three dollars, but a sum of twenty-five dollars could make one a member for life.45 Like the Franklin Institute, the American Institute’s initial leadership was also made up of ambitious entrepreneurs whose personal experiences provided them with added incentive to work for the promotion of manufacturing. Unlike his counterparts in Philadelphia, however, Peter H. Schenck, the first vice president of the New York organization, had started life as a grocer and merchant. Apprenticed to his father’s friend and later a junior in his father’s store, Schenck’s world was bounded by the maze of streets between the Coenties slip and Pearl Street. Perhaps more than any young man in the mercantile trade, Schenck had an insider’s view of how imposts and duties really worked on the waterfront. His father became the surveyor of the port of New York in 1806, a post that had him collaborating with the collector, David Gelston.46 Watching his father and his friend struggle to implement the byzantine web of trade restrictions imposed on the port by Jefferson’s administration and resisted by its merchants left an impression on the young Schenck. Although he never abandoned the mercantile world, his commercial interests shifted toward manufacturing as the war with Britain approached. In 1811, along with his father and other relatives, he founded the Matteawan Company, a cottonmanufacturing company, located in Fishkill, New York.47 Like others of his generation, Schenck thought to take advantage of the trade restrictions in place that gave a boost to domestic manufacturing. The company began with a capital worth $100,000, but its fortunes were soon in jeopardy. By 1813, with the port of New York blockaded by the British, raw cotton was in short supply. Determined not to be beaten by the enemy, Schenck arranged for raw cotton to be carted nine hundred miles from Charleston all the way to Fishkill Landing.48 Such a bold move paid off. The company flourished, tripling its initial capital stock by April 1833.49 Schenck’s understanding of political economy was thus formed by these early experiences. Familiar with how a tariff might work on the ground, convinced of the necessity of making his nation more self-sufficient by his wartime experience, and making money from manufacturing textiles, Schenck’s worldview matched the institute’s mission precisely. Longtime corresponding secretary Thaddeus B. Wakeman was also a man who had benefited from the trade restrictions that were imposed by the War

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of 1812. On June 19, 1812, only one day after Madison declared war on the British, Wakeman, along with seven other men, successfully incorporated a cotton and woolen factory in the town of Onondaga.50 Despite the uncertainties of war, Wakeman’s venture flourished. By 1824, as Congress began to consider a new protective tariff for woolens, Wakeman’s company was still going strong.51 But given that Wakeman’s initial work for the institute was to write a report on the benefits of protecting cotton goods as well as the need for regulating auctions and imposing cash duties, it seems possible that the entrepreneur had felt the benefit of the protections imposed by the war.52 As the American Institute grew, its leadership took on a more pronounced political character. In 1831 James Tallmadge was appointed the president of the institute.53 Tallmadge had been educated at Brown University and worked as lawyer for Governor Clinton of New York. Having served in the War of 1812, he was a member of Congress until 1819, during which time he authored the controversial Tallmadge Amendment, which prohibited the further admittance of slaves into Missouri. Like many protectionists, Tallmadge interpreted the expansion of slave territory as a potential threat to the balance of interests in the nation. It was a position that foreshadowed the trouble that would brew between protariff and antitariff factions at the federal level. Tallmadge went on to serve as a delegate to the state constitutional conventions in 1821 and 1846, was a member of the state assembly, and finally was lieutenant governor of New York between 1824 and 1826. By the time he joined the board of the American Institute in 1828, his political support of tariff and the American System was well established, and as a former politician he believed in effecting change through government institutions.54 While the officers of the Franklin Institute concentrated on education in its early years, the American Institute was more politically oriented from the start. One of Peter Schenck’s first acts as vice president of the American Institute was to testify before Congress on the subject of how the tariff might affect the American economy.55 Appearing before the Committee of Manufactures in January 1828, Schenck assured that body of men not only that the quality of the broadcloths he manufactured was improving thanks to “the Dressing Machine and the Broad Power Loom of American Invention” but that the price of this fabric was going down. Cloth that had cost the consumer $2.50 per yard in the summer of 1825 could now be had for $1.50.56 Schenck’s testimony was intended to reassure Congress that American manufacturing not only was improving in terms of quality but was also an affordable enterprise. The issue of price was a crucial one for the promoters of tariff. Indeed,

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while most supporters of tariff could see that the decisions a consumer made were a key part of sustaining their vision of economic nationalism, they wrestled with the fact that most consumers, if left to pursue their own interests, would not favor a protectionist policy. This was not simply a question of whether consumers knew what was available to purchase, as the Franklin Institute had first imagined. It was also a problem of economic interest. According to the popular wisdom of the day, tariffs made consumer goods more expensive. By eradicating the market competition that kept prices low, protectionist policy was conventionally understood to be a mechanism that made consumers pay more. Thus, as Daniel Raymond had realized early on, finding the ideological retort to the charge that tariffs penalized consumers was a conundrum that few could answer. The problems that this posed for individual lobbyists are clear when looking at the language they used to make their case. Between 1824, when the Franklin Institute was founded, and 1828, when the American Institute opened its doors, Congress received a flood of petitions and memorials calling for greater protection. Focused on the need for the increased protection of wool, they were predominantly couched in language that built on the rhetoric of economic nationalism. Making their case based on calls for “national independence,” the sheep farmers and manufacturers of woolen cloths argued that failing to protect national industry was tantamount to self-destruction.57 This fact, petitioners thought, had already been proven true during the War of 1812. “So dependent were we on foreign nations for almost every manufactured article of comfort and convenience,” argued the wool growers and manufacturers of Woodstock, Vermont, in 1826, “that at the very time when Great Britain was waging a most violent war upon our country we were furnishing her with the sinews for its support, by our great consumption of her highwrought fabricks.”58 This was a backward-looking rhetorical strategy that echoed the language used by patriots during the Revolution and Republicans in the 1810s. However, these strategies had not always had great success, in large part owing to the actions of consumers. Yet when these petitions did turn to the consumer, they did not and perhaps could not acknowledge the power of consumer desire. Instead they addressed consumers who ought to be grateful that the tariff had regulated manufacturing and protected them from cheap, poor-quality goods. Wool manufacturers from Providence thus argued in 1826 that “as the foreign fabrics gradually disappeared those of domestic production took their place, proving generally of a better quality than the cloths they have supplanted[,]

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while they have been sold at half their former price.” Going on to elaborate on the benefits of the tariff, wool manufacturers Sampson Almy and Zachariah Allen concluded, “The American people, instead of being taxed as was at the time generally supposed, for supporting the profits of manufacturing have been immediate gainers to an incalculable amount from the liberal policy pursued by the government.”59 The insistence on higher quality was what enabled the protectionists to claim that consumers should pay slightly higher prices. Embedded in this language were two assumptions. First was the idea that as producers, these woolen manufacturers knew what was best for the consumer. “As consumers it is more important to the people that prices of cloths should be in a good measure steady and uniform, than they should be sunk to the lowest rates,” wrote Samuel Wills on behalf of Massachusetts’s wool manufacturers. This patronizing tone echoed the assumption that merchants had made when attempting to protect consumers from the shoddy goods made specifically for auction sales. The idea that the consumer simply required further education to be able to see the benefits of protection radiated through protariff activism, as much a part of the two institutes’ efforts as the individual petitioners. The second assumption built off the first. Once educated as to the benefits of protectionism, consumers would see that having manufacturing on their doorsteps would provide them with a home market, where they could sell their surplus agricultural produce. Imagining the consumer as part of the closed circle of economic nationalism, protectionists tried to align the interests of America’s farmers to their cause.60 What is evident from the language that these petitioners used was the way in which they struggled to bring the language of individual consumer interest together with civic obligation. Many protectionists, particularly those at the Franklin and later the American Institute, saw their efforts to implement a tariff as part of a greater struggle to empower the nation. Deeply invested in the vision of an American republic that was growing in economic strength and independent of the corrupting forces of Europe, protectionists saw the support of the tariff, whether as a producer or a consumer, as a civic duty. Yet they could see that individuals would have to sacrifice their interest as consumers in order to perform this obligation. It was perhaps because they could see no way to get around this issue that both institutes made the producer their priority throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Such a decision could not be taken lightly. By the winter of 1827, the debate over tariff had escalated, and politicians in Washington, D.C., were preparing to join battle over the rights and wrongs of protectionist policy in America. It would be an especially

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bitter battle. Over the course of the 1820s, southern free traders had become increasingly convinced that the attempts to implement a higher tariff were the result of a direct attack by northern abolitionists and manufacturers on the interests of slave owners.61 As sectional tensions recast the debate over tariff as a fight over the regional balance of the political economy, antagonism mounted. The efforts of the Franklin Institute and organizations like them had never been more important. As the tariff took over political debate in the waning months of 1827, the Franklin Institute sought to lead the discussion away from the divisive problem of sectional interests. Deeply afraid that widespread support for free trade in the South would undermine political support for the tariff in Congress, the institute men tried to make the case that manufacturing could sustain the bonds of union. Manufacturing could, they argued, benefit all parts of the Union equally. While the members of the Franklin Institute were not always entirely comfortable with this approach, they could see its necessity.62 Thus in 1827, the Franklin Institute published an address delivered by Thomas P. Jones, an advocate of using slaves to operate cotton manufactories in the South. Jones’s argument was deeply rooted in the racist assumptions of the day. “In all manufactories,” he pointed out, “we meet the veriest dolts, who become as it were, a part of the operative machinery; performing from habit, the business allotted to them. . . . Strange as it may appear . . . it is demonstrably true, that slaves are the most profitable of all operatives in the business of manufacturing coarse fabrics.”63 Thus, Jones went on to argue, slavery did not preclude the South from benefiting from the blessing of manufacturing. They too could enjoy the boons of protection. Not only would it augment their regional economies, but it would also help them find employment for the poorest sector of their society—white widows and their impoverished children. Jones’s address to the members of the Franklin Institute was thus a way to promote the great benefits of tariff for the entire Union. Not all members of the institutes were so willing to afford southern free traders such a welcome. James Tallmadge, speaking as president of the American Institute in 1831, argued that protecting manufactures was the only way to sustain the experiment in American democracy and that any other way left the United States vulnerable to the disintegration of the Republic. Promoting the protected American industries as sites where men could labor for a fair wage, Tallmadge attempted to frame the opponents of protection as the opponents of the hardworking independent American man. In a portion of his speech designed to shock, Tallmadge outlined the horrific conditions for

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workers in Europe. Describing desperate uprisings and brutal suppressions in English mill towns, the depraved domestic lives of mill workers in Birmingham and Manchester, and the starving Irish families who were forced by poor wages to live off seaweed and cattle blood, he argued that to buy European goods was in effect an endorsement of this atrocious system of production. His deepest scorn was reserved for the men “blessed with an American birth, who can clamor against his own government, about ‘Free Trade,’ and by withholding just encouragement and protection to domestic industry reduce the freemen of this country, to an unequal competition with the mendicant mobs of Europe suffering without liberty and without bread.”64 Tallmadge reasoned that in buying foreign goods and failing to demand protection for American manufacturers, Americans robbed their fellow citizens of a living. Such unpatriotic acts undermined the freedom of their fellow citizens and shattered the promise of equality on which America rested. Tallmadge made his address to the institute in 1831, only a month after George McDuffie had electrified southern audiences by calling for secession and John C. Calhoun had finally admitted authorship of the incendiary “South Carolina Exposition” that had called for the states’ right to nullify legislation like the 1828 “Tariff of Abominations.” Thus Tallmadge, who appeared to address his concerns to the widest possible audience, was in fact aiming them directly at free traders, the politicians and merchants who placed pressure on President Jackson to abolish America’s protective tariff. For both the institutes, but for the American Institute in particular, the wider ideology of promoting domestic manufacturing as a national enterprise underlined a very practical political campaign to ensure that protectionism remained a central plank of American economic policy.65 This political lobbying reveals an importance facet of the institutes’ approach to political economy in the early 1830s. Rather than focus their efforts on a broadly conceived consumer (who, after all, Tallmadge could have held responsible for purchasing European goods), each institute chose instead to focus on putting pressure on the federal legislature, believing that it was the American government that was responsible for ensuring that the economy reflected the values of the American polity.66 It was the government’s responsibility to preserve both the Union and the Republic. And although Jackson’s administration, under the guiding hand of John Quincy Adams, did revise the tariff schedule into a compromise in 1832, protectionists felt they won the battle of 1828. Although President Jackson continued to cut tariffs throughout the 1830s, the 1840s marked the start of over a decade’s worth of a protected economy.

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* * * The focus on the producer, the nurturing of American manufacturing, and the effort to push the federal government to constantly alter the tariff to further protect American industry was the heart of the Franklin and American Institutes’ goals throughout the 1820s and early 1830s. While the institute men acknowledged that the consumer had a part to play, this was not their first interest. Caught up in the urgent exigencies of the battle for tariff, neither institute gave much thought to cultivating the consumer, a figure whom they imagined as both impressionable and obedient. Indeed, both organizations adopted the attitude that the consumer was an individual who required protection. Citizens, they pointed out, required shielding from the unregulated marketplace, which the institutes characterized as both unnatural and destructive, a characterization that reflected their wish to have the government step in and regulate the marketplace. Moreover, the men of the institutes argued, citizens also required protection from themselves.67 But this impression of the consumer could not last. Beginning in the 1830s, several factors combined to alter the way in which the organizers of the annual exhibitions thought about the consumer and the role they ought to play in promoting the nation’s wealth. The first was that the supporters of free trade chose to focus on the rights of the consumer in their quest to overturn the tariff legislation, a rhetorical posture that painted protectionism as inimical to Americans’ rights to buy the goods they needed to live. The institutes responded by trying to court the interest of the consumer in their speeches and reports. The second was that the exhibitors at the fairs and the visitors themselves seemed unwilling to follow the institutes’ lead. Instead of using the exhibitions to improve the nation’s industrial self-sufficiency, the visitors to the fair demonstrated that their interest was in the finer things in life. If those things could not be had in America, then these consumers would look abroad, regardless of patriotism or price. As a result, the organizers of the two northern institutes soon learned to embrace consumers and their desire for luxury goods and attempted to turn it to their advantage. In an effort to make the vision that Daniel Raymond had offered up in 1820 a reality, they tried to combine the need for tariffs with the pursuit of taste by creating a particular model of citizen-consumer. Such efforts cannot have been easy. As the Nullification Crisis intensified in the early 1830s, the advocates of free trade published their support for their policies with new vigor and creativity. They took up the cause of the consumer. Condy Raguet, the president of the Chamber of Commerce in Phila-

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delphia and a merchant of some standing, took the lead. Through his newspaper, the Banner of the Constitution, Raguet made the most eloquent case for the support of free trade, experimenting with how much political leverage he could gain from championing the consumer.68 Raguet argued that it was southern farmers whose consumption was most heavily burdened, likening the tariff of 1828 to highway robbery. Planters were, he said, “plundered every time they are returning from market, which is worse than is found even in despotic Turkey. When they reach home and examine their plundered wagons they find the blankets, woollens, flannels, stockings etc, which they had received in exchange for the produce of their own farms, one half gone.”69 This specific focus on the plight of the southern farmer demonstrated that the older politics of economic interest that had characterized the Jeffersonian rhetoric of the early Republic were starting to succumb to the newer politics of sectionalism. Southern consumers, Raguet explained, unfairly shouldered all the burdens of the protective tariff and received none of the benefits. But within the same newspaper and indeed beyond its pages, others attempted to move free trade beyond the politics of section, arguing that all Americans were consumers.70 Indeed, when Senator Hayne of South Carolina objected to the tariff in 1832 on the grounds that imposing duties on the necessaries of life drew dividends from “the pockets of the people,” he too was trying to make the case that all Americans were consumers in their own way.71 This rhetoric was problematic for protectionists in the early 1830s. Thus as the immediate furor surrounding the Tariff of Abominations died down, protectionists chose to deal with such jibes by focusing more closely on the ways in which their exhibitions could interest and educate consumers. Almost at once they ran into difficulties. In the first instance, the organizers were confronted with the problem that exhibitors were sending in items that did not mesh with the institutes’ vision of the American marketplace. In 1830, the Franklin Institute committee emphasized, “the Institute is aware that in a country like ours, the demand for high priced articles must always be limited and the intelligent manufacturer will generally look to a coarser article for a more safe and extensive market.”72 Yet “coarse goods” were not what the participants in the annual exhibitions seemed to have in mind. The following year, the organizers of the Franklin Institute’s annual exhibition complained that the specimens being submitted for judging were being spoiled by “the injudicious introduction of heavy mouldings and carvings, incongruous forms and unharmonious colours.” In pompous tones, the authors of the

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committee report went on to insist that “experience prove[d] that a discerning public . . . [preferred] those productions that combine simplicity and elegance,” and while they did not want to discourage mechanics from displaying the full gamut of their skills, it was “more important, that those [goods] which are of universal consumption and which are manufactured in large quantities should also appear and that that these should be of the kind and quality which are ordinarily made.”73 Unhappily for the Franklin Institute, however, their exhibitors appeared to ignore them. In 1832, they made the same plea for elegant, simple-looking goods that could be distributed for “universal consumption,” suggesting that the request from the year before had been largely ignored.74 The call for unadorned goods fit for universal consumption suggests that the protectionists’ philosophy of consumption was caught between the old and the new. On the one hand, the demand for the simple and unadorned reflected an older philosophy that designated extravagance and expense as something that ought to be enjoyed exclusively by an elite. The objects of universal consumption were to be simple, plain, and useful, reflecting the dichotomous conceptualization of consumers as either elite or poor that had marked the thinking of the politicians of the 1780s. The universal consumer, it seemed, should aspire to the necessary and not the luxurious. On the other hand, the call for goods that could be universally enjoyed suggested a shift toward the idea that widespread consumer demand was a spur to industry. In this formulation, a greater number of consumers was an advantage, just as Daniel Raymond had articulated ten years earlier. Indeed, it was surely not coincidental that when the great champion of tariffs Congressman Henry Baldwin addressed the visitors to the American Institute exhibition in 1834, he echoed Raymond’s formulation of how a nation could generate wealth. Looking out over the mosaic of domestic manufacturing that the institute had assembled, Baldwin praised “the capacity of the country to fabricate all the articles of necessity and comfort requisite to the supply of wants of the people.”75 But whereas Raymond had labeled luxury the “effeminate indulgence of appetite,” the spokesmen of the institute were starting to embrace a new conceptualization of luxury. Baldwin himself noted the presence of “many of the enjoyments of luxury” at the exhibition in 1834, and the following year Charles Jared Ingersoll praised the efforts of mechanics who were helping to implement the age of luxury in America by cultivating the “elegant, ornamental and polite arts.”76 In 1837, speaking at the American Institute’s annual fair,

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Professor C. Mason announced that “the thrifty farmer can well afford the luxury of seeing his wife and daughter in their improved condition . . . if his household affairs are prudently managed.”77 This improved condition was access to domestic comforts, such as carpets, pianos, and porcelain tableware. These goods, Mason said, promoted “intellectual culture and refin[ed] the manners.” Because managing a household was notably a woman’s task, this recasting of luxury goods also served to alter women’s relationship to consumption. In this new context, choosing new goods and spending on luxuries for the benefit of the domestic sphere was understood as a positive civic good. Not only did it help to cultivate civilized citizens—male and female—it also stimulated the nation’s economy on a broad scale. This shift culminated in the late 1840s. By this point the institutes had completely reversed their earlier aversion to luxury to the point where they could actually frame it as a necessity in a republican nation. As Joseph Chandler said to the crowds gathered at the seventeenth Franklin Institute exhibition in 1847, “ those, then, who in this country are . . . transfusing into the lower classes . . . the wants of refinement are ministering to the diffusion and maintenance of true republicanism.”78 A universal desire for refined consumer goods, accompanied by open access to them within the marketplace, argued Chandler, leveled out society, thus instituting republican relations between the people. Because it was the people that constituted the republican character of the government, this was the ideal situation. By the late 1840s, the organizers of the fair were promoting a vision of manufacturing that provided refined, elegant American-made goods to the entire population. This consumer-oriented approach to creating a republican society elevated the importance of women’s choices in the marketplace. Although their decisions were still not imagined as rights, in the eyes of men like Chandler, their ability to make free choices as consumers had become more valuable to the nation, and thus they were entitled to new respect. Thus women who had both means and taste found that their place in the hierarchy of citizenship shifted subtly. Even though they remained patriot-consumers, they were important as decision makers in their own right. Although the shift toward displaying luxury goods for universal consumption was a reformulation of the institutes’ original conceptualization of how to combine consumption with protectionism, it was apparently a popular one. In both cities the exhibitions went from strength to strength. Organizers of the New York exhibition estimated that sixty thousand people had gained admission during the eight days of the 1835 fair, and an estimated

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245,000 people had attended the 1843 exhibition.79 And the Franklin Institute also enjoyed a meteoric career. In 1852, at the height of the institute’s success, the prize committee judged the work of twelve hundred depositors who had left several thousand items in the forty-thousand-square-foot exhibition space.80 The visitors to these exhibitions were the men and women of the emerging middle classes. Exhibitors were encouraged to attend and learn from their peers. They were often given free admission as well as the right to bring two ladies with them gratis, a nod to the importance of cultivating women’s taste for American goods. Members of the Franklin Institute who were, by virtue of the membership fee, men from the middling ranks of society, were also admitted free of charge, while the general public was asked to pay twelve and a half cents in order to gain entry.81 When it opened its doors a few years later, the American Institute charged a slightly higher price. Just twenty-five cents would buy a ticket to the American Institute fair in 1831 that would admit one gentleman and two ladies.82 An 1845 watercolor depiction of the American Institute’s annual exhibition at Niblo’s Garden shows that the visitors to the fair were a respectable crowd (Figure 9). Cutting an elegant figure in the dark coat and fashionable tall hat of the day, men strolled around the exhibit accompanied by female companions who were attired in full skirts and neat bonnets. Moving in an orderly fashion through the rows of glass cabinets, perusing the fabrics and framed pictures that adorned the walls, and stopping to admire everything from hats to artificial limbs, these were men and women who would have had enough spare income to imagine indulging in workboxes, japanned goods, paper hangings, carpets, or pianos.83 However, consumer interest did not necessarily translate into consumer patriotism. By the mid-1840s, the institutes could no longer assert that consumers were helpless individuals who required protection from the marketplace. Instead, they acknowledged that consumers were headstrong individuals, who felt entitled to seek out goods of all kinds and felt no obligation to support American labor. As James Tallmadge, president of the American Institute, noted in 1843, “it is a matter of regret and public injustice, that in departments in which our mechanics had attained much excellence, their productions were often sent to market, and sold to consumers, under labels of Italian, French or English manufacture. . . . Many thousand such labels were printed in this city.”84 Clearly, consumers required a patriotic education to push them to buy American. Tallmadge believed that the tariff had improved America’s domestic manufactures, but as he now clearly saw, the consumer could not be persuaded to buy American-made goods in the name of

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Figure 9. Annual Fair of American Institute at Niblo’s Garden, ca. 1845, Benjamin Johns Harrison, watercolor, 22 × 29¼ in. Courtesy of the Museum of the City of New York.

supporting domestic manufacturing alone. Thus, instead of pedaling the patriotism of a good’s production, the institutes began to focus on the ways in which a good’s design and style could reflect the values and habits of American consumers and inspire them to buy at home rather than abroad. For the first time, the institutes began to acknowledge the market value of taste and design in their quest to shape the buying habits of Americans.85 This shift ultimately manifested itself in the opening of the Franklin Institute School of Design for Women in 1850. This venture was the brainchild of Sarah Peters, the wife of a diplomat and a woman who used her highsociety connections to enlist wide support among Philadelphia’s business philanthropists such as William “Pig Iron” Kelley, and prominent American women, including Sarah Josepha Hale and Catharine Beecher.86 The School of Design was in many ways a logical step for the Franklin Institute. As Peters

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noted, while the cheapness of American goods enticed some customers, Americans still looked for fashion abroad. “[We are] still compelled to depend almost entirely upon foreigners for our designs and patterns,” she complained, “thus exhibiting ourselves rather in light of successful imitators of others than as original inventors. Thus the designs of our articles of furniture, and the patterns of our dresses and other stuffs are rarely anything more than servile imitations of those imported from France and England, which the different habits of life among us, as well as the different climate of our country, render more or less inappropriate to our use, while the existence of this state of things must render us tributary, and so far inferior, to foreign nations.”87 This scathing indictment of American consumer goods struck at the heart of the Franklin Institute’s efforts. Peters made it clear that technological capability and manufacturing prowess was not enough to ensure American independence from Europe. In fact, quite the opposite, Peters’s assessment of consumer goods suggested that Americans remained dependent in the worst way possible, still subject to old European habits of life that the Franklin Institute had spent decades trying to overthrow. With the opening of the design school, the Franklin Institute acknowledged the power of the consumer, particularly the female consumer, to shape both the political economy and the nation. In founding the School of Design, the Franklin Institute acknowledged the power of consumer taste for luxuries and refinement without giving up on the idea of promoting specifically American manufactures. The opening of the school also provided women with a new place in the political economy of America: tastemaker. With luxury in the ascendance and consumption a boon, the old position of critiquing female spending and complimenting womanly thrift was no longer as useful as it had been to political economists fifty years earlier. Thus, establishing the School of Design effectively acknowledged the place that American consumers, and especially female consumers had in cultivating the nation’s economy. Although neither institute gave up on the idea of educating the consumer, instructing individual purchasers to buy the domestically made goods that reflected America’s success as a nation, they at least gave up on the idea that those goods ought to be coarse, utilitarian items bought to reflect an austere republic. Elegance, comfort, and luxuries were the new symbols of the United States, and women would be the patriot-consumers who would choose these goods and grow the American economy in new ways. The promotion of refinement as opposed to industrial strength came though most clearly in 1852, when William Kelley addressed the Franklin In-

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stitute at its twenty-second annual exhibition. In that cornucopia of consumer goods, Kelley saw America as “millions of luxurious citizens” all waiting to buy the goods that to them expressed the “life of [the] nation.”88 Kelley’s speech was an illustration of how successful the American model of political economy had become in comparison to the outmoded English one. Any polity that rewarded the workingman with these material comforts must by all accounts be a success. But Kelley’s speech also indicated that the figure of the purchaser or shopper was starting to take on new shape. No longer simply a “thrifty farmer” as Professor Mason had alleged, the shopper was evolving into a woman. As Kelley himself put it, “No man having built himself a dwelling, would venture without having consulted wife, sister or cousin, to select paper for its walls or carpets for its floor.”89 It was women, Kelley argued, who were possessed of natural good taste, and women who had the charge of the domestic sphere. It was thus natural to assume that women should become the chief consumers of comfort and it was women who had the obligation to make the correct choices and choose American. The institutes of course would be willing to help. They would redouble their efforts to train women: not only to consume correctly, but also to produce the designs that American goods would be modeled on. The decision to cultivate a refined female consumer was very much congruent with the institutes’ broader effort to bring respectability and status to the work and lives of manufacturers, but in the long term this decision also contributed to an ongoing process of class formation in the 1830s and 1840s in urban America. The institutes had always hoped to cultivate an audience that was well off, well behaved, and refined in their manners and habits. The charging of admission, combined with the encouragement of female visitors, had been an effort to infuse the fairs with the kind of domesticity that was increasingly constitutive of middle-class manners in the 1830s. Similarly, the exclusion of the wage laborer from the ranks of membership had been another way in which the institutes had hoped to encourage a more middle-class status for their organization. Their association with educational institutes, like the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, had likewise contributed to the idea that these organizations were not workingmen’s associations, but organizations of gentleman manufacturers, efforts that reflected the ongoing separation between the owners of productive means and capital and the laborers in the urban workshops and factories of America in the 1830s and 1840s. In the same way, the ability to buy highly finished manufactured goods, wear them or place them in a well-cared-for home (where domestic labor was

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carried out by hired female help), and display them through the rituals of urban sociability, such as dinner engagements, afternoon teas, and evening dances and parties, had become by the 1830s and 1840s one of the chief markers of a middle-class lifestyle. Indeed, the work of women as consumers was important in terms of displaying social capital and thus maintaining a highly fluid and uncertain position of social status.90 Thus, in their attempts to cultivate a refined female consumer, the institutes helped to position the consumption of finished manufactured goods as a middle-class preoccupation. At the same time, speakers like Mason and Kelley were, in the 1850s, framing this middle-class consumption as a hallmark of American democracy. The choices that women were making as consumers reflected, in their eyes, the ways in which the American political economy had succeeded where European models had failed. In Kelley’s opinion, American women were behaving in a truly patriotic way only when they bought the right goods; that is to say American-made, American in design, reflecting the refinement but not the excess of a domestic lifestyle that provided evidence of America’s success as a nation. Although far from realized, Kelley’s aspirations reflected a new role for women as shoppers. If, as the institutes had discovered, the female consumer had a more important part to play in defining and sustaining America’s political economy than anyone had previously imagined, then women must start to take on their new obligations as consumers. By the 1850s, the institutes had given up on cultivating producers and pushing for a higher tariff. That era seemed to be over, particularly because 1846 had witnessed the passage of the Walker Tariff, which instituted the lowest duties since 1824. Thus the somewhat futile hope of the institutes’ men was that they could continue to instill a republican resistance to foreign goods into consumers, and they looked especially to women to fulfill that civic obligation to their nation’s economy. Kelley’s speech, triumphant as it was, would certainly have rankled with southern listeners. His imagined nation was one where the dynamic of trade placed economic power very firmly in the hands of the manufacturers living in the mid-Atlantic. When he had envisioned the “millions of luxurious citizens,” they were living in the “sister sovereignties in the South and West,” and his dream for Philadelphia was that it would “compete with England in the markets of the world.”91 Such a model made the South and the West into consumers of Philadelphia’s bounty. This was a position that many southern free traders deeply resented by the early 1850s. As the debates over tariff and

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nullification had receded, southern planters as well as aspiring entrepreneurs had reassessed the way in which the nation’s political economy was now organized and were deeply displeased with what they saw. In the minds of southern boosters, the chief cause of southern misery was undoubtedly the protective tariff. “The commercial interests of the state have been depressed for many years,” commented magazine editor J. D. B. DeBow in 1848, as he reflected on the condition of South Carolina. “The draining influence of the tariff has no doubt been a leading cause. The products of the soil are sold at low cash prices, and all articles of consumption are brought in at high monopoly prices. The effect . . . must be increased poverty, a deprivation of comforts and a crippled trade.”92 DeBow’s comments would have made for predictable analysis to his readers. By the mid-1840s, blaming the policy of protectionism for economic depression, dull times, and a general regional lassitude was such a deeply held belief that it had become almost a religious mantra for men like J. D. B. DeBow, James Hammond, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and other southern boosters. The ramifications of the protective tariff for the southern economy were varied to be sure, but the unanimous verdict was that its universal impact was dire. The tariff disadvantaged southern citizens in a variety of ways. As his assessment of South Carolina’s fortunes made clear, DeBow believed that the South was burdened by the fact that its people bought most of their consumer goods at “high monopoly prices.” This monopoly had evolved out of the realities of the political economy of slavery. The lure of land and slave labor in the South had encouraged men to place their hopes and their capital into the promise of a fortune founded on cotton. There were relatively few southern capitalists who had chosen to invest in industry. The paucity of manufacturing plants in the South meant that southern men and women, from planter to slave, acquired their consumer goods from outside the region. Some of these goods were imported from Europe. But the pattern of trade in the midnineteenth century meant that these goods arrived via the eastern seaports, most often New York. For many of New York’s merchants, wealth had come as a result of the cotton trade. As the trade expanded, New York merchants established a stranglehold on the business of moving cotton out of the cotton kingdom. Even when southern planters attempted to ship cotton directly from Charleston or New Orleans, New York’s merchants still raked in the profits. As factors, brokers, insurance agents, and bankers, they made money through commissions, interest on loans, shipping charges, and insurance payments. Above all, because southern planters relied on New York agents to sell

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their cotton abroad, the city’s merchants became the primary source of credit for southern planters. In the cash-poor South, New York’s capital helped to fund the expansion of the cotton and slave economy.93 The importation of consumer goods into New York had begun as a subsidiary of this trade. New York merchants who sent millions of bales of cotton to Liverpool every year filled the empty holds of returning ships with dry goods and hardware reaped from the mills, factories, and workshops of Britain’s industrial heartland. Purchased by New York merchants, who banked on the strength of the cotton crop, these textiles and iron goods returned first to New York City, where wholesalers, jobbers, commission merchants, and auctioneers pounced on the cargo, competing to sell it to customers across the United States.94 Southerners were convinced that this roundabout arrival of their textiles, silverware, hardware, and Britanniaware cost them dearly.95 The tariff merely added insult to injury. Not only did the tariff raise the cost of the imported goods that southern consumers sought and bought from Europe, but it undercut the domestic competition, forcing the factories of New England to raise the price of the goods they made. Whichever way southerners looked at it, the tariff disadvantaged them. Southern political economists such as Virginia politician Muscoe Russell Hunter Garnett were convinced that the structure of trade in the United States forced southerners to pay a disproportionate percentage of the tariff burden. According to Garnett, the average southern planter was paid for his staple crop in goods, imported goods to be precise. Without a tariff, this would be a fair trade. But the tariff distorted the equity of exchange. Merchants, who were forced to pay the tariff on these imported goods when they landed in New York or other ports, simply passed that cost onto the planter, by sending him fewer imported goods in exchange for his cotton, wheat, tobacco, and rice. It was common knowledge that the tariff raised the price of goods, but according to southern political economists, southern planters bore the brunt of that truism. The reality of being dependent on northern merchants and manufacturers for goods combined with the structural inequities imposed by the tariff added up to a massive financial disadvantage.96 According to this imagined economy, the southern planter was a citizen-consumer whose obligations unjustly outweighed his rights and entitlements. While some southern boosters turned their attention to bypassing northern merchants and attempting to open up lines of direct trade with Europe, others, like William Gregg, a southern merchant turned aspiring cotton manufacturer, believed that the South’s real problem was that it lacked the ability

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to manufacture its own consumer goods. Gregg felt sure that if the South could establish a material independence from the North through the erection of its own manufacturing plants and factories, then the wealth of the region could not flow into northern clutches as Garnett had described. “What is national wealth?” Gregg had asked in 1850. “It does not consist in money, which can take wings and fly away—may be here to-day and to-morrow located in New York never to return. It consists in the mental and physical improvement of the people.” He went on to make his position clear: “are we to continue to entertain the exploded doctrine that we can hold our position among the nations of the earth by the exclusive pursuit of agriculture?” he asked. “Such doctrines have been repudiated by nearly all the great statesmen of the world, and we perceive that nearly all the civilized nations are preparing to enter into a competition in manufacturing and have become satisfied that it is their policy to supply themselves with all the primary articles of consumption.”97 Gregg’s answer to this problem was to find any means possible to encourage the growth and development of southern manufactures. Unlike many a southern planter, Gregg’s childhood and adolescence had predisposed him to have sympathy toward the adversities faced by manufacturers. He had grown up with his uncle, Jacob Gregg, who was a wealthy watchmaker and manufacturer of spinning machinery. In 1810, when William was just a boy of ten, he had moved with his uncle to Georgia, where he watched Jacob establish a successful cotton factory near Monticelo on the banks of the Little River. Throughout the war, his uncle’s establishment had flourished, but with the return of peace the domestic market was flooded with cheap cotton goods. Jacob Gregg was ruined, and William was forced to move to Lexington, Kentucky, where he learned the trade of watchmaker. At twentyfour, he had moved to Columbia in South Carolina and established himself as a merchant. He spent his thirties going back and forth to Europe doing business as a merchant but dabbling in investments that backed manufacturing ventures. When he moved to Charleston in 1838, his health was failing. Searching for something new to do he returned to his childhood roots. He established the Graniteville Company in 1845, a cotton manufactory that echoed the efforts of his uncle Jacob. In three years he had turned Graniteville, with its $300,000 worth of capital, into a profitable establishment with impressive prospects. With nine hundred employees (none of them slaves) and nine thousand spindles, Gregg’s manufactory turned out twelve thousand yards per day of cheap cotton goods. His venture was a success by any measure.98

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Gregg’s aim it seemed was to turn this success in to a model that could be replicated across South Carolina and eventually the cotton-growing South. To this end he founded, along with sixteen other men, the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art, Mechanical Ingenuity and Industry. Opening its doors in January 1849, the South Carolina Institute bore a remarkable resemblance to its competitors in Philadelphia and New York. Its founders instantly agreed on the staging of an annual fair, as the ideal means of promoting mechanical art and industry.99 Members were asked to pay three dollars a year, just as they were at the Franklin Institute, although individuals hoping to join the South Carolina Institute for life need only pay fifteen dollars, ten dollars less than the fee for joining the Franklin Institute.100 Significantly, the institute’s constitution also banned the discussion of religious or political topics, presumably an effort to prevent the organization becoming the target of orators who wanted either to support the tariff, or more likely, denigrate the institute and its presumed support for protection.101 Opening an institute in support of encouraging manufacturing in the South was certainly a risky venture in 1849. That same year, the proslavery Quaker Elwood Fisher had delivered a lecture to a mercantile association in Cincinnati, Ohio, that compared the political economy of the North and the South. It was a lecture that had received a great deal of notice and was even reprinted in DeBow’s Review that same year. In it, Fisher had acknowledged that because of “the peculiar agricultural employment of southern industry and capital, the South is a customer and consumer of northern manufactures and commerce, and of north-western agriculture.” But this relationship, argued Fisher, was precisely what it was supposed to be. “Abolish slavery and convert the South into a people of mechanics, artizans and merchants, and instead of being a customer, she becomes a competitor of the other section,” argued Fisher. But the consequences, he thought, would be dire. The “pauperism, crime and mortality of the North” would simply become a reality for both sections of the country.102 But Gregg and his colleagues were determined to convince the southern public that manufacturing would answer the South’s economic problems. Appended to the South Carolina Institute’s constitution in 1849, the founders published an address urging the public to support their efforts to promote southern manufacturing concerns. “While the South has devoted her energies to agriculture, she has woefully neglected almost every other industry,” they complained. The results for South Carolina were, they believed, devastating. “While she has been raising from her soil an article for which opposing

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interests have fixed a price, she has brought everything she needed at prices other have arranged. . . . She has become, by her dependant policy the play thing of others—taunted one moment for her indolence and poverty, and insulted the next for her institutions.”103 Such dependence was worrying at the best of times. But in 1850, as Americans were attempting to find a way to incorporate the territories won in the Mexican-American war into the Union, this weakness was even more alarming. The agreement that California should enter the United States as a free state seemed to curtail the possibilities of southern expansion.104 But more frightening still was the idea that these future western states would not align themselves with the interests of the South. This sense of foreboding crept into the thoughts of southern planters and merchants alike in 1850. Maunsel White, a Louisiana commission merchant and planter, was one such prophet of doom, although he couched his own prophecy in a tone of disbelief. “It cannot be that the North will pursue the dangerous policy in regard to our rights and institutions, which her politicians and demagogues have adopted,” he wrote in January 1850. “But if the North is prepared to sacrifice all this in pursuit of a phantom, is the West prepared to adopt an identical course? Will the West turn from her fast friends of the South, friends who stood by her in the infancy of her strength when the North and East were ready to sacrifice her interests?”105 Without the West, which, as White put it, “destiny [had pointed to] . . . as the great manufacturing country of America,” what hope did the South have? After 1850, the South Carolina Institute was even more insistent that their public support the mission to improve southern manufacturing. Gregg’s greatest concern was that the South could not supply itself with the items needed to sustain the business of the plantation economy. “We are now dependent on other countries for nearly all the prime necessaries of life, including the most common articles of consumption,” he fretted. And although he acknowledged that some small-scale manufacturing existed in South Carolina when it came to leather goods, such as shoes, harnesses, saddles, and reins, he was frustrated by the fact that the scale was so small. “From the sea-board to the mountains, you will scarcely find a pair of bridle-reins that are not of Yankee manufacture,” he observed. This meant not only dependence; it meant also that southerners were paying the premium of passage. Those bridle-reins were, Gregg argued, “loaded with the profits of some half dozen merchants whose hands they would have passed through.”106 Gregg could see a connection between the promotion of manufacturing and the profits of slavery. His aim was to convince planters that they could protect

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slavery from northern greed and political ill will by supporting his plan for manufacturing in South Carolina and by agreeing to alter their consumer habits in the process. If Gregg could persuade planters to buy their coarse cloth, the shoes and hats they needed for their slaves, and the tools they needed for their plantation from local manufacturers, he would have succeeded in altering the established pattern of trade that had come to define the sectional economies of America at midcentury. It is notable, however, that Gregg was not asking planters to curb their desire for luxury imported goods. Attempting to debunk the planter’s prejudice that manufacturing would curtail commerce, he turned to Europe to prove that access to the articles of “comfort and luxury,” as he termed them, would not be restricted. “One would suppose,” he wrote in 1851, “that the manufactures of France might suffice to supply the wants of a Parisian, yet we find him indulging his fancy in the purchase of the costly fabrics of London, Roman, Genevan and Chinese workshops, and so with the fashionables of London.”107 Pointing to the consumer habits of the fashionable French and the elegant English, Gregg offered reassurance to the planters of South Carolina who aspired to cosmopolitan standards and shopped accordingly.108 The same message was reiterated by other speakers at the South Carolina Institute. In 1851, Josiah Lumpkin argued that planters should cultivate the means to make their own coarse cottons and yarns, thus providing the garments they would need to clothe their slave population. But he promised his listeners that he had no interest in curtailing the importation of prints and lawns. These finer fabrics, which would have adorned the bodies of South Carolina’s more elite society in the form of dresses and shirts, were not to be replaced by import substitution. Through these kinds of speeches, the vision of the virtuous consumer took shape in the South. Elite consumers were white men, who were free to shop for themselves and their families as they ever had been. But when they sought goods to furnish the needs of their plantation, and especially the needs of their slaves, they should work to patronize southern manufacturing ventures that fueled the southern plantation economy. Economic historians have confirmed that such a plan would have failed to provide the South with any kind of real stimulus for a new industrial sector. Southern boosters and planters vastly overestimated the demand that plantations and in particular slave consumption generated for goods of this sort. Slavery simply did not provide the kind of consumer market necessary to sustain the growth of a manufacturing sector.109 Nonetheless, optimistic boosters and ambitious planters sought to bring an end to “the chivalrous

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South[’s] . . . condition of colonial servitude” through combining manufacturing with agriculture.110 Through the diversification of labor, Lumpkin envisioned a South that was “magnificently rich and gloriously independent.” But this independence was not simply economic. Instead Lumpkin imagined that “patriotism and philanthropy” would underwrite the enterprises of manufacturers and consumers who together were “laying broad and deep, the foundations of a glorious empire.”111 Such grandiose rhetoric made it clear that the boosters of domestic consumption were themselves beginning to lay the groundwork for an independent South and were schooling a generation of male southern planters who might have to act as citizens of a new republic. Lumpkin however also addressed an issue that Gregg had entirely overlooked in his initial plans for altering southern consumption patterns, the consumer habits of the poor white nonslaveholder. These men and women had always occupied an uncomfortable position within the larger framework of a patriarchal slaveholding society.112 On the periphery of the plantation economy, they were often overlooked or mistrusted. Poor as they were, it is not surprising they were initially ignored. Boosters would have been aware that these men and women would have little cash to spare for the purchase of any consumer goods. But Lumpkin overcame that problem by imagining these white men and women as both producers and consumers. “Southern people, must to a certain extent, abandon their accustomed paths,” he argued. “We must increase the class of consumers among ourselves.”113 In Lumpkin’s vision of a new southern political economy, white nonslaveholders were key. They would leave behind their subsistence farming and become the operatives of the South’s new factories. As laborers they would earn enough money to buy the goods they were making and thus become a crucial force in shaping a newly independent southern economy. In contrast to the ideas of northern boosters, who had expanded the role that middle-class women were to play as patriot-consumers, men like Lumpkin tended to overlook women’s contribution and instead expanded the class base of the citizen-consumer. Poor white men would be the citizen-consumers of the South’s future. Lumpkin’s vision gained little purchase in the South. Despite Gregg’s successes in Graniteville, neither poor nor rich southerners took up the institute’s call to arms. Manufacturing did not become a major sector of the southern economy, especially in states like South Carolina. Such failures led the speakers at the South Carolina Institute to adopt an increasingly desperate tone when it came to dispensing advice on political economy, but the wisdom they offered was a peculiar reflection of advice that their northern counterparts

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were doling out. As Benjamin Perry pointed out to the institute’s audience in 1856, “When we sit down to eat, it is altogether probable that the table at which we are seated has been made in Europe or the Northern States. . . . The very chairs we sit in, the bedstead on which we sleep, are from the North. If we look in a mirror, we see ourselves reflected by the mechanic skill and art of a Northern man.”114 Such rhetoric was a more extreme version of Sarah Peters’s lament on the dependence of northern consumers on European designs. Both Peters and Perry hoped to express the very material ways in which these broad configurations of political economy manifested themselves in the most personal and private aspects of an individual’s life. Both Peters and Perry could see that this problem necessitated a radical change in the local modes of production and a cultivation of consumer habits that would support a new direction for American political economy. But while Peters, supported by the other officers of the Franklin Institute, had hoped to cultivate a middle-class consumer who bought American-made items that reflected the aesthetics of democratic comfort, Perry’s speech reflected a problem that was a unique reflection of southern political economy. He continued to address the planter and the farmer as the only version of a southern consumer he could imagine. Lacking from Perry’s vision was the middle-class consumer that the Franklin Institute had hoped to cultivate. Indeed, Perry was aware that the poor white farmer, who Lumpkin had hoped to recast as a more prosperous white factory operative, was failing to make the money necessary to stimulate consumer demand in the South. Praising the planters for their devotion to “fashion and pleasure,” which stimulated demand for southern-made goods, Perry blamed the yeoman farmers of the south for their failures to serve the southern economy in the proper way. “The great evil which afflicts our country,” he argued, “is that there are so many drones in it. . . . They are non-producers; their labor is misapplied. It is this that has paralyzed the Southern States.”115 But Perry, like Lumpkin and Gregg, had massively underestimated the southern planter’s taste for fine things that could only be procured from abroad or up North. In July 1860, only a few months before Lincoln’s election, and with the threat of war filling the air like a thundercloud, Gregg wrote with passion and regret that “the failures of manufacturing establishments at the South have been mainly the result of the absence of Southern patronage; that thousands and hundreds of thousands, and we might say millions, of Southern capital sunk, from the fact that Yankee goods have been purchased and Yankee establishments patronized, to the great detriment of Southern

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consumers, all resulting from an absence of that spirit which should prompt a Southerner to patronize Southern importation and Southern domestic industry.”116 Gregg’s lament pointed to the failure of a protonationalism in southern consumer habits. The concept of a citizen-consumer who expressed his patriotism through his purchasing was by no means unfamiliar in the South. Yet even as the sectional tensions over tariff had mounted and the attacks on slavery prompted many in the South to speculate about southern independence, those who had most to gain from a separate southern nation did not alter their consumer habits in support of this vision. Instead, they pursued a different political economy, one that relied on the hopes of direct trade with Europe and a free-trade empire. As a result, the South Carolina Institute’s dreams of a self-sustaining South crumbled away, crushed by the constraints of a commerce defined by slavery and a consumption inspired by European emulation. The debates over tariff in America played out in a number of overlapping and interconnected arenas between the 1820s and the 1850s. From the exhibition rooms of institutes to the halls of Congress, advocates of tariff tangled with free traders, broadcasting their ideas in the print columns of newspapers and periodicals. Their annual efforts to create a microcosm of the ideal American marketplace were a spectacular effort to teach producers and consumers how to behave in the new independent American political economy. Yet their idealism fell afoul of the aspirations and preferences of the producers and consumers they sought to teach. In Philadelphia and New York, urban mechanics correctly judged that their customers were more interested in the small luxuries of life. Visitors to the exhibitions demonstrated again and again that their understanding of the Republic’s material world was predicated on European styles and a standard of luxurious living. Together these producers and consumers rejected the institutes’ utilitarian vision of a republic sustained by a coarse self-sufficiency. In Charleston, the best efforts of southern manufacturers and their advocates could not convince the audience of elites and aspiring elites that it was in their interest to alter their consumer habits to promote southern independence. The perpetual disappointment of the institute’s officers reflected the ways in which South Carolina planters and farmers failed to connect new habits of shopping with an emerging understanding of southern nationalism. But despite these disappointments, these failures had an impact on the conceptualization of the consumer in America. By process of elimination and adjustment, two versions of an idealized American consumer were

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taking shape by the mid-1850s. In the North, a middle-class consumer was becoming a recognizable figure. An individual who could be either male or female, this person was a representative of a specific vision of a refined republic, testament to the success of a capitalist democracy. In the South, the predominant vision of the consumer remained defined by the aristocratic planter, whose taste for luxury, of either foreign or domestic manufacture, fit into an almost Mandevillian vision of political economy, whereby a passion for extravagance among the few could sustain the livelihoods of the many. But among some of those who dreamed about the future of an independent southern empire for slavery, these habits were a liability. To them the elite consumer of luxurious goods did not represent the material success of republicanism but rather an Achilles heel, which could bring down the slaveholder’s Republic before it had even had a chance to exist. Thus, while northern protectionists found tentative ways to embrace consumers and reposition them as patriotic citizens, the promanufacturing boosters of the South found no such compromise. Perhaps this, in the end, accounted for their failures.

Chapter 5

“They Now Advertise Liberally”

In the early 1840s, a new conception of the American consumer emerged, created not by the Franklin and American Institutes but by northern retailers, commercial artists, and professional printers. In their stores and in their advertisements these urban shopkeepers and nascent advertisers offered the American public a different vision of what it meant to be a consumer, one that challenged the already crumbling assumptions of the entrepreneurs and politicians of the early Republic. Forced by consumers themselves to discard the idea that shoppers were easy to instruct and simple to influence, this cohort of commercial men made a case for a newly powerful consumer, an individual whose tastes and desires commanded public respect and whose activities, they argued, ought to be protected and promoted by law. This promotion of a new kind of consumer gathered momentum through the 1840s, fueled by new networks of distribution, urban expansion, and rapid improvements in printing technology. Before long, the retailers and commercial printers found themselves challenging the old dichotomies of virtue and vice, thrift and extravagance that had constrained Americans’ ideas about consumption throughout the first three decades of the nineteenth century. Abandoning the extremes of the self-sufficient farmer, the thrifty housewife, and the reckless fritterers of fashion—the familiar polemical tropes for authors of moral tracts and household manuals—retailers and commercial artists began to imagine a consumer who was refined, respectable, and able to enjoy the pleasures of urban consumption in a responsible way. To be sure, these multiple, unconnected efforts on the part of retailers, merchants, and advertisers grew out of a desire to expand their own businesses and put more money into their pockets, but in the process their efforts reconceptualized the consumer in American life much more effectively than the men of the institutes did.

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The transformation of the figure of the consumer was not confined to the northern commercial sphere. The newly fashioned consumer figure also took shape in the writings and observations of free-trade economists. Such authors often made strange bedfellows; Massachusetts-born editor Freeman Hunt, a passionate advocate for the virtues of commerce, for example, found common voice with the proslavery author Thomas P. Kettell, who saw free trade as a means to defend the South against the profiteering of northern merchants. Although their sectional interests diverged, their faith in the power of the consumer to shape political economy provided a rare piece of common ground.1 The figure of the consumer had of course already cropped up in previous discussions of political economy. Early defenders of free trade, especially in the South, had been quick to identify the interests of the planter with those of a victimized consumer during the blazing days of debate over the “Tariff of Abominations” and the subsequent Nullification Crisis. The figure these politicians had invoked, however, was of near-helpless individuals, powerless to defend themselves against the economic depredations of the federal government. But by the 1840s this kind of vulnerable consumer no longer matched commercial understandings of who the consumer was and what he or she might be capable of accomplishing. In northern cities, new respect for shoppers in the commercial sphere seeped into political discourse, and out of this the champions of free trade slowly fashioned a new understanding of the American consumer. By midcentury it was more common to hear politicians claim that free trade was necessary because American consumers were entitled as citizens to enjoy the pleasures of consumption in the urban marketplace and beyond. In fact, as Americans began to recover from the aftershocks of the Nullification Crisis, some free-trade politicians worked hard to jettison the reputation that they supported only the southern planters’ habits of consumption. Instead, they repositioned their argument to encompass the elegant middleclass consumer that was being created by American retailers and commercial artists, allowing this figure to stand in as the normative American consumer. In their efforts to make their case, they began to argue that it was the American’s ability to consume luxury goods that marked the American Republic out as a uniquely successful experiment in modern democracy. By the end of the 1840s supporters of free trade had melded American civic rights, the cause of democracy, and the world of consumption together. The emergence of imagined middle-class consumers who shopped for pleasure and who could believe that they were entitled to that pleasure as

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American citizens was a new and significant development.2 As politicians appropriated the figure of the consumer and inserted the consumer’s claims to shop at liberty into political debate, free-trade politicians altered the configuration of the American political economy. The interdependent trinity of productive interests that had once dominated political discourse was broken apart as free-trade politicians asserted the rights of the middle-class consumer as a legitimate political constituency in American political culture. The idea that men, and increasingly women, might imagine their political interests through the lens of consumption rather than production disrupted the neat configuration of the Jeffersonian vision of political economy, allowing Americans to ask questions about how middle-class consumers could play a more positive part in the development of the economy and in the shaping of the new American nation. Rather than asking these consumers to restrain themselves, free traders wondered whether the best thing for America might not be to leave Americans alone to shop as they saw fit. These ruminations found a response in the efforts of the retailers and commercial artists. Their continued attempts to promote and encourage consumers injected a vibrant energy into America’s retail business. Looking around them and seeing prosperous consumers on broadsides and trade cards, as well as in fancy good stores and on downtown shopping streets, free-trade politicians could feel confident that their vision of a republic of shoppers was on the money and, in the end, would surely pay off. The northern consumers of the 1840s and 1850s encountered a quite different commercial landscape to the one that their grandparents might have known at the beginning of the nineteenth century. The middle classes of New England, the mid-Atlantic, and the old Northwest no longer produced their own textiles and household furnishings, choosing instead to buy factory and millmade goods of all kinds.3 Similarly, technological innovations in other lines of production meant that traditionally expensive items became more widely available. Carpets, stoves, pianos, household textiles, cutlery, mantel clocks, and crockery were all examples of goods that became easier to reproduce in large quantities in the 1840s and 1850s and accordingly became more obtainable by midcentury.4 Yet these items simply provided more variety in homes that were already furnished with looking glasses, grandfather clocks, earthenware ceramics, books, and candlesticks.5 At midcentury, most middle-class American consumers were experiencing a wider variety of items for sale and a higher likelihood that they would be able to afford them.

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These purchases could be made from a range of places. Most Americans in the 1840s still lived outside large cities such as New York and Philadelphia, and for them the main source of consumer goods were the dry goods stores in their local town.6 These ubiquitous establishments were supposed to sell everything a consumer could need or want. By 1840, just over fifty-seven thousand retail stores existed in the United States, but they were by no means evenly spread throughout the nation. New York had the highest number of these establishments, where 12,200 stores were scattered throughout the state with at least eighty-five hundred of those stores located outside of New York County itself. Beyond the Empire State few other states could compete. The closest competitor was Pennsylvania, where there were sixty-five hundred stores altogether with forty-four hundred beyond Philadelphia County, and Ohio, which was home to forty-six hundred stores. By comparison, South Carolina’s full complement of retail stores stood at twelve hundred, and half of those were in Charleston County itself.7 For the most part, stores outside the larger cities were likely nonspecialized and sold something for everyone. Susan Fenimore Cooper, describing the local stores in Cooperstown in 1850, observed, “at the same counter you may buy kid gloves and a spade; a lace veil and a jug of molasses; a satin dress and a broom.”8 Cooper’s description evoked a store where the jumble of goods was part of its charm. But the anecdote also highlights that by midcentury, rural Americans were familiar with the idea of the specialty store, so much so that establishments that sold dresses and brooms at the same counter could be described by Cooper as quaint, compared to more recently established milliners or grocery stores in Cooperstown. Nonetheless, Cooper’s affection was clearly reserved for the “country store,” where a farmer could mull over a piece of cotton print while his wife picked out “the teacups or brooms.”9 Store owners outside of major urban centers usually made a point of purchasing new goods twice a year to keep up with new fashions. Ellen Douglas Birdseye, writing in her diary in 1851, noted, “went . . . to Nortons & looked in at his goods. It being his shewday. His store, was filled with elegantly dressed ladies, and beautiful goods—and I was happy to meet some old friends.”10 When new goods arrived in the stores at Syracuse, it was a social occasion. But that would not have been enough for some. Indeed, some rural shoppers clearly saw the local store as simply a place to purchase only their everyday necessities.11 Eleanor Huse Ames, who was married to a successful manufacturer, certainly seemed to feel that way. As a young wife, Ames moved to Chicopee, on the Connecticut River in western Massachusetts in October

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1846.12 She had soon settled into a routine. Her diary for 1849 suggests that she kept a careful eye on the household expenditures. Besides groceries, she purchased cotton and gingham lengths to clothe her and her children, as well as various small sundries such as a hood for her daughter Sarah, a cravat, a lace collar, and once, a sunshade.13 Yet what is really striking is that Ames made none of her major purchases at the local store in Chicopee. Instead she traveled over 130 miles, spending four dollars on a trip back to her old home in Newburyport, to buy on one occasion a carpet and a piano cloth, and on another visit, nine yards of expensive pink delaine for her daughters Ellen and Sarah.14 The reasons for this decision are unclear. Perhaps Ames placed more trust in the storekeepers in her girlhood home, believing they would deliver a better product; perhaps these retailers were prepared to give this longtime customer better credit. It is even possible that as a woman who had experienced what the larger towns and cities of the Eastern Seaboard had to offer, she was prepared to wait to purchase more expensive items for her home and family. Indeed, it was no longer the case, as it had been with the Trumbull sisters, that visiting the stores lasted the whole season. With transport networks improving across the United States, medium-distance travel was becoming easier for middle-class people, and short shopping trips to urban centers were becoming more common.15 Perhaps Ames had decided to combine a shopping trip with a visit to her family back East. Whatever the case, Ames’s decision made it clear that she thought the items for sale at the dry goods store in Chicopee were simply not enough. Shopping horizons for Americans were broadening by the 1840s. When small items were needed but not available at the local country store, rural consumers relied on peddlers to fill the gaps. There were several types of peddler that existed by the 1840s. Peddling companies offered urban merchants a regional distribution network, with hired men to carry a pack of goods from town to town. Other peddlers worked directly for artisans or manufacturers. But the more familiar figure was the independent packman, who bought a bundle of goods and slowly hawked them around the highways and byways of the American countryside.16 Daniel Helms, a thirty-five-yearold man from Wurtsboro, New York, did exactly that in 1851. Having tried his hand as both a book agent and a farm laborer and liking neither, he bought $45 worth of peddling goods in Meadsville, Pennsylvania, and set off to try his hand as an itinerant salesman. Helms bought what might be considered the standard pack: pins, caps, lace, trimmings, needles, combs, buttons, thread,

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and socks, a collection of items most often described by contemporary salesmen as “Yankee Notions.” Sometimes Helms invested in more specific items such as German silver tea sets or jewelry, but for the most part he wended his way through Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York with a wide assortment of small goods.17 Helms’s account suggests that consumers in these areas were well used to buying from peddlers, and far from being able to extract good profits from gullible consumers, Helms complained frequently about the ways in which knowledgeable shoppers got the best price out of him. Selling goods along the Allegheny River in 1852, Helms noted sourly that “the people have so much of the swine incorporated into their nature that they expect Goods at less than New York City retail prices and are outrageous, saucy . . . whining New York Yankees.” Helms assessed, probably correctly, that even clientele from more remote areas knew the difference between a bargain and a scam. By the time he reached Cattaraugus County, Helms was thoroughly dejected. “These old Yankee women are hard caces” he noted; “they will hang on to a ten cent piece and pinch it so hard as to almost make the poor Eagle squeal.”18 Helms’s business was in all likelihood hurt by competition. By 1850, 10,669 peddlers were crisscrossing rural America, and most came from New York, Ohio, Massachusetts, and Pennsylvania.19 Indeed, not long after his complaints in western New York, Helms commented, “I met the Silk Thread Man. I do hope he will cross my track no more as he hurts my custom.”20 He was probably right. Just as the local store and the peddler were established features of rural consumers’ landscapes by the 1840s, so too were the specialized retail store and the urban shopping district recognizable entities for urban shoppers by the same decade. But if the concept of an urban retail district was familiar to urban consumers, the stores and retail districts were themselves changing by the middle decades of the century. Perhaps one of the most obvious changes that had coalesced by the 1850s was the emergence of urban spaces entirely dedicated to fashionable shopping. From early on in the nineteenth century, American towns and cities developed retail districts, each with a distinctive reputation for elegance, affordability, or cheap bargains.21 These distinctions intensified by the mid-nineteenth century. Broadway, perhaps the country’s most famous shopping street, was itself divided into a “dollar” side and a “shilling” side, giving customers the chance to choose their price bracket before even stepping into a store. Customers would want to make that decision carefully. George G. Foster, author and New York observer extraordinaire, commented in 1849 that “none but a well practiced citizen can . . . regain the

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fashionable side of Broadway—for you must remember that nothing could more effectually stamp you as vulgar than to be seen stumbling over the crockery-crates and second furniture of the shilling pavement.”22 Foster’s observation, originally published in the New York Tribune, would have made middle-class readers aware that as customers, they were now participating in a closely observed and keenly analyzed retail-oriented marketplace. Shopping and shopping districts had become a subject of new interest, which commentators discussed extensively in contemporary guidebooks, satires, and travelogues. For consumers in New York in particular, it must have been strange to find that their daily promenade down Broadway had been reified by social commentators and was now held up as the very epitome of American shopping culture.23 New attention to shopping districts was supplemented by the changing material experience of going shopping. In the early 1850s, for example, the notable New York hatter J. N. Genin proposed a bridge across Broadway to save pedestrians from the torrent of carriages and other vehicles that thundered constantly up and down the street. Genin’s bridge carefully ushered customers right to his front door.24 Window displays, particularly in urban stores, also became more elaborate and enticing, as shopkeepers began to compete in earnest for the throngs of customers who flocked past their stores. “Broadway should be visited by the stranger,” wrote author Joel Ross in 1851. “The splendid display in the windows of goods, ware and merchandize almost dazzle the eyes of the owners, and if I mistake not, sometimes quite bewilders the brains of others.”25 The stores’ interiors offered further opportunity for the comfortable perusal of goods in a lavish environment. Glass cases to display items, gas lighting, and large showrooms made shopping a quite different experience from purchasing items fifty years earlier, when shopkeepers had kept goods on shelves behind a counter and brought out only what the customer asked for or what the shopkeeper thought the customer could afford.26 Indeed, Freeman Hunt, the editor of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, advised store owners who wanted to be successful to refrain from displaying goods in a “heap” or in a “heterogeneous mass.”27 Some stores went far beyond this simple advice. Glenn and Company, a fancy goods store on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, had “Italian Tesselated Marble Floors . . . a Ceiling superbly Frescoed . . . Magnificent Mirrors . . . surrounded by a border of richly cut Bohemian Glass [and] . . . Chandeliers . . . of the far-famed Cornelius.”28 As a result the store’s interior was a draw, even before customers had seen any merchandise.

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And the merchandise itself was often arrayed from floor to ceiling. These displays pointed to the love affair that midcentury Americans had with domestic objects of all kinds. Small wonder that shopkeepers stocked their store windows full of goods, when the middle-class shopper aspired to a home that had knick-knacks and objets d’art on every surface.29 The new, more sophisticated displays also tell us something of how the midcentury retailer imagined the urban consumer. The shopkeepers of New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Boston believed that their windowshoppers were connoisseurs, who could be enticed with artfully arranged goods in a sophisticated setting. Historian Richard Bushman has argued that the colonial shopper was both served and educated by the urban retailer in the eighteenth century. By mid-nineteenth century a new element had entered that relationship. Retailers who arranged their stores in this way hoped also to impress, entice, and entertain their shoppers, who were no longer innocent of the fruits of commercial culture.30 While most retailers stopped at new techniques of display, some went even further. Ahead of his time in this respect was Alexander T. Stewart, whose massive department retail store in New York was a marvel in its own right as well as the exception to the rule in the 1840s. His “marble palace,” established in 1846, made Stewart the first “merchant prince of New York.” He bought the frontage on Broadway between Chambers and Reade Streets, just north of city hall. On this lot he erected a five-story marble building that would become the largest dry goods store in New York.31 The store and its gleaming white frontage quickly became a phenomenon, employing hundreds of clerks and attracting thousands of eager customers. Stewart’s was the first structure in New York specifically designed as a retail store, and he organized it in a revolutionary way. He divided the store into several different departments, each selling a specialized line of goods. Silks, dress goods, laces, shawls, suits, calicoes, and more, all had their own counters made from mahogany and maple, as well as their own specialized clerks, cash boys, and porters. As clerks were instructed to allow customers to browse freely, a consumer was at liberty to wander about the store, gazing at the lavish displays of expensive goods.32 As Stewart’s marble emporium suggests, by the 1850s, shops had begun to be designed to tempt consumers to purchase in new ways, once again emphasizing the conceptualization of the consumer as an individual to be enticed and whose desires deserved attention. As well as altering the appearance of their stores to appeal to consumers, retailers also began to employ personnel to attend more directly to the indi-

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vidual’s requirements as a shopper. Clerks moved out of accounting rooms and onto shop floors, where their task was to see to the needs of customers. This new relationship did not always please the impatient young clerks. Henry Southworth Clay, a clerk in Ira Beard’s millinery shop on William Street in New York, complained bitterly about the time he had to spend in waiting on customers. “Miss Gooden of Bridgeport, Conn[ecticut] came into town,” he noted in his diary in June 1850; she is quite a troublesome customer occupying about two days in buying about $60 worth of goods, it falls to my lot to wait upon her, but I exercise patience and manage to get along, but I think if I should have to attend upon many such people I should quit the trade in disgust.”33 While clerks like Southworth often complained that customers, particularly their female ones, dithered and wasted time, this new relationship suggests not only that customers were dealing with a greater variety of goods but that shop owners sought to provide more thoroughly for the individual customer’s whims.34 In part, retailers were responding to customers who had a better knowledge of what constituted good quality, choice, and affordability. Competition drove expansion and increased sophistication.35 As the city directories show, retail trade in New York in particular had proliferated. In 1800, for example, the city had only one fancy store listed; by 1845 that number stood at 258. Indeed, retailers recognized consumers as knowledgeable and discerning rather than bewildered by all this choice. But the commercial lens through which they reconceived of shoppers also conditioned the retailers’ response to the consumer. Clerks like Southworth were dealing with not just the shoppers who came into the store to buy for themselves but also the clients who bought items to resell in a variety of different contexts. The amount that the customer Miss Gooden spent, for example, suggests that she was a milliner, not a woman who planned to finish a single bonnet of her own. Dealing with a growing commercial culture, as well as an expanding print culture that facilitated the spread of knowledge about fashionable new goods, it was easy for storekeepers and clerks to attend to their urban customers assuming that they had a significant level of experience and familiarity with the world of consumption, which had to be catered to and respected. Retailers and clerks were not the only ones paying attention to the consumer. By the 1850s, credit-rating agencies watched customers closely to assess the creditworthiness of any given business.36 In 1841, when Lewis Tappan began his commercial intelligence office, his goal had been to provide trustworthy information on men and their business prospects to anyone who

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needed to know. This could include investors or bankers, both domestic and foreign, who were anxious about lending or investing money with unknown partners. It could include merchants and wholesalers who were unsure as to whether the retailers they wanted to sell to would repay their debts. It could even encompass a retailer worried whether his customer could pay for all the goods he or she had ordered. At a time when business was becoming increasingly less personal, and introductions and vouchsafes were becoming rarer, Tappan’s agency was the answer many were looking for. The testament to its success was its own long life and the large number of competitors that sprang up shortly thereafter. It was the means of gathering this commercial information that gave the consumer yet further power. By the mid-1850s, R. G. Dun, Tappan’s successor, employed hundreds of men to gather information on businesses and record their own observations, as well as document scraps of news and commercial rumors in the company’s large red ledgers. Included in these reams of scrutiny were the clerks’ and agents’ impressions of the class of customers that any given business might attract. Thus, an 1854 assessment of Peterson and Humphrey, a company that sold carpets, included the comment, “[they] are a popular house and sell to a fashionable class of customer.”37 This comment, along with others, was intended to communicate the relative reliability of this firm for potential investors or creditors. Similarly, a glowing report on the hatters Leary and Company, who occupied retail space in Astor House on Broadway, also included commentary on the type of customer. “One of the most fashionable establishments in this city,” noted the Dun and Company clerk. “Rich and getting more so every year.”38 A report on a jewelers and fancy goods store at 550 Broadway was even more direct. “Doing the leading fashionable retail business with the best kind of customers[,] making money fast.” This astute clerk knew what he was talking about. The company in question was Tiffany and Company.39 This kind of surveillance and reporting made retailers aware of how important the right kind of customer could be. By attracting the “best kind of customer,” they not only were drawing in wealthy clients but were also boosting their reputation, increasing their creditworthiness, and sharpening their competitive edge. As shops proliferated and the choice of stores became bewildering, this kind of reputation could make or break a new business. By the 1850s then, the consumer imagined through a commercial lens was not only the center of attention, but also a figure to be courted, attracted, enticed, and scrutinized. The fashionable consumer was also a figure to be respected, no

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matter what he or she demanded or expected. Tales of long-suffering clerks and frustrated store owners abounded, as retailers struggled to accommodate the customer’s every whim.40 The clear implication of these tales was that retailers were going out of their way to be as obliging as possible, even to the point of absurdity. This long-suffering compliance only increased in times of financial downturn, tipping the scale even more in favor of the consumer. With its usual acuity, Harper’s Weekly rendered this discomforting dynamic into a succinct cartoon, where even the lowliest of shoppers gained new power in the wake of the Panic of 1857 (Figure 10). By the middle of the century urban middle-class consumers were newly perceived to have commercial power and influence. Their desires could not be dismissed. Midcentury attempts to capture the interest of the consumer extended far beyond the physical experience of shopping, spreading out also into the realm of advertising in significant ways. Of course, shopkeepers’ efforts to garner attention and cultivate reputation were not new. From the late eighteenth century onward, shopkeepers had bought and circulated trade cards and produced advertisements that appealed to the “ladies and gentlemen” of the city, in an effort to produce and retain a loyal clientele.41 But the 1840s and 1850s saw an expansion of retail advertising as well as several new developments in

Figure 10. “Before the Panic and After the Panic,” Harper’s Weekly, November 14, 1857. © Alexander Street Press.

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the business. Indeed, the development of advertising in this period was perhaps the most marked development across the entire spectrum of the retail experience. The expansion was due largely to technological innovations in printing. The arrival of lithography in America in 1825 had opened up new possibilities for commercial printing. The ability to create tonal rather than line prints allowed printed ephemera like trade cards, billheads, and broadsides to take on new sophistication. By the 1840s, the invention of the electrotype machine provided printers with the ability to produce thousands of copies of their advertisements at a relatively low cost. As a result, advertising in many forms became a newly widespread medium, which pervaded urban and rural landscapes alike.42 Shopkeepers attempted to make the most of this new means of approaching customers. To their delight, their new methods proved successful. “John & Myself distributed Bills again through several streets,” wrote a young and weary clerk from Albany in 1848. After several days of handing out ads for his employer’s store, he went on to note their efforts had paid off. “Today the customers came—the Bills we left at different places began to take effect. . . . Everything in the store was pulled apart, a great rush.”43 New technologies soon prompted new business models. One aspiring advertising entrepreneur was Volney B. Palmer, who set himself the task of creating one of America’s first professional advertising agencies in 1841. Palmer began his career acting as a middleman between newspaper publishers and advertisers across the country, helping merchants to get their advertisements into newspapers. But in 1849, Palmer improved on his services by creating his own newspaper, dedicated to the needs of men who wanted to advertise. In V. B. Palmer’s Register and Spirit of the Press, Palmer developed a system of advertising that helped retailers seeking advertising space to choose the best medium and regional market for their product. Having helped merchants make the choice, Palmer’s agency then placed the advertisement in the recommended newspapers or periodicals.44 At the same time, Palmer vigorously promoted advertising in his own newspaper, culling quotes from around the country to promote his business and make the case for the growing importance of advertising. Quoting from the Boston Star, Palmer’s periodical trumpeted: “Nothing is more clearly settled, or more universally admitted than that the best money spent by a business man is that paid for advertising. The fact has been demonstrated throughout the world.”45 Palmer’s initiatives were a bold attempt to create a wider commercial network of retailers and customers. But his work also had conceptual flair.

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Through his newspaper he suggested to retailers that there was a larger regional community of consumers ripe for business. This community shared common interests, were interested in similar goods, and could all be persuaded to buy in a similar fashion. Thus, Palmer helped to develop a business model whereby retailers could imagine appealing to a broad swath of consumers, rather than building a customer base one village or town at a time. Perhaps it was the cost, or perhaps it was simply that the idea of appealing to such a broad swath of people, organized by region or class, but Palmer’s strategies seemed risky to retailers who were used to selling to smaller local communities. In fact, another form of advertising—the poster or broadside— suggests the difficulty that advertisers and retailers had with bridging the gap between the idea of a local and personally known clientele and a broader consuming public. Over the decades, broadside authors experimented with phrases that addressed “friends and customers” as well as the more impersonal “purchasers,” “the public generally,” and on one occasion “citizens of the Western Reserve.”46 There was not a specific progression from the personal to the impersonal in these broadsides of the early and mid-nineteenth century. Rather, the multiple ways that advertisers chose to address shoppers indicates the extent to which the identity of the consumer was itself under consideration even as it was in flux. While other trends in the retail trade suggested that retailers believed customers deserved more attention, with specific care lavished on their needs, larger numbers of customers caused a slow drift toward more impersonal shopping experiences. By midcentury, retailers were obliged to treat customers in a more generic fashion. While retailers still retained personal relationships with their wealthiest customers and were always careful to keep tabs on their customers’ credit, the figure of the anonymous urban middle-class shopper—delineated in newspapers and other printed ephemera—began to take shape as a recognizable entity. By the 1840s and 1850s consumers and inhabitants of a city or region who read the proliferation of printed advertisements could envision and experience a connection to a consuming public beyond their immediate social circle.47 Anyone who read an advertisement had to be aware that it could appeal not only to his or her own interests but also to the interests of the other people who read it. Moreover, encountering each other in shops and stores where similar products stood side by side reinforced that notion. Magazine articles detailing fashionable dress and books discussing home management and décor also suggested a shared material culture.48 Perhaps newly aware that as shoppers their attention was courted and their wants looked after, individuals

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were aware that when they bought goods in this urban retail environment, they shared that act and their desires for new goods with many other Americans. These nebulous connections were reinforced by the ways in which consumers saw images of themselves reflected in the commercial lithography of the 1840s and 1850s. Of course the success of new printing technologies meant that Americans faced a panoply of images of themselves at midcentury. The lithographed “city view” offered up tonal depictions of urban landscapes, providing artistic and accurate renditions of familiar buildings, monuments, and edifices. By 1840, dioramas and panoramic views vied with early daguerreotypes, and tintypes, offering ever more intriguing views of individuals and their landscapes. Pictorial magazines such as Frank Leslie’s Illustrated and Gleason’s Pictorial Magazine flourished, surrounding Americans with reflections of themselves and their society. But no single genre was more familiar or widespread than the commercial pictures of stores and city streets. They were the images that most lithographers produced to sustain their business from week to week.49 These images appeared on trade cards and later as billheads, in catalogues and city directories, or framed and displayed at train stations or commercial hotels. But if these images existed in a wide variety of sizes and contexts, they were linked through their subject matter and style. A distinctive rendering of American retail stores, which displayed shop, goods, and consumers in an elegant and orderly configuration, represented an emerging advertising genre that could perhaps be summed up as a “retailscape.” These prints were always different in their details, but they were united by common visual themes. A typical retailscape most often displayed the store frontage, emphasizing the signage and in particular the name of the business. Artists and lithographers also chose to show off the large expanses of glass windows through which the commodities for sale were clearly visible. But the inclusion of shoppers in these images was perhaps the most notable innovation in these prints. While advertising from the earlier decades of the nineteenth century most often included iconography, ranging from boxes and bales to the more elaborate depictions of classical figures (Figure 11), later images stood apart through their inclusion of everyday shoppers. Figures strolled along the streets or through the store, browsing through the plethora of goods on offer (Figure 12). They cut deliberately elegant figures: well dressed, leisured, and identifiably middle class. Although specific in their representation, they were nonetheless anonymous in their uniformity.50

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Figure 11. “John Bordman, Hat & Fur Store, no. 56 Cornhill, Boston,” Boston, 1820 or 1821, trade card, 49⁄32 × 328⁄32 in. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

It was the inclusion of consumers in these advertisements that set these images apart from other lithographs of the day. Unlike the “city view,” which portrayed the scene from a bird’s-eye vantage point, the “retailscape” invited viewers into the landscape they were viewing. Collapsing the distance between the scene and the spectator erased any sense of detached observation. Thus these prints offered their observers a chance to identify directly with the scene and shoppers they saw, connecting the viewer to the imagined scene. Moreover, as these images proliferated, they moved further and further away from the point of their origin. While traditional city views were often bought by the residents of one particular city, these retailscapes traveled far and wide.51

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Figure 12. “Finn & Burton’s Paper Hangings Warehouse, no. 142, Arch St. Phila.” W. H. Rease (Philadelphia: F. Kuhl, April 1849), print: lithograph, 16½ × 1919⁄32 in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

As trade cards and billheads they moved from retailer to consumer, circling out from their original location. As fliers they were posted and sent throughout the city, and as images in catalogues they traveled across cities to small towns and country retail stores, providing the scenes with wide audiences, who were invited to aspire to the lives lived by the consumers in the picture.52 Through printed advertisements, the figure of the middle-class urban consumer became the normative model for a heterogeneous muddle of shoppers across the United States. Race and class certainly limited the possibilities of this aspirational visual culture. The shoppers in midcentury advertising and retailscapes were always white, and the idea of black shoppers was either resolutely ignored or lampooned mercilessly in satirical print. As early as the 1820s, for example,

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middle-class African American shoppers were mocked in a series of cartoons produced by Philadelphia artist Edward W. Clay. His series, “Life in Philadelphia,” targeted the social aspirations of the more prosperous free black population of the Quaker City, making fun of their efforts to participate in the burgeoning culture of white bourgeois retail fashion.53 One particularly damning image depicts an overdressed African American woman asking her equally overdressed male friend what he “tinks” of her “new poke bonnet.” The hat she is referring to is so large that it hides her face, creating a ludicrous profile. The joke is made more vicious still when her companion “Frederick Augustus” replies that he doesn’t like it because he can no longer see her face and distinguish her from other “she niggers” (Figure 13). Clay’s image worked on several levels. It certainly mocked fashionable culture in general, teasing those consumers who bought trendy styles that were impractical and excessive. Behind the teasing was an accusation that without good taste, white consumers were no better than African Americans and thus just as contemptible. But the real venom was directed against African Americans who sought to become a part of that culture, spending their money on goods that were indicative of fashionable culture but could never give them access to that society and respectability. Frederick Augustus’s comment is also a cruel reminder that no matter how hard African American consumers tried, they would always be simply “niggers,” indistinguishable from one another for middle-class white men and women. Clay’s intention was clear. He hoped to communicate to any black American who saw such a print that consumption was not a tool they could use to develop personal style or claim social status. Clay’s vicious humor translated into violent backlash against prosperous African Americans. In August 1834, white working-class Philadelphians launched a huge three-day attack on the prosperous and influential free black community in the city. This hostility was in part the physical manifestation of the resentment that poorer whites felt against the “dressy blacks and dandy colored beaux and belles,” who were claiming cultural capital beyond their white neighbors’ means.54 However, these outbursts and exclusions were not always enacted by an enraged mob. Charles Haswell, an author looking back over his time in New York, recalled an incident from 1825 that suggests just how seriously individual white consumers took African American attempts to partake of the consumer culture they arrogantly assumed to be their own. “Passing up Broadway in the winter of 1825–6 at the northern corner of Vesey Street, I witnessed in great part the following scene . . . a man, well dressed

Figure 13. “Life in Philadelphia.” “What you tink of my new poke bonnet . . . ?” Edward Williams Clay (Philadelphia: Published by S. Hart, 65 So. 3d. St., c. 1830), etching, hand colored, 8¼ × 7 in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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and of presentable appearance, had dragged a chinchilla hat from off the head of a negress, stamped on it, and then threw it into the gutter, where it was rapidly borne down the street. Upon being questioned why he had done it, he replied: “I have just paid eighteen dollars for a chinchilla hat for my sister, and I don’t mean that any nigger-wench shall wear one like it, while I know it.”55 Thus while Clay’s female figure had been an object of fun, the woman that Haswell saw that day had been physically assaulted as a result of her choice. For Clay and Haswell, the lesson offered was that no matter how well African Americans attempted to integrate themselves into the middle-class world of consumer goods, their efforts would not enable them to assimilate into the polite culture of American urban life.56 Indeed, both men would have agreed that black men and women were not supposed to be consumers. Instead, white Americans imagined African Americans largely as slaves, objects in the marketplace rather than independent agents. As property, slaves were the bedrock of not only a southern economy but also the larger national economy, their bodies used as the hard currency that gave value to the paper-based transactions that fueled the expansion of the American marketplace, both domestically and internationally.57 Even white abolitionists tended to overlook African Americans as consumers. The free produce movement, which was intended to bring pressure to bear on slave owners through the boycott of slaveproduced goods, made consumer decisions on behalf of African Americans.58 As a rule, black men and women were denied economic agency. This outlook helps to explain why the purchases made by the small community of elite free blacks that lived in Philadelphia and New York caused so much consternation among the white communities who witnessed these transactions. The material comforts and economic successes of these black individuals and their families defied the racial order that underwrote the American economy. Similarly their success in managing their economic lives also challenged the discourse that claimed African Americans were irresponsible, dependent, and even irrational individuals.59 The sober responsibility with which families like the Fortens and Casseys in Philadelphia managed their households made it difficult to claim that African Americans were incapable of acting as economically independent citizens.60 This is precisely why those claims were made with such vehemence. Between the 1830s and the 1850s, the formal exclusion of African Americans from the body politic combined with these existing prejudices regarding black economic capabilities to underwrite the idea that black men and women could not be valuable as citizen-consumers. More than that, the insistence on

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the part of white commentators that African Americans could not contain or control their desires also meant that they were never considered to be patriotconsumers either. Thus formally excluded from citizenship, they were also denied the opportunity to even claim they offered service as consumers through the shouldering of civic obligation.61 Similarly, although far less violently, the commercial images of the day sought to distinguish between the leisured consumer and the laboring man or woman, suggesting that despite their economic reliance on one another, they nonetheless occupied separate social and cultural arenas. One of Philadelphia’s most prolific commercial artists, W. H. Rease neatly articulated this division through his graphic designs. In his retailscapes, he usually depicted cart men hard at work, focused on loading or unloading commodities, their backs turned on the middle-class shoppers, who, in turn, had their eyes turned toward the rows of goods lining the store windows. The juxtaposition of laborers and shoppers drew a visual boundary around the parameters of the consumer community. Lacking time, money, and gentility, the workingman was visually separated from the precincts of the middle-class store, despite the fact that his labor made him an intrinsic part of retail culture.62 Similarly, depictions of the store’s interiors reinforced these distinctions. These were scenes that were insulated from the point of production and instead furnished to look like private domestic interiors. In these spaces the middleclass culture of the drawing room prevailed. Quiet conversation—only possible in salesrooms where machinery did not clank and workers were not busy—replaced the noisier environment of workshop and retail space combined. Tables and chairs echoed the intimacy of tête-à-têtes shared on sofas and around tea tables.63 In short, the depictions of shop interiors reinforced the idea that only those with middle-class habits and sensibilities would be able to navigate the maturing retail culture of the 1840s and 1850s. The visual vocabulary of Rease’s lithographs as well as the arrangement of the interiors of urban stores suggest that engaging with the retail culture of the 1840s was in itself a means by which individuals could assert their claims to middle-class status. By shopping in a certain way, American men and women could assume a genteel sensibility that marked them out as middle class. By moving through these spaces as knowledgeable shoppers, being courted and waited on by clerks and store owners, perusing and eventually buying the items that signaled domesticity and refinement was certainly a way for Americans to lay claim to a middleclass status and for those same citizens to ascertain who shared that status. Such images worked to define the middle-class consumer as the norma-

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tive and indeed the most valuable type of consumer that existed in urban America. In contrast to the situation that African Americans found themselves in, where law and visual representation worked in tandem to exclude black people from both the polity and the marketplace as self-interested agents, white workingmen navigated a very different set of realities and discourses. Even as they were empowered legally as citizens through an expanding franchise and participated in an ever-growing urban marketplace, these images communicated to them that their economic citizenship would be limited to the labor they undertook. Their role as a citizen-consumer was far from confirmed. Working white women were even more marginal, their economic labor rendered invisible in this burgeoning commercial culture. They did not appear as workers in the advertisements for elegant stores and fancy good shops, and the secondhand shops in which they made their purchases were not delineated in the commercial retailscapes of the day. In terms of their identities as citizen-consumers, they did not exist at all. These images worked hard to prescribe the race and class of potential consumers, but the pictorial advertisements did not promote white middleclass female consumers above male. On the contrary, the retailscapes featured many images of the neatly dressed male consumer, strolling past plate-glass windows, or bent over glass counters in their uniform of a long dark coat and a tall dark hat.64 Indeed both male and female middle-class shoppers were depicted in these advertisements as refined, elegant, and in control. This characterization marked a departure from earlier discussions of consumption and especially female consumers. In eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century discourses on consumption, the female consumer had been a potentially dangerous individual, marked out as the usual perpetrator of reckless and excessive consumption.65 Although the idea that the female consumer could easily become more extravagant than men did not disappear at midcentury, there was a shift in the representation of female consumers. Moving away from the pictures of self-indulgent or spoiled women, pictorial advertisements presented the idea that middle-class female shoppers were legitimately virtuous individuals in their own right. Indeed, lithographers depicted female consumers in these advertisements as the very epitome of urban taste and refinement. The women’s gentility as consumers helped cultivate the idea that the public arena of the marketplace could be domesticated and infused with a sophistication that equaled anything that Europe had to offer. Men who subscribed to this domestication of the marketplace were not excluded; if anything they were visually encouraged to follow the female lead.

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The retailers’ efforts to introduce domesticity to the marketplace were in part an effort to create an attractive and familiar environment for middle-class shoppers, encouraging the wealthy to spend their money.66 But the domestication of the marketplace was also an attempt by retailers to combat the dangers of the growing urban marketplace, where customers were no longer familiar, confidence scams were common, and deception and fraud were the biggest problems facing any businessman. Retailers may have hoped that the introduction of domesticity to the marketplace would help them identify the frauds and fakes, who would be tripped up by the rituals of polite culture. By midcentury, politeness, tact, and sentimental acquaintanceship became the means that middle-class families used to screen out the social riff-raff. Retailers hoped the same tools would allow them to spot the shoppers who planned to run up bills they would never pay or “shove” counterfeit notes into their tills.67 Of course, the domestication of the marketplace didn’t guarantee success. Henry Southworth, the millinery store clerk, jotted down one such cautionary tale in 1851: [Mr. Paddon] related to me a curious incident which transpired a few days ago. . . . It seems (a lady) I mean to write a female called at his store and ordered certain articles . . . [to be] sent home a certain day. The articles were sent and the boy who carried was requested to call the next day for the pay[,] accordingly he done so, but when he did call he was informed that the Lady was married and had left town the previous day, while he was there several Bills were presented for payment and refused, it seems she had run up Bills for her wedding dress, confectionary, false hair &c &c and a large bond Bill, she had passed her self off for a rich person and had succeeded in catching a husband, who is a clerk in a dry goods store receiving a salary of $800 a year, I pity the poor fellow.68 Yet retailers continued to cultivate the environment and habits that reflected a middle-class marketplace, perhaps in the hopes that these refinements would protect them from being swindled. Such faith elevated the female consumer to new importance. This reflected a broader shift in American culture that was gradually imbuing women with greater economic agency. By 1839, laws in various states on married women’s property allowed wives a far greater control over their own assets, providing women with some of the basic economic rights of citizenship.69 This new financial independence, combined with the convictions of commer-

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cial men that women’s tasteful gentility improved the urban marketplace, helped to shift the perception of women at midcentury. No longer simply patriot-consumers, whose duty it was to serve the nation through their consumption, the new figure of the urban middle-class female consumer was one imbued with power, who could more easily claim attention, respect, and independent agency in the commercial sphere. Despite retailers’ beliefs that they could domesticate the marketplace and entice only the well-to-do shoppers, the reality was that the boundaries of the marketplace were permeable and messy. The nature of cities like Philadelphia, Boston, and New York made it possible for a broad swath of people to interact with one another, in ways that blurred class lines. Clerks in New York who waited on customers at lunchtime could join the throng of shoppers on Broadway after dinnertime.70 Mechanics in Philadelphia might pull on their coats after leaving their workshops and become indistinguishable from store owners and clerks as they passed through fashionable shopping districts. The daughter of a genteel family from Baltimore or Boston that had fallen on hard times might be mistaken for a seamstress and vice versa. Indeed, individuals who did not have the other markers of class such as professional status, wealth, or property could appropriate the consumer goods and shopping practices that signaled middle-class status. Moreover, the neatly bounded physical urban spaces depicted in the commercial lithographs and advertising images did not match up to the reality of the city. A thriving secondhand economy gave less wealthy consumers access to a wide variety of consumer goods. In New York, for example, residents knew that Chatham Street and the Bowery was the neighborhood where cheap secondhand clothing stores, slop shops, and pawnbrokers abounded. Although observers condemned the trade as cheap and flashy, these areas nonetheless provided the less well off with access to consumer goods, which were at least new to them.71 William Bobo, a visiting South Carolinian, directed those who wished to get better prices on hats and clothes to Canal and Hudson Streets, dismissing Broadway as the place where only the “tens” and the “strangers” traded.72 Despite retailers and puffers promoting the existence of distinctive retail districts, these areas were not neatly divided, and consumers of all classes and kinds could pass back and forth between these different worlds. Even the wealthy might pass from one retail world to another. Francis White, a wealthy resident of Brookline, Massachusetts, made extra money for himself by selling his clothes to a secondhand clothes shop, and aspiring middle-class families went to auctions to “furnish their house.”73

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In fact, despite the ease with which the middle-class consumer was constructed graphically by advertisers and commercial lithographers and given substance by the commercial culture they depicted, contemporary observers often expressed their anxiety that they could not always identify on a daily basis who was middle class and who was an imposter. Yet commercial literature and images, visible in both public and private spaces across the midAtlantic, continued to reinforce the idea that white middle-class consumers constituted an imagined community of American shoppers. For broad swaths of urban and rural consumers across the Northeast, the commercial images and advertising appeals provided a shared language of consumption, one that allowed individuals to classify their shopping experiences and interpret them as part of a shared culture of manners, practices, aspirations, and ideals. By the 1850s, then, urban middle-class citizens were familiar with the values and practices of genteel consumption and used those practices as best they could to exclude the working class and racially different from their middle-class community. In a world where the realities of living in a democratic polity were unpleasant, chaotic, and sometimes downright dangerous, this alternative vision of the wider community provided both a comforting fantasy to both retailers and politicians and in the case of racial identity offered a useful means of excluding the unwanted citizens from an imagined community.74 This vision took on an added importance as middle-class hopes of domesticating and refining urban public space were constantly challenged. The mercantile elite in particular were “eager to disprove Alexis De Tocqueville’s assertion two decades earlier that ‘in few of the civilized nations of our time . . . have great artists, distinguished poets, or celebrated writers been more rare.’ ”75 Attempting to find new ways to assert a national culture, one that was both splendid enough to compete with Europe, yet democratic enough to fit America, some citizens chose to manifest their cultural superiority through their consumption. One of the most dramatic efforts at this undertaking was the lavish piece of puffery assembled by the Reverend Charles E. Lester in 1854. Taking as his subject matter some of New York’s most successful businesses, he set about praising these establishments, coupling his tributes with poetry and artistic prints that could be cut out and kept. The high-cultural tone of the entire book reflected Lester’s belief that American society was reaching a new pinnacle in terms of national taste and sophistication. Thus his paean to the jewelry company Ball, Black and Company described the gold and silver tea sets that were available as “thoroughly American . . . [with] none of the air of servility about them—Europeans stopped to gaze on them for they breathed

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the Spirit of our Nationality.”76 Lester was impressed that these items had been made in America. But unlike the boosters at the Franklin and American Institutes, Lester did not think that an item had to be made in America for it to reflect a national quality, nor did he restrict consumers who wished to shop patriotically to American-made goods. In fact, in his book he praised just as many stores who stocked and sold imported items, such as clothing or carpets. For Lester, the American quality of the item lay in its widespread availability. In fact, if anything, Lester expressed an even greater admiration for the businesses that imported fine goods into the country. Describing the imported carpets of Betts, Kelleher and Betts, he congratulated Americans on the democratization of their consumption, noting that “here the plain house or chaste cottage of the working man can be adorned and made comfortable with small means; while the opulent can gratify the most cultivated and refined taste. The ‘iron-age’ of the Republic has gone by—and opulence is drawing around us curtains of silk and gold.”77 The extensive access to high quality new goods was something that Lester saw as uniquely American. He believed he lived in “an age of luxury” and that this new epoch had been ushered in by “Democracy.” For Lester, democracy was not simply about political representation. It was expressed through material wealth and widespread luxury. His equation of domestic luxury to personal independence left his reader in no doubt that the nation’s widespread prosperity and refinement was a unique feature of the American Republic. In no other country might you find, for example, “Hiram Anderson—the Carpet Merchant of the People.” Indeed, Lester’s book of advertising was a striking example of a new American understanding of consumption: to be able to buy whatever one liked, regardless of where it had been made or even what it was, was a uniquely American ability.78 Lester’s vision was both aspiration and fiction. Many Americans in the 1840s and 1850s, particularly in immigrant neighborhoods of eastern cities and hardscrabble rural areas, were struggling to make ends meet, with no spare money to buy carpets, however cheap. Yet the idea that access to these kinds of goods was unique to living in the United States proved to a powerful and pervasive fantasy, one that continued to resonate in American culture.79 As retailers and advertisers connected genteel consumption to a vision of a domesticated democracy, white middle-class demands and desires took on a new political valence. By the 1840s, proponents of free trade appropriated the rhetoric that linked American tastes and access to cheaper goods to an

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expression of American democracy and used it to champion the abolition of tariffs. The first step in this argument was to take the retailers’ respect for the middle-class public’s taste seriously and frame it as a demand that could not be denied in the American democratic marketplace. This attitude toward the public’s taste was a significant intellectual shift. The problem of American taste had always been one connected to the issue of national strength and identity for cultural elites. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, cultural nationalists like Noah Webster and Benjamin Rush had lamented the absence of American literature, theater, and language. But the anxiety that Americans did not have their own culture was not limited to the artistic world. Instead it had spilled over into the realm of fashion, manners, and goods. In answer to the question of how to cultivate an American aesthetic, elite citizens struggled to respond. Drawn to the gentility of British culture and society, they nonetheless recognized that British goods challenged their political, economic and cultural independence.80 Elites compromised by continuing to consume imported luxuries themselves, but urging abstention and restraint on the broader public. In the 1820s, as American manufacturing had matured, the anxiety over American taste had become the province of manufacturers and protectionists, who were concerned that Americans preferred foreign manufactured goods to the ones they were able to produce domestically. As the efforts of organizations such as the Franklin and American Institutes suggested, the problem as they saw it was teaching Americans that they were able to buy the kinds of goods they wanted while still supporting the producers of the U.S. economy. The institutes imagined that all they had to do was to help provide Americans with the goods that could compete with the European imports, thus making domestic producers the first choice of American consumers. However, when simple availability had failed to attract consumers, the institutes, and in particular the Franklin Institute, turned their attention to the task of training American consumers to have a taste for American-made goods. Yet that project too had met with failure. In the end, the protectionists’ vision of American consumers and their taste was cast in the mold of restriction, restraint, and constant reeducation, a model that had never been popular. This was not the case for proponents of free trade. Trading in the currency of the newly powerful consumer, advocates of laissez-faire policies suggested that American consumers, along with their tastes and desires, should be respected and attended to in their own right. In adopting this argument, the free traders were not taking their cue directly from the retailers. Rather

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they were making use of these ideas to refine a rhetoric they had been working on for some years. Indeed, the free-trade vision of the consumer that took shape in the 1840s had its roots in the language used in the early 1830s by men such as Condy Raguet and Senator Robert Hayne. The passion and fury that erupted over the Tariff of Abominations had generated a political language that did not disappear even after the crisis was resolved in 1833. Instead, this political language was taken up by a new cohort of free traders, who found themselves speaking to a far more receptive audience in the North. The success of American manufacturing through the 1820s had convinced many citizens and politicians that American industry was no longer in its infancy and did not require such stringent protections. By 1842 tariffs stood at 20 percent duty across the board. Indeed, despite the Whigs’ tariffs, the end of the Nullification Crisis had signaled a shift away from broad public support for protectionism, and the 1830s and 1840s were marked by a new interest in the possibilities of free trade.81 The postnullification world encouraged the advocates of free trade in the North to try to move the debate beyond the demands of sectionalism and the interests of planters. But in leaving behind the idea of the planter-consumer, free-trade advocates found themselves on experimental terrain as they attempted to shape an identity for consumers and make a case for consumer rights and entitlements. In doing so, they appeared to have taken inspiration from the commercial world, which was changing around them. Abandoning the debate over whether the consumer was a rich southern planter, lowly farmer, or in fact any American going to market, free traders focused instead on the consumer as a knowledgeable middle-class member of a respectable household. The best example of this approach came from the pen of Freeman Hunt, editor of the Merchants Magazine. In 1841, he published an article that stated: “every man finds his commonest pleasures increased by the productions of other countries. . . . The table on which we eat is probably of wood grown in South America; the cloth which covers it is from Ireland; the cups from which we drink are from China or England; the knives in part from Liverpool and in part from the deserts of Africa; the spoons from the mines of Mexico; the coffee which we sip is from the distant island of Java; the sugar which suits it so admirably to our taste from the island of Cuba.”82 His point was that the government ought not hinder consumers in making these kinds of purchases, purchases that were the prerogatives of middle-class American citizens.83 With this argument, Freeman Hunt brought the politics of free trade to the consumer’s breakfast table. Moving with ease from the comforts

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of home to the corridors of Congress, Hunt went on to condemn Whig efforts to place a tariff on West Indian sugar to protect sugar production in Louisiana. Using powerful language, he called it unjust and oppressive because it imposed “a tax on all the pursuits of industry—that is, on all the consumers of sugar within the United States—for the purpose of favoring a particular branch of production, which we think government has no right to do.”84 Thus Hunt placed male and female middle-class consumers, and their rights, at the center of a free-trade argument. Indeed, including all those seated at the breakfast table, Hunt had formulated a political rhetoric that elevated women from patriot-consumers to citizen-consumers. The choices women made for their households were now newly imagined as rights that deserved consideration and protection. The passage of a new tariff in 1842 breached the 20 percent ceiling on duties that had been established by the Compromise of 1833, raising duties on imported items and causing fresh frustration for free traders.85 Nor were these raises insignificant. Imported printed cotton cloth, for example, could not be had in the United States for under thirty cents a yard, even though Britain was selling it to American wholesalers at thirteen cents a yard. The combined effects of an ad valorem charge and a minimum valuation effectively put the tariff at nearly 60 percent.86 Free traders continued to object, although their political support in the North was limited. Pennsylvania, with its mining and steel industries, continued to clamor for protection. New York was less unified. Wealthy Democrats in New York, especially those involved in the international cotton trade, had limited sympathy for liberal laissez-faire policy, although some workingmen and small farmers often demanded that free soil should come before free trade.87 In the South, objections to the tariff intensified after the Panic of 1837 and became entangled with proslavery philosophy. As a result, southerners also called for free trade, but for quite different reasons to their northern counterparts.88 They continued to cast the consumer in the light of the victimized planter. But in both cases, these authors continued to place the consumer at the heart of their argument, as they made their case for a tariff-free nation. The free traders’ efforts to make the connection between free trade and consumer advantage were so successful that even the opposition were forced to deal with the assertion. In a piece on tariffs written in 1844, protectionists attempted to dispel the myth that free trade ensured low prices for consumers. “In 1841,” they wrote, “the duty levied upon cotton goods, under the then existing revenue law was nominally 20 percent. The tariff of 1842, as is alleged

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by the ‘free trade’ Loco Focos, increased that revenue duty to a highly protective one of 160 per cent. In January 1841, a piece of 4-4 shirting of 32 yards in quantity, cost on average $3.12. In January 1844, under the ‘black Whig tariff’ the like goods in quantity and quality sold for $2.40; a difference in favor of the consumer . . . of 72 cents.”89 But this kind of reasoning did not seem to erode the supposition that free trade was the political economy that favored the interest of the American consumer. As an article in the Boston Cultivator put it in 1841, “[Free trade] sounds well in the public ear and a general system of free trade would be a capital affair if we could persuade the nations of the earth to adopt it. We, the people, the consumers, might then purchase where goods should be found cheapest and the products of the whole earth would be offered to us.”90 Echoing the constitutional preamble was no coincidence. By the 1840s, middle-class Americans, men and women both, had begun to imagine that cheap consumer goods, no matter what their provenance might be, were something to which they were entitled as American citizens. This sense of entitlement undergirded a newfound respect for American citizens’ tastes and purchases. But it also contributed to a growing set of arguments that posited the power of the purchaser as a crucial facet of America’s modern commercial democracy. Such ideas had particular purchase among an emerging group of Democrats associated with the Young America movement. These men eschewed the party’s old aversion to mercantile pursuits and instead embraced a new kind of commercial egalitarianism rooted in the expansion of free trade and international markets.91 Thomas P. Kettell, the editor of the United States Economist, was one such individual. Kettell’s career had included a position as financial editor for the New York Herald, as well as a stint writing for Freeman Hunt himself. Kettell had also been an editor for John O’Sullivan’s Democratic Review, and his free trade credentials mingled with a powerful current of nationalist rhetoric.92 The United States Economist, a trade publication addressing itself to any and all involved in the dry goods business, translated these principles into a practical rubric for commercial men. Thus in 1852 Kettell pointed out to his retail-minded readers that if they hoped to be successful, then “the tastes and wants of the American people” were something to be studied. Urging his readers to keep a “watchful eye on young America,” Kettell promised that those who did would soon become “the occupants of palaces built with moneys gained through their intimate acquaintance with American tastes.”93 This respect for American tastes was combined with a firm belief that consumers could not be forced into purchasing protected items, even if protariff politicians urged consumers to do so as part of

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their duty. Pulling apart Horace Greeley’s proposal to institute a tariff of 40 percent on imported silks, Kettell pointed to what he believed to be the fatal flaw in this plan. “We can make silk dear enough—on paper—to remunerate the grower; BUT WE CANNOT MAKE PEOPLE BUY DEAR SILKS.”94 Kettell’s critique went to the very heart of the problem, the desires and decisions of American shoppers themselves. Consumers, as Kettell noted, could not be commanded. Nor should they be unfairly taxed by protection. Continuing with his analysis of the proposed silk tariff, Kettell argued that with all the duties imposed on raw silk, dyes, and chemicals used in making silk, there would be in the end “a tax upon CONSUMERS of 12 cents per yard.”95 The implication was that tariffs designed to protect industry placed an unfair obligation on a consumer who lived in a democracy whose unique quality, as Charles Lester had pointed out, was the democratic access to cheaper luxury goods. By 1846 the tide had turned in favor of free trade. The Walker Tariff, passed in 1846, applied a simple 25 percent ad valorem tariff, effectively dropping duties from 57 to 25 percent. Between 1846 and 1860, the U.S. government eliminated protective tariffs and watched in satisfaction as the American economy largely prospered.96 For free traders, this prosperity seemed to be the natural result of their economic policy. By the 1840s and 1850s a new understanding of the American consumer had taken shape. Pieced together by retailers and advertisers, credit agencies and merchants, free-trade politicians and their opponents, the consumer they created was a powerful cultural force to be reckoned with. As a group these consumers were white, middle class, domesticated, and fiercely independent, encompassing a broad swath of citizens that represented a specific vision of American democracy as well as the nation’s unswerving progress toward sophistication and civilization. Their tastes were to be catered to, an approach that dismissed the efforts of organizations like the Franklin Institute, which imagined training Americans to consume differently. Ultimately, these new ideal consumers had the right to demand that nothing, and especially not the government, obstruct their right to obtain desired goods at the lowest price. It was a radically different figure from the one that had predominated in the 1810s, one that only became more firmly entrenched as America enjoyed fifteen years of prosperity between 1846 and 1861. Yet, with the consumer such a visible and influential figure in American political and cultural discourse, it should hardly be surprising that when that prosperity was threatened, the consumer quickly came under attack. The

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Panic of 1857 caused a hasty resurfacing of older ideas about the perils of luxury in a republic. With this old anxiety came a new critique, one that focused on the dangerous effects of the consumer’s relentless drive for cheap goods. Following older patterns, it soon became clear that the target of these attacks was the female consumer. She, who had during the good times been seen to domesticate the public spaces of the city with her genteel shopping practices, quickly degenerated into a dry goods vulture, who picked over the pieces of the commercial crisis with unpatriotic glee.97 As the panic took hold, journalists and satirists were quick to point out that female shoppers were rushing to Broadway, desperate to make the most of retailers’ efforts to sell off their stock quickly and for cash. As the great shopping precinct became plastered with signs that announced the “Great Sacrifice” of panic-driven sales, female shoppers were depicted as part of an unattractive commercial frenzy, or what one author called a “shopping mania,” a horde of consumers unable to restrain their impulse to go after the cheapest goods possible.98 Described as a “spending animal—a creature whose destiny is to buy,” whose heart is “a bargain,” whose soul is an “immense reduction,” and whose very existence is “an alarming sacrifice,” these women epitomized the very worst of what the newly powerful American consumer could be.99 Their shallow pursuit of sartorial splendor obliterated all their “republican virtues,” and the ability to obtain new goods, which for Lester had represented the very best of American democracy, had become nothing more than an undignified mob scene, where domestic gentility had degenerated into chaos.100 These caricatured consumers symbolized an uncomfortable truth that Americans were beginning to sense about the free market: that it was incompatible with the order and security that middle-class Americans craved for, for their nation.101 This specter of disorder, coupled with the nation’s need to prove its cultural superiority on a world stage, made consumption a particular object of public scrutiny by midcentury. Even before the onslaught of the panic, journalists urged women in particular to set a good example to all. “That the rich should spend their wealth is naturally to be expected,” opined one writer. “But it would be well if it were spent in such a way as not to vulgarize the tastes and demoralize the character of their fellow-citizens.”102 While no free trader, or retailer or advertiser for that matter, was prepared to curtail the consumer’s enthusiasms, there was a tacit understanding embedded in their critiques that for the Republic to remain stable, free from the convulsions of panics and other economic disasters, consumers must learn to shop judiciously, according to their station in society. If a reduced tariff meant that

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government was to have a limited role in regulating and restraining the kinds of goods that a consumer might buy, then the consumer’s obligation to shop wisely became accordingly more important.103 As urban Americans in the North came to understand themselves as part of a republic of powerful consumers, who were entitled to a share of the luxuries and comfort the nation had to offer, they also understood that their consumption was a personal civic obligation. But these oppressive obligations resurfaced only at times of national commercial stress. At those moments, Americans could point the finger at the citizens, especially the female ones, who had made poor consumer choices and blame their lack of responsibility for financial disaster. But when economic prosperity reigned, Americans could congratulate themselves on their commercial republic and enjoy the inheritance of luxury that was rightfully theirs as citizens of the new American capitalist democracy.

Chapter 6

Consumers at War

In April 1861, with the firing of the first shots on Fort Sumter, the Confederates declared war on the Union and its vision of a commercial, free-labor republic. In an attempt to prepare the citizens of the South for what was to come, the editor of DeBow’s Review, the leading proslavery magazine, published a stern warning to its secessionist readers. “We have brave men enough to conduct war. We need only money. By cheap living, we can save money enough to defray the expenditure of war, however long. . . . The soldier is ready to sacrifice his life for his country; can’t the civilian sacrifice a dinner, remit a glass of wine, give up his broadcloth and carriage?”1 The message, along with the anxiety, was clear. For the Confederacy to have a hope of winning the war against the Union, southern citizens would have to restrain their consumption for the sake of nation. In contrast, the men and women of the Union seemed to fear no such restriction. New York merchants had been understandably fearful in the months before the war, anxious that a conflict would destroy the valuable business they did with southern cotton magnates. But with the outbreak of hostilities, New York City witnessed a frenzy of consumption. In July 1861, the New-York Tribune reported, “We hear about ‘war’ prices. . . . Dry goods at marvelous prices. Clothing at next to no price.”2 Shoppers apparently heard as well and did not hold back. Instead, they rushed to take advantage of the low prices that came as a result of retailers trying to get rid of their overstock. Nor was this rush confined to the precincts of Broadway. Across the Northeast, advertisements appeared that conflated consumption with a strike against the Confederacy. In Enon, Pennsylvania, less than a month after the shots on Sumter were fired, local merchant Benjamin Ramage put up a broadside that conscripted shoppers to the Union cause. “Attention Volunteers!” proclaimed

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his poster, “Fort Sumter Re-taken . . . Ramage’s Store Reinforced by a Splendid Stock of New Goods . . . sold . . . at War Prices” (Figure 14). The chasm that had opened between northern and southern attitudes toward consumption had been thirty years in the making. Entwined with the issues of slave and free labor, as well as the dynamics of commerce and industrial production in antebellum America, this divergence over consumption became a part of the greater ideological conflict that fueled the rise of two sectional political economies in the nineteenth century.3 Although never the driving force behind increasing tensions between North and South, popular understandings of regional acts of consumption helped to shape sectional identity and sharpen sectional grievances. Thus as sectionalism morphed into secession, habits of consumption on both sides became a part of the debate over national obligation and civic duty. In the southern states, this process had begun with the rise of “King Cotton.” The expansion of the cotton kingdom in the 1830s presented Americans with new possibilities and aspirations. But ambitious fantasies were often accompanied by lurking concerns. In the southern states, writers, political economists, and politicians became increasingly concerned that the habits of their region’s shoppers were undermining the economic strength of their section. As champions of southern economic power, these men resented the South’s reliance on northern merchants and manufacturers. At the very moment they were imagining a future where cotton not only would conquer the continental Southwest but would ultimately lead them to economic dominance in the Gulf of Mexico and the South American continent, they were forced to confront their dependence on consumer goods made or sold by northern men and women.4 Identifying the consumption of such new goods with a loss of economic independence and a show of weakness, these men imagined shopping as an ideological liability, an act that exposed the institution of slavery as vulnerable and lacking in self-sufficiency. By contrast, in the northern states, middle-class white men and women invested the objects of material comfort with moral meaning, using them to signify the inherent superiority of the North’s free-labor political economy. Contrasting their domestic environments with those of southern planters and farmers, they delighted in the scarcity they read about in southern shacks and compared it smugly to their own comfortable middle-class gentility.5 Although they continued to grapple with the inequities of the marketplace, northerners imagined a citizen’s opportunity to shop for new goods as a symbol of America’s success in creating a civilized democratic republic.

Figure 14. “Attention volunteers! Fort Sumter Re-taken . . . Enon, Pa. May,” Benjamin Ramage ([Philadelphia]: Duross Bros., [1861?]), broadside, 24 × 199⁄32 in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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When Civil War broke out in April 1861, over a decade’s worth of diverging economic fantasies combined with the commercial exigencies of the moment to create two national political economies. Within each there was a quite different understanding of the civic role a consumer was obliged to play. In the Union, Republican politicians turned toward the tariff to create a political economy funded by consumer-driven revenues. But nearly two decades’ worth of support for free trade had left its mark on northern imaginations. Although Republicans ignored the ideas espoused by free traders that consumers were entitled to cheap goods, they did not ignore the free-trade contention that consumers were entitled to buy whatever they liked for the best price they could find. Jettisoning the moralizing tone that had once pervaded their economic ideology, protectionists finally accepted that consumers were not there to be educated, instructed, or protected from themselves. The Confederacy faced a very different set of problems. Adhering to the vision of a free-trade nation, southerners quickly found themselves in the very position they had dreaded: cut off from their source of manufactured goods and reliant on foreign powers for goods and revenue. Their only recourse was to return to the rhetoric of consumption that had predominated during the Revolutionary War. Urging women to return to the spinning wheel and elites to refrain from the world of goods, the Confederacy framed nonconsumption as the best kind of civic virtue. Trapped on a home front that rapidly became a battlefield, questions of self-denial soon became moot. Stripped of their possessions by war and scarcity, unable to marshal the funds to pay for more goods even if merchants had been able to offer them, southerners framed their material world through the lens of survival. Small wonder then that the Confederate vision of the virtuous consumer evaporated with the declaration of surrender at Appomattox. Americans at midcentury faced a bewildering number of theories through which they might try to understand their national economy. Competing entrepreneurs, merchants, retailers, writers, magazine editors, and politicians from all parts of the nation attempted to take the commercial opportunities and financial disadvantages that beset them and render them coherent by situating them within a broader cultural understanding of America’s political economy. Through these efforts, Americans imagined new economic landscapes that not only reflected an emerging sectional identity but ultimately helped to constitute the same. Although these economies were rooted in the realities of antebellum channels of commerce and patterns of production, it

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was ultimately the perception of two separate sectional economies that became politically powerful by the 1840s and 1850s. The South’s imagined economy was shaped by the fears that slavery was threatened by the region’s reliance on northern merchants and manufactures. This idea had emerged out of the Nullification Crisis, an event that had convinced many southerners that northern factions of merchants, farmers, and manufacturers were determined to profit at southern expense.6 But it was the Panic of 1837 that really galvanized southern planters.7 When the cotton bubble burst that year, planters across the Mississippi Valley were forced to confront not only the inherent weakness of a monoculture economy but also the southern dependence on northern capital. The loans they were being forced to repay were held by New York merchants and British banks, a fact that threw into sharp relief what one delegate to the Augusta Commercial Convention in 1837 called the “south’s degrading shackles of commercial dependence.”8 Such dependence came as a shock. The profitability of cotton could not be disputed; it was a commodity in demand all over the world. Thus the question that southerners began to confront in the late 1830s was how the South had come to be so humiliatingly dependent on northern capital, commerce, and by extension consumer goods. At the center of their explanations was their sense that the tariff policy of the United States was perpetuating a massive economic injustice.9 Frustrations with the tariff policy were numerous, but among the many problems that southern planters pointed to was their belief that the tariff forced them to pay above the odds for imported consumer goods that arrived by way of New York City. While some southern manufacturers, like William Gregg, had argued that the solution to this problem was for southerners to diversify their economy through industrialization, others argued that it was the resumption of a direct trade with Europe that would save the South from itself. If southerners could ship their cotton directly to British factories and bring back manufactured goods for southern and western consumers in return, then New York and its merchants would no longer be able to divest the South of its rightful prosperity by charging them extra for the goods that the profits of cotton had purchased.10 The call for direct trade thus seemed to be a simple and elegant solution to southern problems. Resentment and fear of the northern monopoly on trade would come to dominate the thinking of a number of southern nationalists.11 Yet the sources that fueled these acts of economic imagination were not always formal theories of political economy. In fact, more often they were prosaic and protean

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sources of information, their very ordinariness the key to their credibility. Any person who leafed through J. F. Kimball’s Business or Advertising Directory in 1846, for example, would have put down that tome convinced of one thing: the best place to buy consumer goods in the United States was New York City.12 Page after page of this useful guide to commerce was taken up with listings for Gotham offering a cornucopia of consumer goods that stood in stark contrast to the listings Kimball provided for other cities.13 For the imaginative reader, Kimball’s directory provided a mental map of America’s retail landscape in 1846, with New York City indisputably at the center of the nation, a position that southern boosters soon came to resent. J. F. Kimball’s directory aimed to attract the interest of southern and western storekeepers, merchants, and brokers, and New York City retailers were well aware of this fact. Their advertisements offered shoppers a wide range of goods that were already “on hand,” reflecting a market where consumers no longer lived close by but instead had only a limited time in the city before they were to return home.14 This courting of southern consumers was also reflected in New York retailers’ guarantees that they would ship their stock across the nation. William H. Guion, a carpet merchant, promised his customers, “Families from the country can have their Carpets &c baled and shipped free of expense,” and Roderick Lawrence, the proprietor of the Cheap Carpet Store, promised the same thing.15 New York retailers and manufacturers were all too eager to attract the custom of southern and western consumers, hoping to capture what William Kelley had called the “millions of luxurious citizens” whose needs and wants would be the driving force behind the economic growth of the northeastern United States.16 This imagined commercial landscape reflected New York’s very real stranglehold on the importation of consumer goods into the South. A year before the outbreak of Civil War, just over nine hundred ships bearing European goods arrived on the wharves of New York, meaning that the city’s stevedores could be sure of unloading at least three ships per working day.17 And although some of the goods that crammed the shelves of the city’s warehouses would be sold and sent to customers in the expanding western reaches of the United States, the southern United States and all its consumers still remained a crucial market for New York wholesalers and auctioneers.18 By the end of the 1830s this was the reality that regional boosters, southern merchants, and the concerned middle-class men of the South hoped to address. They gathered at a series of commercial conventions staged across the lower South to investigate how the South might take command of its own

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import and export trade and break New York’s stranglehold on southern commerce.19 By the mid-1840s, when the price of cotton dropped again, the idea of fostering a more direct trade with Europe became even more appealing. Cutting out the middlemen who drained the planters’ pockets of profit seemed to be a logical response to the depressing state of trade. “Why should not Richmond, Norfolk, Charleston, Savannah and Mobile, be depots for the supplies of the hundreds and thousands who flock twice a year to the Northern cities,” cried Benjamin Blake Minor in September 1845. “Those cities have their back country and resources; why should not our cities be entitled to the benefit of what seems so naturally to belong to them?”20 Advocating for a new system of paying duties called the warehousing system, which they hoped would encourage direct trade, campaigners like Minor and Matthew Fontaine Maury imagined a new world of commerce. They envisioned a system where the tariff no longer disadvantaged the cash-poor southern merchants who could not afford to pay the vast amounts of money required to land goods in the United States. Instead of paying the tariff on entry, duties would be paid only as the goods were sold to local retailers and sent on their way to American consumers. Goods intended for reexport could remain in bonded warehouses duty free. It was a system designed to enable southern merchants to finally gain a foothold in the vast reexport trade that New Yorkers had enjoyed for the better part of four decades. But it was also a means of allowing southern entrepreneurs to break into the import trade by waiving some of the upfront costs of importing that merchants faced.21 “Let the Warehousing System fill your Southern store-houses with bonded merchandize,” wrote Maury in October 1845. “This will ‘bring business to the place’ and attract Southern and Western store-keepers to them for their supplies. The Southern merchant will then find it to his interest to fix his abode permanently in the South and instead of carrying profits away, will remain there to spend his money among you.”22 With direct trade the South could come into its own, and New Orleans could be the southern New York for a new commercial era, “the mart of a great and powerful empire.”23 When the Warehousing Act was made into law in 1846 as a part of the Walker Tariff Act, the horizons of prosperity seemed to widen. Between 1845 and 1848, southerners faced the exciting possibilities of territorial expansion, a growing commercial empire, and the southern vistas of trade extending into the Gulf of Mexico and down the Amazon River.24 These were years when the imagined economy of the cotton kingdom seemed boundless. But at the same time, political machinations in the North

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threatened the expansion of slavery. The Walker Tariff had not laid to rest southern fears about northern domination of U.S. commerce, and the Warehousing Act did not seem to provide a great deal of impetus for southern merchants to change their ways. The dearth of inspectors and public stores, the stringent regulation of private warehouses, and the limited time allowed to merchants to keep the goods in storage before being forced to export or pay duties had all contributed to the failure of the warehousing system.25 The Wilmot Proviso, first proposed in 1846, had ignited a fearful debate on the expansion of slavery within both of the mainstream political parties across the sections by 1847.26 With the Mexican-American War promising further expansion still, southerners believed that that continued dependence on northern merchants for their consumer goods was a liability, politically, economically, and culturally. With federal legislation failing to live up to the job of solving their problems, they turned in on themselves to look for solutions. The answers they came up with began to focus with more force on their habits of consumption. Many southerners agreed that the answer to their problems was to withdraw their custom from northern stores and revive the weapon of nonintercourse.27 In particular, they focused on trying to cut New York out of their circuits of commerce. But even as many expressed their loathing for this metropolis of goods, they acknowledged the irresistible lures of the city. Publishing his Glimpses of New-York City in 1852, South Carolinian William M. Bobo demonstrated both the desire and disgust with which southerners approached this city of consumer delights. “As many of our Southern friends will doubtless wend their way North this season, to spend their hard earnings among those who seek to destroy them, as well as their peculiar institutions, it may not be amiss to post them up in the matter of hotel,” Bobo noted. Continuing with sartorial advice, he wrote: “Come, let us go over to Genin’s, 214 Broadway, (who ever goes any where else for a hat?) If you want anything for your children, go up to the St. Nicholas, to ‘Genin’s Bazaar’ 513 Broadway, and there you can have them fitted out in the latest style.”28 Bobo did not stop there. He went on to advise suit buyers to visit W. T. Jennings at 213 Broadway and those who were looking for jewelry to visit Tiffany, Young, and Ellis, also on the great shopping street of the metropolis. Bobo’s book clearly functioned on one level as a directory and guidebook for southern visitors to the city. But the book was also a scathing indictment of New York City and its inhabitants. At the heart of Bobo’s critique was the understanding that the whole city was governed by an unquenchable passion

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for money that gave rise to an immoral and extravagant population. He wrote with scorn about dandies and foppish “Avenuedles,” but the core of his disgust centered on the treatment of poor women. The New Yorker’s pursuit of profit, he argued, encouraged them to exploit young women, who labored for pitiful wages as “shop-tenders” or seamstresses, desperately attempting to elude the clutches of lascivious customers or worse, the degradation of the brothel.29 Directly connecting the glossy culture of consumption that pervaded New York society with the moral decay he saw at the city’s center, his book was both an invitation and a warning to southern readers. New York offered material delights, but the real price of these goods was a corruption of the soul. “Social life in New-York is a vast bubble, inflated by vanity and pride, and covered with rainbow hues reflected from the plate-glass windows of the dry-goods and millinery shops along Broadway,” he warned. “[The city’s] divinity is the goddess Caliconia—its scribe, Fashion—king, Mammon—its high priest, Stewart.”30 As Bobo’s work suggests, southern ambivalence toward northern merchants and material desires burgeoned in the 1850s. By midcentury, southern attitudes toward storekeepers living and working in their own section of the country were also deeply uncertain. On the one hand, southern storekeepers provided a rural community with a conduit to the exciting world of consumer goods, as well as offering men access to credit and important social spaces. In this respect, the store and its owner formed an invaluable part of southern rural life.31 On the other hand, the southern storekeeper represented all that the southern farmer feared. As a broker of credit, the store owner was also the keeper of debt. Because many southern farmers pledged their future crop toward the payment of accounts, the storekeeper’s demands to pay up and pay in cash were often feared by men who lived a precarious existence on the edge of financial solvency.32 In a society where slavery defined every aspect of a man’s standing, the prospects of dependency were deeply resented. With their seductive array of goods and the possibility of ruin lurking behind their counters, storekeepers occupied an ambiguous place in the minds of smalltown southern men and women. Southern authors helped to cement this ambivalence into regional truisms. In his account of the South, for example, Daniel R. Hundley divided the class of storekeeper into two types: honest and dishonest. He was more interested in the latter group, whom he dubbed “the Southern Yankee.”33 The chief characteristics of the Southern Yankee were disingenuous charm and greedy dishonesty. Trained in the arts of retail by northern opportunists, who

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had migrated south to set up business, the budding southern storekeeper soon learned “to split skeins of silk, selling a half-skein for a whole one, as well as to lie genteely, to look at all times smooth and insinuating, to be obsequious to the rich, and condescendingly affable and confidential to those of mean condition.”34 Yet this training in the arts of deception was only the first step in what would become a career-long practice of using commerce to swindle customers. The second step was the shopkeepers’ decision to associate with northern partners, whose knowledge of city prices and quality would allow the “raw Southerner” to navigate the city’s commercial realms with better effect. Hundley argued that this arrangement enabled southern merchants to buy their goods at the auction houses, secondhand stores, and pawnbrokers, where “old goods [were] sold for Southern and Western trade.” Buying these shabby, oldfashioned, poor-quality goods and passing them off as high-quality items was the road to profit. “Our Yankee consoles himself,” wrote Hundley “that in a few more years he will grow rich, when it will be plenty soon to enjoy telling the truth and being conscientious along with the other luxuries of life. And besides,” he added, “the honest farmers and mechanics, and calico-loving negroes, will never entertain a doubt but what they have received their money’s worth.”35 Hundley’s bitter summary of how a southern merchant willingly succumbed to the New York trade once again highlighted the deep-seated resentment southerners felt toward that singular metropolis and the ways it dominated their commerce both materially and culturally. Yet alongside this resentment there was also an implicit acceptance in Hundley’s writings that there was no other place that a southern merchant might want to get his goods. Once he turned his attention to that smaller class of merchants, the good, honest, and frugal storekeeper who worked hard to serve his customers, Hundley mentioned not one word about where these men purchased their stock.36 Yet in all likelihood, these merchants would also have looked to New York for their goods. Such accounts demanded that southerners examine the ways in which they did business. Their efforts led them swiftly to the conclusion that it was not just their regional habits of consumption that needed to be changed. Nonintercourse needed to be supplemented with a revolution in the southern practice of commerce. George McDuffie, who had served as governor of South Carolina and as a senator for the state delivered a report to the Commercial Convention gathered in Augusta in 1846, where he urged his fellow

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delegates to buy from southern merchants instead of northern suppliers. “It can scarcely be doubted,” claimed McDuffie, “that importing merchants residing in the staple-growing States, could organize a much more perfect system with the manufactures of Europe than any that has heretofore existed. . . . They are nearer to the consumers, know better the extent and nature of their wants and can supply them by a more rapid operation.”37 But McDuffie was not blind to the additional problems that southern merchants faced. Without capital, southern businessmen could not offer long lines of credit to their customers. Thus McDuffie urged southern shoppers to take heed of that fact. “To enable our importing merchants to introduce this system of short credits in their foreign transactions, the co-operation of our planters and consumers is indispensible,” he said. “A radical change must be made in their system of economy. Their habit of laying out their incomes before they get them and requiring a credit . . . until they sell their crops . . . is the root of the evil of our whole credit system.”38 Once again, consumers were being called to account. To McDuffie’s mind their actions had the power to alter the nature of the South’s political economy. In McDuffie’s call to action were the echoes of a much older politics of consumption, a ploy whose strength lay in the economic might of consumers’ habits and their ability to withhold their purchasing power. But in 1846, McDuffie was not asking southerners to sacrifice their own consumer interest entirely. Although he hoped that southerners would buy their imported goods from their regional brethren, he did not expect them to do so if it meant having to pay over the odds. “We should furnish an example of mock-patriotism,” he acknowledged, “if we were to advise our fellow-citizens to purchase from our own importing merchants when better bargains could be obtained from our northern competitors.”39 McDuffie’s choice of political idiom was instructive. As a staunch supporter of nullification and a lifelong opponent of high tariff, McDuffie, it is worth noting, backed away from the rhetoric used by protectionists. He would not go as far as to ask consumers to subsume their personal desires for bargains, or presume to instruct them on how to place their nation’s needs before their own. McDuffie, like many others in the South, believed in the axioms of free trade. This then was consumer-citizenship according to the doctrines of laissez-faire. It was a model of citizenship that lacked the power to impose obligations on the consumer in the name of civic duty. The reluctance to make demands of the consumer proved to be a problem for southern political economists. Fashioning a political economy that upheld

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the ideals of free trade but that still served the needs of a southern domain, defined by cotton and slavery, was an endeavor fraught with contradictions. Political economists, like Francis Lieber, found a wide audience in the South with writings that claimed “that free trade . . . means nothing more nor less than unshackled production and exchange for the purpose of unrestrained consumption.”40 Lifting all restrictions on production, commerce, and consumption was the defining attribute of free trade. Yet in the wake of the Compromise of 1850, more and more southerners proposed plans that placed limits on southern commerce and consumption in order to protect their region’s interests against northern aggression. At the Southern Commercial Convention held in New Orleans in 1855, one delegate, Dr. McGimsey of Baton Rouge, offered a resolution “that the planters of the Southern and Southwestern States patronize exclusively our home merchants and that our Chambers of Commerce and merchants generally exert all their influence to exclude foreign agents and factors from their respective bodies.”41 Also echoing McDuffie’s call for planters to operate on shorter lines of credit, McGimsey rather radically proposed that it become a criminal offence to ask for long lines of credit from southern merchants. Unsurprisingly the resolutions were voted down. But the idea that southern merchants and planters be restricted in their consuming habits was certainly present. McGimsey’s solution, although not hugely popular at the convention, was reiterated time and again by the delegates of commercial conventions and the authors of editorials.42 Increasingly conceptualizing the South as a nation under attack, they imagined trade with the North as an act of disloyalty. In 1858, A. Dudley Mann called on the citizens of the South to stop buying imported goods from any merchant who did not receive them directly from Europe. “I may be regarded as an extremist,” wrote Mann; “I care not. . . . I [would] rejoice to see the citizens of the South registering in their hearts, a vow, a solemn vow, that from and after the 31st of December, 1860 . . . they will consume no foreign goods which are not imported directly through a Southern port from the country of their origin. Such a resolution, faithfully adhered to, would be more efficient than any legislative enactment, however favorable, upon the subject, or however constitutional.”43 Mann’s call to action was a part of a wider scheme he had dreamed up to fund a steamship route that went direct from Richmond to Liverpool. Its ambition was stupendous, but rather than frame it as a commercial endeavor, Mann pitched the project as an act of patriotism. “Let it be seen,” he wrote, “that Southerners are in earnest, that patriotism has duties to perform in trade

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intercourse . . . and all the articles required for consumption from abroad will thenceforth come directly to their homes.” In ominous imagery, he urged southerners to “cease . . . to do homage to that overpowering and overshadowing fiscal fort of Wall Street,” whose denizens he likened to a standing army.44 Small wonder that by 1861, southerners imagined the terrain of commerce as a battlefield and their habits as consumers as one of the weapons they had to wield in the onrushing war. Many years of imagining the source of their consumer goods as New York, the decades of resentment over tariff and commercial prosperity, and finally the realization of reliance on northern merchants and manufacturers contrived to make proto-Confederates connect the act of nonconsumption with a profession of southern patriotism. If the South’s imagined economy was shaped by the fear that relying on northern merchants and manufactures made slavery vulnerable, the North’s imagined economy was defined by the effort to protect and foster the Republic of free labor. Articulated by Whigs and ex-Democrats, as well as nativists and abolitionists, the idea of free labor became a vision of a nation sustained by individual independence and national self-sufficiency. Taken up by the Republican Party in 1861, the principle of free labor became the foundation of the Union’s policies and the central idea in the imagined economy of the North.45 By the 1850s, free labor had come to mean several things. First and foremost, it was a system of political economy deeply opposed to slavery. Despite a number of criticisms leveled at “wage slavery” by Democrats, ex-Whigs turned Republicans dismissed these concerns about the nature of waged work, claiming the dichotomy between free and slave labor was self-evident.46 Leveling particular criticism at the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which opened the western territories to the threat of slave power, Republicans argued that both individual and national interest were best served by keeping the land and its laborers free. This conviction rested entirely on the premise that labor created value. Thus, the second crucial premise of free labor was the idea that every man had a right to enjoy the fruits of his own labor.47 As Francis Wayland, author of The Elements of Political Economy wrote in 1837, “Moral philosophy teaches us, that if a man expends labor in the creation of value, this labor gives him a right to the exclusive possession of that value; that is supposing the original elements belonged to no one else.”48 Wayland, whose work became popular in the 1840s, influencing the thinking of both William H. Seward and Abraham

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Lincoln, was absolutely clear when it came to the benefits of possessive individualism.49 The idea that hard work—on one’s farm, at one’s workbench, in one’s factory, or even on the frontiers—could make an individual prosperous was absolutely central to free-labor philosophy. It was only through such hard work that wealth could be attained, and wealth, Wayland argued, gave man the “capacity to gratify desire” through the possession of “objects” that could be claimed as his own. Wayland’s rather oblique reference to owning “objects” signaled the ambivalent way in which the proponents of free-labor ideology framed the act of consuming material comforts. Although he argued that consumption destroyed value, it was also part of a circuit of economic activity that ultimately helped the producer. “The more industrious and the richer the community, the greater will be the consumption and of course the demand,” he wrote. “Hence, as we have said before, the richer the community, the better it will be for every class of producer.”50 Wayland was not the only person who sought to find a place for consumption in the imagined economy of free labor. As Horace Greeley, Whig editor of the New-York Tribune, spelled out, free soil and free labor helped to guarantee the producer the material comforts he deserved. Free labor, argued Greeley, gave the “thrifty farmer” the freedom to make choices about how best to use his labor to obtain what he needed. In this way the farmer could adjust his production, bringing goods to a local market that allowed him to make the most out of all his resources. The diversified free-labor economy thus enabled “the farmer’s prosperity [to] overflow,” allowing him to improve his farm, buy new furniture, and send his children to school, all of which in turn would add “to the prosperity of his townsmen.”51 His vision of an economy privileged independent producers who did not need to go far to find the goods they needed or abroad to market the commodities they produced. Because of this, Greeley continued to perceive foreign manufactures as a problem for the U.S. economy. Cheap goods devalued labor, and thus Greeley argued that tariffs were a key part of promoting a free-labor economy. Claiming that it was in the best interests of “Labor universally, that producer and consumer, should everywhere be placed in as simple and direct relations as possible, so as to relieve them from the necessity of paying transportation and three or four profits upon the interchange of their mutual products in different hemispheres,” Greeley argued that tariffs protected consumers from paying the price extracted by the rapacious middlemen of a free-trade economy.52 What he did not need to add of course, was that the supporters of slavery

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would do everything they could to pull down the remaining protective tariffs, thus exposing the producer and the consumer to the unnecessary depredations of “facetious[?] commerce.”53 Retailers were quick to respond to these concerns and capitalize on these ideas. Store keepers who lived in the rural hinterlands of New York, Philadelphia, and even Boston made sure that they appealed to their customers by promising that they would not inflate the price of goods beyond their value simply because they had not come directly from the producer. Chester Woolworth, a dry goods retailer from Sandusky, Ohio, promised his customers “boot, shoes, hardware and crockery at New York prices.”54 Rather than signaling expense, the pledge to sell at New York prices was a guarantee that Woolworth would not transfer the cost of transporting goods across the country onto his customers. Anyone who walked into his shop would be buying goods at prices that were the same as if they had traveled to New York themselves. Even more spectacular was the promise made to his customers by Emory Dunreith Coffin.55 “I am determined to repulse if not entirely vanquish the great ‘RAW HEAD AND BLOODY BONES’ MONSTROUS PRICES AND MURDEROUS PROFITS which has settled on our whole country like a mighty Incubus,” announced Coffin, an owner of a small dry goods store in Indiana in 1859.56 He promised his customers that he would buy straight from the East Coast manufacturers in order to protect his clientele from “paying the Extra Tariff” that was incurred when middlemen took their cut. He also assured his customers that as “honest, industrious, frugal prompt paying men who struggle[d] hard against the pressure of the times to pay their contracts,” he would not limit their ability to buy goods by raising his prices to cover his own costs of doing business with customers who didn’t pay on time. As Coffin’s customers, shoppers would be relieved “from paying other people’s debts through this levy of extra per cent.” Coffin’s promise to protect consumers from the “Extra Tariff” played to the idea that protectionism penalized consumers. But he inverted that implication, by claiming that the tariff was better understood as the price consumers paid when the market was not protected from the effects of profiteering and profligacy. In the wake of the Panic of 1857, there had been a renewed surge of support for protectionist policies, with vocal proponents of tariff such as Horace Greeley leading the way.57 Coffin’s advertisement, which promised greater restriction and accountability through the insistence on cash or produce payment, seemed to translate the broader preoccupations of

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protectionists into assurances on a local scale. His promise to help place a restraining hand on “the wild and unbalanced system of business” could have been read as a move away from free-trade doctrines. Moreover, by assuring his customers that he bought direct from the East, he inferred that the coast’s metropolitan outlets could become a part of the local circuit of economic activity in Indiana. Such rhetoric certainly resonated with Greeley’s vision of a marketplace. Greeley had proclaimed the virtues of keeping consumer and producer in direct contact with one another.58 In his hyperbolic assurances, Coffin was affirming the same. Yet such rhetoric suggests that rural western Americans saw New York in the same light that southerners did, feeling their distance from these urban centers to be a disadvantage in economic terms. Nonetheless, rural retailers attempted to turn this perception on its head, and proclaim a particular connection to the metropolis that privileged their customers and gave them access to the material cornucopia of New York and other eastern cities. Coffin’s copy may have been militant, but it framed an image of refined men and women dressed in the latest fashions (Figure 15). Embedded in Greeley’s rhetoric and Coffin’s copy was the idea that the market itself was becoming a symbol of northern superiority. Implicitly contrasting the spiraling horizons of the southern mart, where goods were laboriously shipped in from many thousands of miles away, with a vision of the buzzing market economy of the North, thriving on (broadly defined) local circuits of commerce, Greeley’s arguments especially became a part of the broader debate that was taking place in both the North and the South about the relative commercial and moral advantages of the two competing political economies taking shape in antebellum America. Translating these ideas from political debate into popular perception became the task of northern middle-class travel writers and novelists. Through their eyes and their words, the meaning of consumer goods in northern society took on a new sectional significance. These authors made the possession of material comforts into a symbol of the superiority of the free-labor political economy. By contrast, they created a vision of an inferior southern society, identifiable through the material markers (or absence) of consumer possessions. Readers of abolitionist-oriented travel narratives, in particular, learned that southern society had no middle class. Instead, they read about a slaveholding aristocracy, whose possessions (which included their slaves) indicated their corruption, and about an impoverished southern farming class, whose lack of possessions signaled their uncouth ignorance.59 In these accounts, the

Figure 15. “Emory Dunrieth Coffin, in the Field with a terrible array of Dry Goods . . . Coffin’s Station, Ind., September, 1859 . . . Emory Dunrieth Coffin” ([Philadelphia: Duross Bros., [1859]), broadside, 383⁄16 × 24 in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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inability of white working southerners to possess consumer goods such as carpets, cookware, and curtains became a testament to the failures of the plantation economy to create a civilized society and respectable citizens.60 Frederick Law Olmsted, a Connecticut-born son of a prosperous merchant, was one such travel writer. Starting in 1850, Olmsted traveled back and forth across the South for over ten years, publishing in that time fifty pieces on southern slave society in the New York Times and the New-York Tribune.61 Though not entirely motivated by ideological zeal, Olmsted was predisposed to find fault in the southern slave economy. Writing to Frederick J. Kingsbury in 1852, Olmsted had confided, “I am not a red hot Abolitionist . . . but am a moderate Free Soiler—going to vote for Scott & would take in a fugitive slave & shoot the man that was likely to get him.”62 Despite his convictions, Olmsted managed to write in a manner widely regarded as moderate. Although he never enjoyed huge commercial success, he was soon feted as one of the leading literary figures among a cadre of writers who supported free soil, free labor, and even immediate abolition throughout the 1850s. As part of that elite, he continued to find publishers for this work. Thus in 1856 and 1857 Olmsted consolidated his observations into two book-length works, which by November 1861 he revised again into one comprehensive account of the South and the people who lived there. He called this work The Cotton Kingdom. In The Cotton Kingdom Olmsted provided his readers with a complete assessment of all parts of the slaveholding South, commenting as he did so on the material poverty that characterized the lives of the white men and women who cobbled a living together beyond the borders of the large cotton and sugar plantations that dominated the South’s economic and cultural landscape. Arriving at a home in central Mississippi in June 1854, Olmsted described what he called a favorable representation of “the condition of poor whites of the plantation district.”63 These were families who were rich enough to own a horse and wagon, as well as land on which to plant cotton but not wealthy enough to hire out a slave. This family, Olmsted wrote, lived “in a single room, twenty-eight by twenty-five feet in area and open to the room above. There was a large fireplace at one end and a door on each side—no windows at all. Two bedsteads, a spinning-wheel, a packing case, which served as a bureau, a cupboard made of rough hewn slabs, two or three deer-skin seated chairs, a Connecticut clock and a large poster of Jayne’s patent medicines, constituted all the visible furniture, either useful or ornamental in purpose.”64 Olmsted’s description was intended to emphasize the bleak lack of comfort and respectability that defined the lives of these people. The furniture

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was basic and unlovely. Nor was there any separation of private and public space, a separation that was key to establishing respectable gentility in the North. The only item in the room that was not roughly assembled or homemade was the clock. Olmsted’s decision to label it as a Connecticut clock was significant on several levels. Primarily, the designation alluded to a specific type of clock. Connecticut clockmakers, like Chauncey Jerome, had recently learned how to produce clocks at an unprecedented rate, mechanizing production in order to turn out vast quantities of virtually identical one-day shelf clocks. By 1850, Jerome owned two factories, one in New Haven and the other in Derby, Connecticut, which turned out in a year 130,000 and 150,000 clocks, respectively. Jerome, who boasted that by 1860 he had sold “millions” of his clocks both in America and Europe, charged only $1.50 for these clocks—a small price for an item that had once been too expensive for most families to afford.65 Thus Olmsted could simply have used the adjective to signal that the clock was one of these mass-produced timepieces. However, the clock was also one of only two items in the household that were not utterly utilitarian. In a household that lived by an agrarian seasonal rhythm, the clock, like the poster, was in some ways ornamental. Apparently Olmsted saw it as such. He tacked the clock on at the end, assigning it the same status as the broadside on the wall. Perhaps Olmsted, himself a son of Connecticut, wished to note that the only item that spoke to a more comfortable level of living came from his home state, up North. As a set of symbols, the constellation of basic wooden furniture items, the paucity of civilized consumer goods, and the shabby farm setting all signaled a concomitant lack of standards in both social and moral behavior. The woman of the house was “sulky” and spat at the fire. She undressed in front of Olmsted, crawling into a nest of quilts on the floor that she shared with the rest of her family. Neither the wife nor her husband nor the children fully undressed to go to sleep, nor did they wash, both rituals that a northern middle-class family would have observed. The poor personal habits, the lack of concern for privacy, and in particular the woman’s lack of domesticity all signaled the low standards of behavior that abounded in this household according to middle-class standards as defined by northern magazines, advice manuals, and cultural conventions of sociability.66 The lack of politesse could have been predicted by northern readers upon reading the description of the domestic interior. Antebellum northern readers were used to interpreting material surroundings as a metonym for morality and civility.67

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Olmsted’s continuous descriptions of the poor white southerners as people without carpets, lamps, books, or glass windows were intended to signal to northern readers that the slave South was a society that lacked a respectable, industrious, well-educated, and independent middle class. These bare houses gave way to a society that was rude in habits of body and mind. Francis Wayland, after all, had argued specifically that mental and moral cultivation were the results of consumption in a free-labor economy.68 Olmsted’s decision to focus on this was not just pique over the lack of creature comforts. Rather the dearth of material culture signaled a lack of education and intellectual refinement. Thus Olmsted’s writing not only reflected the preconceptions about commerce held by southern men and women. It also worked to create an archetypal vision of both North and South, the first being both morally and materially superior to the second. These new ways of imagining the significance of consumer goods thus provided a crucial means through which the northern reading public could identify the material and moral outlines of sectional identity in the 1850s. Although many southerners, as they were increasingly identified, would have objected vociferously to the characterizations offered by Olmsted and Greeley, the power of these descriptions rested on the commercial realities that had taken shape through the 1830s and 1840s. Rendering political economy into emotional narratives helped to translate consumer goods into political axioms. In the imagined economy of an increasingly free-soil North, the rewards for a slave-free democracy were the blessings of domestic comfort and material prosperity. With these ideas already in place it is hardly surprising that with the declaration of war in 1861, advertisers and shopkeepers took advantage of new commercial opportunities and conflated shopping for new goods with a struggle on behalf of the Union’s cause. In the early years of the war, a number of retailers capitalized on the profit-making possibilities embedded in the imagined economy of the free-labor Republic. Often humorous and highly opportunistic, some advertising copy offered citizens the chance to make their consumption a civic activity. S. Barlow Espy, a dry goods store owner from Shelbyville in southern Illinois, who would later enlist in the 115th Illinois Volunteer Infantry, literally framed Emory Dunreith Coffin’s advert from 1859 as a Union argument by surrounding the same text with a completely different border. In the poster he had made up in 1861, Espy copied Coffin’s belligerent appeal to convert to the cash system and buy direct from New York

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verbatim on to his own poster.69 But he replaced the graphic of well-dressed men and women with four ranks of Union soldiers, as well as a picture of a Union camp, a general, and a battle charge. Over the top of this Espy had the words “Another War Declared. Great Slaughter Anticipated! ‘Watchword: Give Nor Ask any Quarters’ ” (Figure 16).70 In this way, Espy provided a new context for Coffin’s earlier argument for a more egalitarian marketplace. He framed it as a part of the Union cause, suggesting that the equality that came with a fair and just marketplace was an integral part of the ideology that Union supporters now fought for. While U.S. soldiers would fight further afield, the men and women who stayed at home could support the cause by patronizing his store. It was no coincidence that that the broadside looked like a recruiting poster. Espy wanted to conflate the ideas of shopping with fighting for the cause. He blurred the lines between civilian and military acts still further when he made his dry goods store into the local recruiting center.71 In southern Illinois, where not every customer would have been a stolid supporter of the Union, shoppers at Espy’s store could display a local allegiance to their national politics, and make themselves a part of a larger battle for the hearts and minds of the Union. Espy was not the only retailer to deploy this strategy. P. and C. Templeton of Brady’s Bend, Pennsylvania, also chose to use the same text as Coffin in May 1861, directing his advertisement to the attention of “Union Men.”72 Templeton also announced that “Secession had produced a wonderful change in prices” and that a “Slaughter” was anticipated, a line that was funny in the spring of 1861, when confidence in the Union cause remained high and Lincoln’s armies had still not seen battle. Templeton’s banner head united the fight against the Confederacy with an attack on high prices, linking the abundant availability of cheap goods with the Union cause. Addressing themselves for the most part to men, the rural retailers worked hard to suggest that buying the domestic goods one wanted at a fair price was an entitlement that was available only in the Union. Similarly, in September 1861, shoppers in Washington, D.C., might have been forgiven that the latest broadside to be plastered all over town was a recruitment poster for the local militia. The National Union Store, hawking cheap jewelry in a closing-down sale, called for “5000 U.S. Volunteers” to buy their goods and promised that their wares were “within the reach of all.” Conflating mobilization with shopping and emphasizing the democratic nature of their sales pitch, the National Union Store capitalized on their customers’ patriotic fervor and hoped to play on the connections that had sprung up

Figure 16. “Another war declared. Great slaughter anticipated! ‘Watchword, give nor ask any quarters!’: S. Barlow Espy in the Field with a terrible array of Dry Goods Foreign and Domestic. Shelbyville. Ill. April, 1st, 1861. . . . S. Barlow Espy” ([Philadelphia]: Duross, Bros., [1861]), broadside, 3725⁄32 × 2413⁄32 in. Courtesy of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

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between the opportunity to purchase fashionable items and the cause of the Union itself.73 Whether the consumers of these small towns themselves imagined this connection was not clear, but retailers certainly went out of their way to flesh out this vision of the shopper and suggest that their consumption was sustaining the Union. Thus in the early months of the war, when shoppers still had money to spend and the devastation of the conflict was as yet unknown, retailers like Espy and Templeton worked hard to frame the act of buying goods as a civic virtue, one that asserted a Union identity and helped to fight the Confederacy symbolically in the process. Appealing to consumers by promising them cheap goods under a Union banner head, retailers associated the democratization of consumer goods with the Union cause. Retailers, no doubt, made these assertions in order to make money, but that did not mean these connections did not have a wider currency. In fact, by 1860, the members of the Republican Party were also struggling to make sense of the citizen’s economic obligations and entitlements when it came to consumption, not through a consideration of the retail dry goods trade, but through a fierce political debate over the merits of once again resurrecting tariffs in order to protect American manufacturing. The Republican decision to return to tariffs as a primary means of raising revenue marked the end of the free-trade ascendancy that America had experienced since 1846. The success of the Walker Tariff in promoting prosperity by lowering duties across the board had silenced the protariff Whigs throughout the 1840s and 1850s. Even Lincoln, who had supported Henry Clay’s American System and who favored tariffs as a measure to protect American industry and workers, kept quiet on the subject. This trend was confirmed by the passage of the Tariff of 1857, which lowered duties still further, particularly on iron and raw wool.74 But the economic panic of that year and the subsequent decimation of domestic manufacturing convinced many Americans that dispensing with tariffs was dangerous. The Republican Party’s decision after 1857 to make tariff the center of their party platform reflected that wisdom. Particularly in states where the voting public viewed the antislavery agenda with suspicion, Republican politicians championed the tariff as the weapon needed to protect free labor.75 The tariff’s congressional champion was Justin S. Morrill of Vermont. In March 1860, Morrill introduced a tariff bill into Congress that was designed to reinstate tariff at the center of America’s political economy. In the main, the bill dispensed with the older ad valorem duties on imported goods and imposed

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specific duties on most items from bar iron to Brussels carpeting, a maneuver that raised duties overall.76 Morrill’s rationale was to spread the burden of paying the extra price of tariff as evenly across the whole community of American consumers as possible. He also adhered to the idea that luxuries should be taxed at a higher cost than necessities, but as always with the malleable concept of luxury, his categorization did not go unchallenged.77 Nonetheless, H.R. 338 was a bill that proclaimed the Republican determination to use the tariff to try to create a harmonious republic of free labor, where all interests played their part as a consumer to serve the needs of all producers.78 Held up by southern senators in the winter of 1860, the bill languished in committee. But in the early days of 1861, these Deep South senators from Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi followed South Carolina’s lead and withdrew from the Senate. By late January, the bill was out of committee, and by March 2, 1861, President Lincoln signed the Morrill Tariff into law.79 The Republican Party’s commitment to a tariff was tested even before the revised duties came into force. In mid-March 1861, with the institution of the new tariff only weeks away, the New York Herald, itself an antitariff publication, reported that the Confederacy was refusing to hand over the duties it had collected under federal law, a sum that amounted to two million dollars. This refusal to pay was not surprising given the Confederacy’s firm espousal of free-trade policy and its long-standing resentment of the northern tariff. In fact, many British journalists believed the northern decision to impose such a stringent tariff would be the ultimate cause of war.80 Worse news for the Union, however, was that the Confederacy was threatening to bring into force their own economic policy after May 1, a policy that at its most basic level made those southern states into a free-trade confederacy.81 For New York merchants in particular, this prospect was alarming. The possibility that the Confederacy might become a permanent free-trade nation on their southern border presented a serious threat to their long-term prosperity. Nor did the merchants have to wait long before the ramifications of the South’s free-trade policy began to take effect. “European imports,” the New York Herald reported, were “arriving at New Orleans or any other city within the limits of the Southern confederacy and paying the low duty prescribed by the Southern tariff.” These imports were then “shipped by these Mississippi boats to all points in the Northwestern and border States without any regard for the exorbitant provisions of the Northern Morrill Tariff.”82 Here at last was the longawaited dream of direct trade, and it was accomplishing all that it proponents had hoped it would. Goods landed at New Orleans could travel all the way up

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the Mississippi and beyond into the far western reaches of the United States without merchants paying a single cent to the treasury. As a result, both the Confederacy and the southern merchants would receive the money that was rightly the property of the Union and its merchants, which was not an insignificant sum.83 Nor did the newspaper’s editors expect the American consumer to rectify this problem. “No-one supposes,” reported the paper “that . . . [a] sagacious and frugal population will purchase the cotton goods of New England and the iron manufacturers of Pennsylvania out of pure patriotism or loyalty to the government at Washington, if they can get the same articles of foreign manufacture cheaper either in the South or in the British provinces.”84 Free traders like the Herald did not believe it was the consumer’s responsibility to boycott goods for a political cause. Articulating what was, by 1861, a well-known position for free traders, the New York Herald maintained that even in the face of national disaster, the consumer should expect to buy at the lowest price possible. Yet even with the dire predictions that the South would grow fat at the expense of the North, the Republicans did not back away from protectionism as a policy. Instead, on April 19, 1861, before the South could bring their free-trade policy into full effect, the Union navy led a blockade against southern ports. By June of the same year, thirty-six blockade ships were patrolling the southern coastline. Southern elites took the blockade to mean that the Union was indeed frightened of the power of direct trade to sustain a free-trade South. Some even saw the blockade to be a strategic advantage. Duff Green, a journalist turned railway builder from Kentucky, felt confident that the Confederacy would only profit from such enforced isolation. “If the war and the blockade continue,” he wrote to a Georgia Commercial Convention in October 1861, “then, if the Confederate Government purchases the cotton crop and pays for it in Treasury notes without interest, that purchase and the expenditures of the war will give us an abundant and cheap currency to be employed in building up manufactures; and availing ourselves of improved machinery, we can convert our cotton into yarns and cloths, and should the war continue for three years, we can then supply the increasing demand in Africa, India and China with greater profit than it can be supplied by Great Britain herself.”85 Taking up the mantle of men like DeBow and Gregg, Duff Green saw the war as merely a short detour on the road to commercial domination. Other authors saw the blockade as an opportunity to emancipate the South “from the commercial vassalage” that had ensnared them before the war. “Blockades and embargoes will teach [us] to dispense with innumerable Yankee

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notions, ministering to Southern luxury and caprice, which have hitherto been most improvidently purchased by our people,” said one southern planter. Taking up Green’s optimism, he enumerated a second benefit: the creation of new factories in the South. By creating “articles of real necessity and substantial use” among themselves, southerners could also keep their specie within their “own borders,” a surprisingly mercantilist view for a free-trading nation.86 Such proclamations of optimism were not universal. Fears that individual consumption needed to be curtailed emerged alongside such expressions of hope, belying the confident assertions of commercial strength to come. Exhortations to stop being lazy became more common, and men and women alike were urged to put aside their imported luxuries in favor of more utilitarian garb. “Come, gentlemen,” urged an author in the Southern Cultivator in June 1861. “Lay aside your broad cloth, Alpacas, drab-d’etes, ducks, dills, cassimeres, and high beavers, your heavy gold chains and many other hurtful practices you can dispense with. . . . Attire yourselves . . . in plain substantial clothes. . . . Money must be saved for other purposes than to be used for fine dressing and other extravagances.”87 Yet these warnings were not initially heeded. Indeed, the very magazine they appeared in continued to advertise “parlor gem” pianos from Albany, New York.88 Thus, through its earliest days as a nation the Confederacy remained unsure about what would be asked of its citizens during the nation’s hour of need. As the war got under way, the Union government faced the same question. What economic obligations might they reasonably impose on their citizens? After three months of waging a war without funds, suffering defeats such as Bull Run, Lincoln turned to the Republican Congress in July 1861 and asked them to prepare to take extraordinary measures to fund the war.89 Certain of the tariff’s success in raising money, Salmon P. Chase, the newly appointed secretary of the treasury, responded to Lincoln’s call by helping to usher in the new War Tariff on August 5, 1861. It was both a carefully constructed partisan political strategy and a return to a central tenet in American political economy, as well as a policy that Republicans believed to be key to upholding the principles of the Union.90 Yet the Republicans’ firm support of the tariff only served to ensure that the policy would be controversial. As political wrangling over the tariff ensued, the debate became focused on whether the citizen was obligated to fund the nation’s most crucial undertakings through his or her consumption. The discussions that accompanied both tariff bills through Congress revealed the extent to which politicians had come to understand protectionism

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as both the consumer’s burden and the citizen’s obligation by 1861. Arguing for the wholesale adoption of the Morrill Tariff in February 1861, Galusha A. Grow, the representative from Pennsylvania, had argued that “the most important obligation the people have is to keep the Treasury afloat,” even if the government had to lay a tax on every item that came into the country.91 For protectionists, like Grow, the self-interested desire to see a tariff pass combined with the belief that American citizens were obliged to maintain their government through the tax they paid on imported items. Others were less sanguine about what and who ought to be taxed. John Cochrane of New York worried that “the duties levied in this bill, upon which an increase of revenue [was] to be expected, [were] not for the most part upon the luxuries of consumption but upon the necessaries of consumption.”92 Cochrane’s distinction became the very crux of the debate over the Republican tariff. While few participants in the debates disputed that the way to raise revenue in America was through the taxation of the consumer of imported goods, most politicians wanted to tax only luxury goods. That way, as Horace Mayard of Tennessee argued, only wealthy consumers would have to pay tax because they were purchasing items they wanted but did not need, and the question of “whether they [would] have to pay duty or not [was] a matter of choice.”93 But necessity was a problematic category in a society that imagined consumer goods as signs of political superiority. In the 1850s, advertisers and retailers had framed the possession of certain material goods as proof that America’s experiment in democracy had created a civilized and successful republic. Charles Lester’s identification of the carpet in his Glances at the Metropolis, an advertising publication from 1854, was a perfect example. Lester had claimed that the citizen’s ability to have a carpet in his or her home was a sign of America’s success as a capitalist democracy. In 1861, that claim took on a new political valence, when the Morrill Tariff attempted to levy a tax of forty cents per square yard on carpeting.94 Unsurprisingly, the clause generated controversy. Missouri congressman John B. Clark argued that “carpets [were] doubtless a fair subject of taxation, being of almost universal use.” But he did not like the fact that the expensive carpets—the Wiltons, Saxonys, Aubussons, and Axminsters—were taxed at the same rate as the cheaper Brussels carpet, which was the floor covering that most Americans bought.95 As Clark noted, the inclusion of the Brussels carpeting was a deliberate attempt to protect the Massachusetts manufacturer who had patented technology to reproduce the Brussels carpets but could not do it as inexpensively as foreign producers. While Clark objected to the blatant protectionism in a law

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ostensibly designed to raise revenue rather than shelter weak industry, his argument suggests that he believed the cheap carpet to be one of the items in life that Americans could consider themselves entitled to. Clark’s efforts proved futile, and Brussels carpeting was taxed at the same rate as its more expensive counterparts. Thus, the jubilant claims that Lester had made in the early 1850s, that universal access to carpets marked the dawning of the “age of luxury,” were less secure under the pressures of war. Protectionists countered criticisms by insisting that paying taxes on consumption was a civic duty. As Robert McKnight from Pennsylvania pointed out, “in the present exigency of the country, when the Treasury is bankrupt . . . I think there is not a constituent of any man in this House who would not consent to have a duty levied on articles of this sort in order to extricate the country from bankruptcy.”96 This turned out not be the case, and when the Morrill Tariff passed in March 1861, coffee and tea—two particularly contentious items—remained on the duty-free list. However, McKnight’s use of the words “consent” and “constituent” revealed a very particular conception of citizenship, one that framed the consumer’s decision to buy goods at a higher price as a civic obligation that male American citizens agreed to undertake. McKnight’s decision to call the undertaking consensual seems particularly significant, hinting that his thoughts were underpinned by a vision of the kind of contractual relations that bound the free American citizen to his polity. McKnight was the only politician to make an implied reference to the social contract in the early spring of 1861. But he was not the last politician to claim that the people had a duty to pay higher prices on consumer goods in order to sustain the nation in its time of need. As James F. Simmons of Rhode Island argued in July 1861, the need to finance the war was not just a question of survival but one of principle. “This nation,” he declaimed, “is entering upon a page of its history which in my judgment, is destined to make it the most renowned the world has ever known. This imposes on us all, as individuals as well as upon the nation, responsibilities . . . such as we have been unaccustomed to and which no other circumstance would have laid upon us. . . . Believing this I am ready to begin to provide for the obligations it will impose. When this is done, the genius of freedom will say to her votaries everywhere . . . whenever our standard winnows the buxom air: be not afraid, it is I.”97 William Pitt Fessenden, chair of the Senate Finance Committee, was more pragmatic. Promising that the War Tariff would raise the necessary revenues, he argued that Americans needed importations and would be “willing to pay” the extra duty.98 Such language once again raised the issue of who the

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citizen-consumer actually was. While McKnight’s language had emphasized the voting and therefore male citizen in his use of the term “constituent,” Simmons and Fessenden had used language that was more equivocal when it came to gender. Perhaps this was a tacit recognition of the role women played in making consumer choices, their responsibility for balancing household accounts, and their part in choosing what would be bought on behalf of a family. More important, it was an acknowledgement that when it came to civic duties, as opposed to rights, women were just as obliged as men to consent. In the end, the protariff forces won out. The imperatives of war pushed even the unwilling to acknowledge the need for revenues from all consumers, rich and poor. Congress raised the rate of duties and even removed tea and coffee from the duty-free list. It was significant, however, that even the most passionate supporters of the tariff believed excessive duties to be an emergency measure. “The people expect, and are prepared to receive, a special tariff bill, increasing the rates of duties on sugar and such other articles as will bear increasing, and imposing a duty on tea and coffee, and all other articles now in the free list of which we import largely,” reported the protariff Philadelphia Inquirer. But, the article continued, “such a bill should be designed specially for revenue and to meet the contingencies of the war and be repealed when the war is over, or the Government does not require the revenue, leaving the Tariff of 1861 for a fair trial.”99 Conceding the obligation of the consumer to fund the government, American politicians and the northern public at large reluctantly agreed that desperate times called for desperate measures. If taxation in a democracy represented the way in which voters decided to fund national projects and public interest, Union citizens in 1861 grudgingly conceded that consumers had a duty to financially sustain their government through their shopping.100 Salmon P. Chase’s initial assumption that tariff revenues could support the nation had not been completely unfounded. In 1861, customs revenue had provided 39.9 million dollars’ worth of revenue for the United States, out of a total of 41.5 million dollars for the fiscal year.101 Yet it soon became clear that the tariff alone would not be able to fund the war. Indeed, by 1865, the 41.5 million dollars in fiscal revenues that the tariff generated would be enough only to cover the cost of ten days of war.102 Seeking to extract revenue from both the rich and the poor, Chase not only asked for a $100 million loan in denominations of up to $5,000 to sell to the rich but also requested that Congress issue low-denomination treasury bonds with high interest rates to sell to poorer citizens. Congress approved the sale of bonds worth $250 million in

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the summer of 1861. When even the bonds failed to finance the war effort, the government began to simply print its own money. The passage of the Legal Tender Act in February 1862 made paper money or “greenbacks” legal currency in the United States, a measure that eventually raised $450 million for the Union cause.103 Yet all these measures were not enough on their own, and so, pushed by the emergency of war, the government turned back to the consumer. In June 1862, a new Internal Revenue Act taxed the production, distribution, and purchase of nearly every consumer good available to Americans, as well as taxing income for the first time in the nation’s history. Placing the heaviest tax burden on citizens that Americans had ever known, Congress laid direct taxes on property already purchased, from carriages and yachts to individual inheritances, as well as on goods and services of all kinds. As long as the mechanism of tariffs had been in place, politicians could claim that consumers had a choice on how much tax they wanted to pay, by refraining from the consumption of imported luxuries if need be.104 By 1862, that choice had been taken away. Instead, the internal revenue system imposed taxes on American citizens that left little to choice. While nearly every profession and interest was asked to pay its share, the consumer was undeniably the hardest hit.105 These drastic steps were clearly understood as a wartime measure. In the wake of the conflict, Republicans quickly phased out the excise taxes, which had placed such a heavy burden on the poorest of America’s consumers. But the tariff remained a central plank of the Republican Party’s agenda after the war, a policy that Democrats attacked without reserve for the high prices that drained consumers. Yet Republicans adhered to the tariff through the 1880s, using the tariff to pay off the war debts, thus transferring wealth from lowincome consumers to wealthy bondholders.106 In this way, the experiences of the Civil War established that consumers of nonessential items had an obligation to help fund their government. But this burden did not demand selfrestraint. The wartime tariff did not ask citizens to refrain from purchasing luxury foreign goods, as Jefferson had asked during the embargo, or the protectionists at the Institute had during the 1830s. In fact, the wartime tariff finally made the consumption of luxury goods into a civic virtue from which no one was asked to refrain.107 While northern consumers were asked to pay an additional price for the privilege, the Civil War detached the consumption of imported luxury goods from the moralizing restrictions proposed by protectionists and the restraints of the antebellum political economy. Although the changing ways in which the Union government funded the

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war may have lessened the restraints consumers imagined in relation to the demands of the nation’s political economy, shoppers were by no means released from the burdens that cultural mores placed on the practices of consumption. Good quality clothes and domestic furnishings still symbolized the success of the Union’s political economy. However, as wartime inflation took hold, and the conflict seemed to benefit the wealthy rather than the poor, the practice of consumption became enmeshed in a new politics of representation.108 Tensions erupted about making and then spending large amounts of money, a pressure that was made worse by the fact that consumption was helping to fund the war effort itself. The biggest focus of these tensions, particularly as the conflict wore on, was a group of wartime profiteers, whom the public identified through their excessive spending on showy consumer goods. While public anxiety blew the actions of these opportunistic merchants and manufacturers out of proportion, it remained the case that the war brought wealth to a small group of entrepreneurs, a result of Union methods of mobilizing for war.109 Throughout the conflict, state militias and the federal army alike relied on the services of private businesses to supply the Union war effort. Brooks Brothers, for example, became one of the chief suppliers of Union uniforms, and George Evans and William Hassall turned their thriving Ladies Dressing Trimming Business into an army knapsack wholesale trade.110 While many businessmen made an honest profit from this very necessary business, accusations about unfairly awarded contracts and the sale of poor-quality products to the army were rife. The archetypal example of this immoral business was the sale of “shoddy” to the Union quartermaster’s office. “Shoddy” was the name given to the poorly made fabric, cheap to assemble and quick to disintegrate, that many dry goods retailers sold the federal government to make the Union army’s uniforms and blankets. A poem in Harper’s Weekly summed up the general resentment that the salesmen of shoddy generated in 1862. The poem ran: Go where you chose, look where you will, You’ll find these army leeches; In church, in Congress on the stump, A making Union speeches. Round bar-room fires these wintry nights They drink their whisky-toddy While shiver, shiver in the camps The men they clothed in shoddy.111

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Yet for all the disapproval, the sale of shoddy—or any wartime necessity— could be a lucrative business. As fortunes for some soared during the war, suspicion began to settle on the families who could, more than ever, buy the material comforts and luxuries in life. When that wealth seemed new, then those consumers were identified as “the Shoddys”: a family of tasteless, heartless parasites who enjoyed the trappings of wealth despite the fact that that same wealth had derived from the suffering of others.112 Identifying a family of “Shoddys” was accomplished by assessing material wealth alongside style and taste. It was not simply the consumption of silks, hats, flowers, feathers, and jewelry that provoked condemnation but the excessive and ostentatious display of these purchases that incurred public disapproval. So, for example, “Jaynan Hubbs,” the daughter of a washerwoman, was made to look ludicrous in one such story because upon her marriage to a “Mr. Weevil,”—a tallow chandler who supplied the Union army with “hides, hoofs and other remains of slaughtered cattle”—she went out and bought silk moiré dresses, diamond rings, and lace handkerchiefs. The hideous juxtaposition of the dead cattle with the trappings of genteel wealth was made more comic by the fact that “Jaynan” wore the moiré at the wrong time of year, put too many diamonds on at once, and spoke and acted in such a vulgar way that her purchases only served to highlight her lack of class.113 The “Jaynan Hubbs” story laid bare a middle-class anxiety that predated the war itself. The democratization of material goods and prosperity had been heralded as part of the wonder of the American democratic experiment. In 1840 de Tocqueville himself had argued that “the love of comfort [had] become the dominant taste of the nation.”114 But this widespread aspiration to wealth and comfort was not always, as de Tocqueville noted, built on solid foundations. He argued that people’s desires outstripped their means, and so they looked for shortcuts, such as cheap goods and mediocre craftsmanship.115 This criticism lay at the heart of the “Shoddy” stories. The democratization of wealth was all very well when it was confined to people who displayed their wealth tastefully. But extended to those who embarrassed the nation by gaining their wealth through dubious means and depriving the needy in order to satisfy their own consumer cravings eroded the moral bedrock of society and blurred the social boundaries that many in the wealthy middle class were anxious to maintain. “Jaynan Hubbs” was the exemplar of how the female citizen-consumer had the potential to corrupt the nation. The attack on the “Shoddys” encompassed both male and female consumers, but it is worth noting that the public was more likely to denigrate

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men for the sums they spent on the women in their families rather than what they spent on themselves as individuals. Indeed, more often than not, public denunciations of “shoddy” consumption in magazines made women the chief target of their disapproval. Condemning women for their heartless spending came easily to a society that was already poised to examine and assess women’s purchases in the marketplace and see their taste and choice as a reflection of something larger than an individual decision. What the “shoddy stories” highlight is the way in which the meanings and practices of consumption during wartime, particularly by women, were filled with tension. On the one hand, as writers like Olmsted had identified, the widespread consumption of consumer goods allowed for the visible construction of a genteel middle class, but on the other hand, these purchases could all to easily come to signify the unstable boundaries of middle-class life and the ways in which the American capitalist democracy cultivated tasteless and immoral citizens. The “shoddy stories” thus reflected the public’s uncertainty over the nation’s morality. Individuals wondered whether those who made money from the war and then spent that money on themselves rather than on the nation were immoral anomalies or actually the representative citizen in a capitalist democracy. Reporting on the lavish “Russian Ball” in 1863, which was given in New York in honor of a Russian regiment, Harper’s Weekly allowed Mr. Shoddy a rare opportunity to voice his side of the story, apparently to make him sound ridiculous. But his questions struck a chord. “Are we all to put on sackcloth and ashes for the war?” asked Mr. Shoddy. “Are Mrs. and Misses Shoddy not to have an opportunity of displaying their beauty—to say nothing of their splendid dresses and the magnificent diamonds which I bought them with the proceeds of paper-money—simply because we are engaged in a war? The notion is monstrous! I pay for the war: taxes on my income, taxes on my clothing, taxes on my house, horses, carriages, silver, and every thing that I have got; I send my blood relations to the war to fight and die, I give money for bounties and money to the Sanitary Commission; I vote to support the Government. Having done all of this, I submit that my duty is fulfilled, and that I may, if I choose, get up balls for Mrs. and Misses Shoddy.”116 The article went on to concede uneasily that Mr. Shoddy had a point. In the wartime capitalist democracy, everyone who bought luxury goods

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contributed to the coffers of the nation. Thus, distasteful as it was, Mr. Shoddy’s position was hard to refute, even though it exposed a moral conundrum at the heart of the North’s political economy of war. The Union had created an economic structure in which there was no longer a logical reason to restrain a citizen’s consumption of luxury goods, be they foreign or domestic. In stark contrast to the ethos of the Revolution, the political economy of the Union transformed the decision to spend one’s money on whatever one pleased into a facet of civic virtue and gave men and women alike the right to spend how they pleased. If the Union’s policies on consumption were marked by the decision to jettison the constraints of the antebellum political economy, then the Confederacy’s politics of consumption was distinctly that of the nation’s founding decade.117 Across the South, citizens read that the only way to ensure victory was to resort to autarky, thus once again translating economic independence into political independence. “It affords me great pleasure,” wrote DeBow in his magazine, “to be able to assure you that since the declaration of our independence of the old United States government, and pending the war, our entire people, with unexpanded energy, have recurred to the primeval principles and customs of industry, economy and frugality which characterized our ancestors for many years subsequent to the wars of 76 and 12.”118 Looking back to a golden age of domestic manufacturing and local productivity that had arguably never existed for the southern elite but remained a far less rosy reality for many poorer households across the South, DeBow’s report was in fact an account of all the manufactories that had sprung up across the Confederacy and were now producing the goods and matériel needed for victory. DeBow’s reference to both the Revolution and the War of 1812 were intended to dispel public anxiety. The memories of those conflicts seemed to prove that self-sufficiency enforced by war had always resulted in a new era of industrial progress for America. For southerners who imagined themselves as the genuine heirs of the Revolution, it must have seemed clear that their loyalty to the true interpretation of the Founding Fathers’ legacy should be upheld through an adherence to Revolutionary tactics. DeBow also made a point of commenting on how it would be women’s domestic labor that would be of crucial importance. “Our women,” he wrote, “animated with becoming zeal and resolution, to sustain our glorious cause, have put aside their silks, their calicoes . . . and have substituted the wheel, the cards, the loom.”119 The reversion to a politics of homespun took female citizens of the Confederacy

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full circle, reviving the spinning wheel as the symbol of civic virtue and turning the practice of retrenchment into the promise of political and economic independence; thus women were returned to the status of patriot-consumer. The Confederacy’s economic circumstances meant that it could ask its citizen-consumers, women and men, to act in no other way. Given the South’s failure to diversify its economy before the war, it was not surprising that southerners faced terrible shortages. Cut off from both northern and foreign suppliers by the blockade, citizens in the army and on the home front struggled to supply themselves with the clothing, shoes, blankets, and general household goods that sustained a livable existence. As goods became scarce, hoarding and speculation became common features of life in the South. Despite injunctions from all quarters, many citizens still bought what they could get their hands on and more besides. And as the war raged on, these problems were exacerbated still further by the destruction of farms, homes, crops, and livestock, resulting in a general outpouring of rage from southern citizens who tried everything from appealing to their governors, congressmen, and president all the way through to out-and-out violence in their efforts to claim what they believed to be rightfully theirs.120 Against this backdrop it is hardly surprising that both the Confederate Congress and the Confederacy’s many journalists and editors asked southerners to give up their former habits of consumption. Indeed, many citizens could not have pursued them even had they wished. But there remained a small portion of southern society who still had some resources. It was at this elite group that the public call for frugality and retrenchment was directed, becoming more strident as it became clear that a demand for luxuries was prompting blockade runners to bring fine textiles, jewelry, and other small delights across the lines instead of the more utilitarian goods needed to fight the war. John Beauchamp Jones, a clerk in the Department of War, observed in June 1863: “the press everywhere is opening its batteries on the blockade runners, who bring in nothing essential to the people and nothing necessary for the war.”121 Jones estimated that one steamer either arrived or left the South every day and that most of what they brought in were goods of Yankee manufacture. While Jones reckoned the cargoes remained unsold because of high prices, blockade runners nonetheless managed to live high on the hog as a result of their exploits.122 Despite all the other ways in which Confederate citizens suffered the material deprivations of war, it was the realization that blockade running was damaging the war effort that was the key to the Confederate vision of the

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citizen-consumer. Citizens were urged to be economical and leave “blockade goods . . . severely” alone. Rather than allowing themselves to seek out newly imported “Yankee nostrums” without thought, they should preserve their possessions, reuse them, and make do with less. From the biggest of purchases to the smallest items in the household, southerners were called on to outwit the tactics of the Union’s blockade by looking to their own consumer habits. ‘Pick up pins,” urged one article in the summer of 1862; “probably in no other article of trade has so much extravagance and carelessness been visible.”123 By refusing to buy goods that had been run through the blockade, writers and their readers imagined that they might cause the somewhat unscrupulous runners to turn their attentions to goods needed for the war effort. The importance of controlling trade through the blockade was certainly not lost on the Confederate government. Despite their entrenched belief in free trade, in 1863 they enacted a law that attempted to force the vessels running the blockade to dedicate one-third to one-half of their cargo space to government imports.124 This ultimately had little real effect because the law also allowed vessels chartered or owned by individual states to determine their own cargoes. Thus Governor Zebulon Vance’s famous blockade runner the Ad-Vance continued to run the blockade on its own terms throughout the war, and Wilmington, North Carolina, became known as the “fairy-land” of the Confederacy, such was the abundance of prewar luxuries that remained available.125 The crackdown in law, however, was reflected in the increasing seriousness of tone taken by the press.126 Funding the enemy through the purchase of northern goods could hardly be interpreted as anything other than treason. In the intersection of state policy and cultural understandings of how the southern economy functioned, a new meaning of southern citizenship was forged that applied especially to women. Their clear obligation was to deny themselves any of the goods that had formerly constituted the comforts of life. “Industry and self-denial” were now the watchwords of civic duty.127 Jefferson Davis himself made a point of congratulating the “noble and devoted” women whose homes now sang with “the noise of the loom and spinning wheel.” But even Davis did not cover up the coercive element of Confederate financing. “If our enemies submit to an excise on every commodity they produce and to the daily presence of the tax gatherer,” he noted, then there was no excuse for southern citizens, whose “self-sacrificing patriotism” was far greater, to not endure the same type of economic burden.128 Davis believed his people would rise to the challenge. But for most citizens of the Confederacy, eking out an

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existence on inflated currency and import substitutions, and in diminished households, such a burden was almost impossible to bear. Nonetheless, by January 1864 it was clear that all the exhortations to deny the blockade runners a trade had been unsuccessful. Despite the continued calls for “Home Industry” and the pleas to fill the South with “the music of the Spinning Wheel,” the runners were still bringing in spirits, wines, silks, fine cottons, woolen fabrics, jewelry, and Yankee notions, all goods that Jefferson Davis at least deemed to be luxurious and thus injurious to the nation’s cause.129 In a last ditch effort to bring the situation under control, the Confederate Congress passed a law in February 1864 that prohibited the importation of luxury goods into the country.130 But the reception this law received in the southern press was skeptical. Citizens of the Confederacy had not lived up to their obligations as consumers before the law, and imposing such restrictions on them now seemed to some to make a mockery of the Confederacy, even as it highlighted the shame of citizens who had not done their “duty.”131 Indeed, even as the law was passed, the Confederate Congress made an exemption for cloth imports needed to make clothing. Moreover, delegates to the Congress complained bitterly about a law that denied them the chance to export and import goods on their own state’s account.132 Despite the fact that the southerners across the nation, both on the battlefield and in their homes, were suffering through untold deprivations, an effort to protect their own people, combined with a deep-rooted resistance to the control of commerce, led southerners to criticize even this last-ditch effort to save the nation. As it had once before, in a different rebellion, the attempt to fuse self-denial with civic obligation ultimately failed. The end of the Civil War marked the beginning of a new era of economic citizenship, defined by the entrenchment of the free-labor political economy in the United States. As the politics of Reconstruction would show, civic rights in the postbellum world would not include an entitlement to a living wage or access to productive means. These things would have to be fought for and earned. Instead, the economic understanding of citizenship in the wake of the war was rooted in the right to enter into contracts and make money in a free-labor world. But the defeat of the Confederacy also marked the end of another vision of citizenship that had been a part of America’s political culture since the nation’s inception: the idea that citizens had a responsibility as consumers to serve their nation through restraint and self-denial. The Union’s victory confirmed instead that consumers were at liberty to spend what they

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wanted, how they wanted, and that these purchases would help to provide for the nation. Indeed, the Union’s success seemed to confirm that consumers were a positive asset to the nation and not, as they had been seen for so many decades, a national liability. Framed as a reflection of the Republic’s strength, defined as a marker of democracy’s success, recognized as a political constituency whose claims had weight in the political sphere, the citizen-consumer emerged as a powerful figure from the ashes of war, a figure around which a new, powerful American political economy would be created. Yet as would become all too clear, the freedom the consumer gained as a result of this shift was largely in the realm of aspiration. Though Americans were entitled to dream freely of indulging in the cornucopia of goods both foreign and domestic, and encouraged to see these dreams as one of the benefits of American citizenship, the right to aspire was never matched by an equal opportunity to acquire the material comforts and luxuries of life. Such a gap might be better labeled the wakeful reality of the “American dream.”

Epilogue The Citizen-Consumer and the State of the Nation

On a bright September morning in 1876, Anna K. Baker visited the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in Fairmount Park. Though it was her eighth visit, the excitement had not yet worn off. The vast pavilions, with their displays of products and produce from around the world, the model School House, the exotic men and women from far-flung lands, even the opportunity to see tea served in the Moroccan style, all delighted the middle-aged Philadelphia schoolteacher. She marveled at the spectacle of it all. Yet on this particular visit, Baker entered the grounds as more than just an overawed spectator. She arrived as a consumer. After months of exploring all that the exhibition had to offer, she finally decided to make a purchase: “a dinner set of China in the English department the old willow pattern lately revived and two stone pitchers in the German.”1 Baker did not buy much else at the great exhibition, though she continued to visit the grounds through the fall. Finally, on November 10, the exhibition closed, and four days after that, Baker noted in her diary that her order of “English china” had arrived at her home. It was, she thought, “a beautiful memento of the Centennial.”2 Making sense of this single purchase, putting it into the multiple contexts in which it would have been read, interpreted, and understood, is a useful way to reflect on the place that the citizen-consumer occupied in America by 1876. Baker was clearly satisfied with her choice, but in many ways it was a strange one. She had made her purchase at an exhibition designed to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of American independence. In 1776 that independence had meant far more than severing political ties with Britain. It had also encompassed a purposeful effort on the part of many patriots to claim an economic and cultural independence from Great Britain. The manufactured goods of London, Staffordshire, and Yorkshire had been symbols of American dependence on their imperial governors; they signified a lack of technical

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knowledge and capability, a want of independent tastes, and a dearth of economic self-sufficiency. Many patriots believed that their reliance on imported British goods was the central weakness of their incipient nation.3 It is unlikely that Baker was ignorant of that matrix of meaning. The memory of Revolutionary consumer boycotts had not disappeared from the national histories of the 1870s. Indeed, celebrations of homespun as a Revolutionary relic, and spinning wheels as an emblem of female virtue, were wellestablished features of Fourth of July celebrations as well as other public holidays.4 Moreover, Baker was probably familiar with the idea that women’s particular virtue in that Revolutionary moment had been their ability to refrain from the purchase of luxury imports. Even if she was willing to ignore the historical context of the Centennial celebrations, Baker could not have overlooked the fact that the designers of the exhibitions were intending to showcase the industrial strength and cultural sophistication of the United States.5 This six-month pageant of manufactured abundance was an opportunity for Americans to showcase their consumer goods side by side with commodities from around the world and demonstrate that their material lives wanted for nothing. In this context, Baker’s purchase contradicted the very purpose of the Centennial. Her acquisition neither reflected the historical meanings of this celebration, nor did it conform to the idea that American-made goods could rival the world’s productions. Yet in another context, Baker’s choice made complete sense. In the wake of the Civil War, with a Republican political economy that imposed high tariffs on a wide variety of imported goods, the purchase of any object from abroad contributed to the national coffers. In buying her china set, Baker was doing what the state required of her: purchasing goods that would, through the tariff, contribute to the public revenue.6 Through these transactions, citizen-consumers like Baker generated an important part of the nation’s revenues. Entangled with this protectionist policy was a different but powerful commercial discourse. First advanced by American free traders, this language feted the consumer’s freedom of choice in the marketplace and guaranteed cheap prices by arguing for unbridled commercial competition. Despite the ways in which these ideas contradicted the tariff policy, the democratic promise of material prosperity and consumer comforts embedded in free-trade rhetoric became a central component of free-labor and later Union ideology. Thus in making a choice to buy the willow-patterned English-made crockery, Baker was celebrating her own entitlements and privileges as an American

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citizen-consumer in a newly reunified republic, as well as doing her duty to the nation. Not everyone would have found as much to celebrate in Baker’s small purchase. William D. Kelley, the old stalwart of the Franklin Institute and an early supporter of the Centennial Exhibition, would have found Baker’s choice extremely irritating. It had been Kelley who in 1852 had told his audience at the Franklin Institute that America was full of “luxurious citizens” waiting to buy the goods that to him “expressed the life of the nation.”7 His vision had depended on American consumers choosing to buy Americanmade goods. Nearly twenty years later, he had not changed his mind. Speaking to Congress in 1871, he argued that there was no more fitting way to celebrate American independence than to “exhibit to the world the results of the mining, manufacturing, and artistic skill of a people, who one hundred years ago were not permitted to manufacture a felt hat or a plow or a nail from the productions of their own soil.”8 The ability of Americans to manufacture consumer goods—both utilitarian and luxurious—symbolized the success of the United States’ new political economy. Despite Kelley’s bombast, some organizers believed that the purpose of the exhibition was to improve the technological capabilities of America’s artisans and mechanics. Here the old impulse to educate the American producers and instruct the American consumer for the good of the nation resurfaced. The Centennial Commission itself even debated whether to keep the exhibition open on Sundays, so as to allow workingmen the time to come and see this great instructional spectacle.9 In the end, however, the committee decided that this was not appropriate. Instead, they decided to leave only the public grounds open, thus shifting the purpose of the exhibition subtly toward entertainment rather than education. Indeed, as Baker made her purchase, she was fulfilling the speculation of one commentator that the exhibition had become “a mere bazaar for the exhibitions of wares on sale.”10 Such a shift illuminated who the truly valuable American would be in this new age of commercial success. This was an exhibition geared toward the middle-class consumer, and not the workingmen and workingwomen of the Republic. Unlike the exhibitions staged by the Franklin Institute and the American Institute, the Centennial Exhibition would not be a place to prompt Americans on how to adjust their commercial behaviour to suit the needs of the nation’s political economy. Instead, its precincts would honor the new vision of postbellum commerce in the United States, one where the freedom to indulge personal desires represented the pleasing success of the

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American Republic. Kelley’s hopes for the Centennial would not be fully realized. Anna Baker’s purchase would have certainly pleased the Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker, who had also been an early supporter of the Centennial Exhibition. Wanamaker imagined it as an opportunity to promote a new culture of retail in the city. Looking back he reflected: “The Centennial celebrated liberty for the American colonies in 1776. The Wanamaker Store celebrated the freedom from the shackles of old burdensome customs of business.”11 Wanamaker was not content to sell only one type of good to his customers; he wanted to offer new variety to his clientele, just as the exhibition satisfied every desire and interest that any visitor to Fairmount Park might care to indulge. Thus, his new department store on the corner of Market and Thirteenth Streets was a deliberate replica of the Centennial’s pavilions. Opening on May 6, 1876, only four days before the great exhibition itself, Wanamaker’s new “Grand Depot” offered his customers choice, elegance, and visual excitement in an “ever-growing exhibition of products of soil and skill from every land under the sun.”12 Modeling his approach on the exhibition itself, Wanamaker sought to offer those who entered the precincts of his store all that the world had to offer in the way of new goods, regardless of where they came from. Wanamaker, who had helped to organize and finance this great celebration of the nation’s history, saw the Republic’s success (as well as his own) through the prism of commercial liberty, market expansion, and consumer choice. In this, Wanamaker was like many other retailers and importers who saw the exhibition as an opportunity to capture the interest of new customers arriving in the city to enjoy the exhibition.13 Their views represented a firm belief in the power of consumer demand to grow the American economy. As one commentator on the Centennial observed: “No well-educated political economist of the present day will deny that a nation’s wealth is increased by the diffusion of good taste among the people.”14 Such a sentiment echoed the words of Adam Smith, penned one hundred years earlier, that consumption drove the expansion of a national economy. Baker’s purchases, in stores like Wanamaker’s, would be replicated in their millions across the United States and provide the home market for American industry as well as an increased impetus for international trade. Through the Centennial Exhibition, consumption and citizenship collided for women and men like Baker and Wanamaker in 1876. Their actions reflected a vision of political economy where personal acts of consumption powered local and indeed national economies, where retailers

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could imagine their business as a facet of a powerful commercial republic that projected the nation’s success, both politically and economically, at home and abroad, and where citizen-consumers, men and women alike, could claim to be acting patriotically as they indulged their personal desires. This book opened with the debates that Americans had over the role that consumption would play in the creation of their nation and the definition of good citizenship. The decisions that Americans made one hundred years later at their Centennial Exhibition reveal that these dilemmas of abundance had not been resolved, despite all that had changed. Baker, Kelley, and Wanamaker together illustrate that the very nature of political economy in the United States was still a matter for debate, both on the prosaic everyday level that Baker negotiated, right up to the congressional arenas of political debate. The place of personal desire and consumer self-satisfaction was as yet not entirely decided. Were such longings to be commanded by the state and harnessed to the needs of the nation for the public good? Or were these same demands to serve only the expansion of private businesses, whose profits would collectively symbolize the success of the nation? In 1876, some of these questions had been answered by the war, by Republican government policy, and by the Centennial Exhibition itself: personal desires were to be set free both to serve private interests, and, through the tariff, to fund the nation in ways that reinforced the power of an expanding marketplace as well as entangling such a marketplace with the interest of the state in decisive ways. Although there was no consensus, in this postwar shift toward a more liberated form of consumption, the dichotomy between private interest and public good that had sustained some of the earliest debates over American political economy collapsed. In the age of the new Republic, the public good would be measured by the extent to which it enabled the free pursuit of private interest. Virtuous consumer-citizenship would be defined in part by the purchase of new goods of both foreign and domestic manufacture. The citizen-consumer’s freedom to shop became a new right as well as a clear service to a reunified nation. By 1876 middle-class consumers had transformed their own habits of consumption into the ideal model of virtuous consumer-citizenship. Their efforts were made even more meaningful because this transformation was underwritten by the power of the state. In this new configuration of political economy, the middle-class consumer became the most valuable class of citizen in the Republic. What they bought, how they spent, when they shopped and

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when they saved, became the template of how citizens could add to America’s wealth without draining the nation’s resources or threatening its moral and social order. In staking such a claim to civic worth, middle-class consumers implicitly called into question the value to the state of all other citizens. Working-class men hovered on the borders of being useful citizen-consumers. Well into the nineteenth century and beyond into the twentieth century, labor unions would fight for the right to earn a living wage, to enable white workingmen to earn sufficient income to fund a new consumerist lifestyle.15 Their efforts were not wholly successful. Through the 1910s and 1920s, the Supreme Court undermined the legitimacy of even the minimum wage. The court’s decisions in Bunting v. Oregon (1916) and Adkins v. Children’s Hospital (1923) held fast to the idea that the freedom to make contracts was the touchstone of America’s liberal democracy and that the minimum wage violated the natural market-driven process through which labor found its value.16 Placing the liberty to make contracts over and above the demands of working consumers, the Supreme Court’s decisions were a testament to the idea that the government did not perceive poorer men and women to be as valuable as citizenconsumers when compared to the more affluent members of the commercial Republic. Despite a pervasive rhetoric that equated American identity and especially democracy with widespread prosperity in the United States, such a reality did not materialize in the early twentieth century.17 However, as depression gripped the nation in the 1930s, working consumers (alongside struggling middle-class consumers) did gain some protections and support from a newly liberal government. Through bodies such as the Consumer Advisory Board (CAB), campaigns against unfair prices gained momentum. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s advisors attempted to bolster the consumer’s purchasing power by expanding working hours and fixing wages. This support was designed to expand demand and enable consumers to spend America out of the Depression.18 But this support did not come without certain expectations. The Blue Eagle campaign, for example, which the government launched in 1933, asked shoppers to buy only from stores that provided employment with maximum hours for workers who would be paid the minimum wage, two factors that raised the price of goods. Similarly, the campaigns of the CAB were focused on promoting fair prices for Americanproduced food and textiles. Other items were deemed less important. In all, the support that struggling consumers received from New Deal policies were dependent on white men and women spending their money on the kinds of possessions that the American government felt best served the state.19

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By the middle of the twentieth century, the expansion of an industrial economy and in particular mass production of consumable goods meant that cars, refrigerators, and televisions, all packed into or beside newly built suburban homes, became the benchmarks of virtuous American consumption. In the wake of World War II, the federal government presaged the massconsumer economy as the great panacea to all that had ailed America through the 1930s and 1940s. The Full Employment Act of 1945, the G.I. Bill, and the government’s economic support for expanded housing and highways all pointed to the ways in which the state sought to support the expansion of mass consumption in the postwar era, converting it from the liability it had been during the war into the civic responsibility of the people.20 This apotheosis of the citizen-consumer thus seemed complete, but it had not taken a mere twenty years to accomplish. The relationship between the state and the citizen-consumer reached back to 1789 and the federal government’s decision to raise revenue by taxing the people’s consumption. It was through shopping for new goods that Americans first experienced what it meant to be a citizen of the United States rather than simply a citizen of Massachusetts, New York, or South Carolina. The federal state in America has thus always looked to the consumer as a citizen to be made use of for the benefit of the nation. But this form of citizenship has always been precarious. Subject to the vicissitudes of political economy, rather than defined by constitutional law, the opportunity to claim rights and demand protections as a citizen-consumer could easily be undermined by a shift in ideology, be that economic, moral, or political. The vulnerability of the citizen-consumer seems clear if we look at how women have fared in this role. By the 1870s, middle-class women like Anna K. Baker seemed certain of successfully claiming status as citizenconsumers. Baker’s shopping was not placed under any restrictions, and indeed her choices helped to reflect the commercial success of the United States. Indeed, the power of the female consumer seemed only to grow. In the late 1890s, when the spiralling cost of living resulted in housewives taking to the streets to protest inflation in urban spaces across the nation, women seemed to have laid claim to the full language of rights that the title of citizenconsumer conferred on them. By World War I, President Wilson had legitimized the idea that citizens, men and women, had basic rights as consumers and empowered the government to protect what were popularly dubbed “fair prices” and “living wages.”21 But as the state underwrote the expansion of the consumer economy and looked to its citizens to spend for the sake of the nation, the government also

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imposed new limits on whose consumption was ultimately the most valuable. The new G.I. Bill and income tax codes helped to support a male-directed family economy, giving men the access to property, skills, and credit, and taking these things away from women. In this context, the state demanded a specific type of consumer-citizenship from women, one that valued their taste but that ultimately did not provide them with access to capital.22 As had been the case between the Revolution and the Civil War, citizenship as civic belonging remained as something nebulous that could be claimed as well as easily challenged. Women who did not spend according to the prevailing moral and political codes were especially vulnerable to criticism and vitriol. The ongoing history of women’s consumer-citizenship shows that it can be both a privilege in the hands of individuals, as well as a weapon used against them, to strip them of resources, reputation, and rights. It is easy to dismiss civic belonging as mere rhetoric, to look at only the forms of citizenship that have been clearly underwritten by law. Yet when we do that, we see a narrative of progress, a history of American citizenship driven by a story of inclusion. It is a painfully slow tale, often fraught with setbacks and disappointment. But the arc is undeniably one of progress, with more and more people crossing the border from exclusion into belonging.23 In contrast, to look at the history of civic belonging through the lens of consumption is to see a far more ambiguous tale. There is no reassuring notion of progress. In this recounting of a civic history, a different dynamic becomes clear. Where a citizen might claim an entitlement, for example, to freedom of choice or fair pricing, such entitlements can be easily undermined by uneven access to credit or legislative loopholes. The civic obligations of the citizenconsumer to spend wisely, to spend well, are subject to shifting value judgements. Often the question of what constitutes good consumer behavior is not defined by democratic discussion but through the state adopting the values of interest groups and specific corporations. Civic values are thus created privately and not publically. The idea of the citizen-consumer has at various junctures helped Americans to claim higher wages, better prices, fairer standards of living, and better protections in the marketplace. Over the course of the twentieth century, the act of consuming, or, indeed, not consuming, would ultimately become part of a language of rights that protest movements across the United States would use to claim a fuller, more meaningful type of citizenship. African Americans especially understood how their political rights could be propelled forward through their acts as economic citizens: they did not buy where they could

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not work, they refused to ride the bus, they occupied the diners where they would not be served, and when that was not enough, they looted the stores and claimed the possessions that embodied affluent American citizenship.24 But if the concept of the citizen-consumer has thus served the citizen well, then the same idea of a citizen-consumer has also been of use to the state. Because shifting tides of ideology have always shaped the very concept of the citizen-consumer, different Americans have at different times found themselves blamed for the failures of America’s economy. With the U.S. financial collapse in 2008, both media and government were quick to scrutinize the actions of the citizen-consumer. Overspending and irresponsible borrowing (rather than irresponsible lending, for example) were among the first explanations to surface. As had been the case in the War of 1812, and indeed in the Confederacy in the 1860s, the government looked to individuals to make right the nation’s dire economic predicament. Using the language of household economics, the failures of the citizen-consumer were laid bare, the blame laid on the shoulders of individuals. Such stories of personal fiscal irresponsibility became the means through which the state exonerated itself and its corporate partners. It was only through challenging this scapegoating of the citizen-consumer that a different story of structural failure became clear. Here then lies the real work of citizen-consumers, both in the United States and elsewhere. It is not only to debate whether the act of individual consumption can empower, or whether personal desire undermines the creation of a public good. It is also to police the ways in which governments make use of the citizen-consumer, and to guard against accusations that make individuals, rather than corporations and states, responsible for the people’s economic welfare. Such a recognition is not a luxury but a necessity if democracy in a capitalist state is to thrive.

Notes

The following abbreviations appear in the notes: AAS DBR HSP JER LCP N-YHS SLM WMQ

American Antiquarian Society DeBow’s Review Historical Society of Pennsylvania Journal of the Early Republic Library Company of Philadelphia New-York Historical Society Southern Literary Messenger William and Mary Quarterly Introduction

1. “An Eruption at the Eastward,” Evening Post (New York), March 31, 1814. 2. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 51. See also Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish Rebels and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). 3. “An Eruption at the Eastward.” 4. The two books that have guided my thinking about the economic dimension of citizenship are Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Judith N. Shklar, American Citizenship: The Quest for Inclusion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1991). Shklar specifically argues that citizenship expands beyond a legal construct to encompass an understanding about how to behave and what to expect when you belong, or wish to belong, to a nation-state. Waged work as an aspect of economic citizenship has received more attention than consumption. See Alice Kessler-Harris, In Pursuit of Equity: Women, Men, and the Quest for Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). 5. The question of who could claim to be a citizen of the Republic between 1783 and 1865 was not self-evident, and the issue of whether individuals owed allegiance to their state or the federal state was not resolved. This was further complicated by questions of territorial expansion and the changing nature of the franchise. See Douglas Bradburn, “ ‘The Great Field of Human Concerns’: The States, the Union and the Problem of Citizenship in the Era of the American

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Revolution,” in State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States, ed. Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 77–112; Erik Mathisen, The Loyal Republic: Traitors, Slaves and the Remaking of Citizenship in Civil War America (forthcoming, University of North Carolina Press); John M. Murrin, “The Jeffersonian Triumph and American Exceptionalism,” JER 20 (Spring 2000): 2–4; Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York: Basic Books, 2000). 6. I use the term middle class to encompass a wide range of people, which includes professionals, merchants, entrepreneurs, manufacturers and what can be called the petit bourgeoisie, for example shopkeepers and artisans. They shared not only a broadly defined economic standing but also an emerging set of cultural values, both of which were expressed through consumption habits. The imprecision of the term is useful in this context, because it reflects the changing boundaries and identity of this emerging class. For historians who have successfully used this term in a similar way see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of a Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1780–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 7. On the global dimension, which is not the subject of this book, see Emily S. Rosenberg, Spreading the American Dream: American Economic and Cultural Expansion, 1890–1945 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982). 8. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 9. Breen argues that these consumer habits reinforced a liberal individualism that went on to inform American citizenship. However, Breen did not go on to examine the debates over consumption that followed the Revolution. In undertaking that examination, my research challenges Breen’s interpretation of the Revolutionary moment. See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 23–25. 10. James T. Kloppenberg, “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and the Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 (June 1987): 9–33; and Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 165–196. Their emphasis on synthesis resolves an older debate where scholars tended to emphasize either the importance of republicanism or liberalism. On the former, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1969), and on the latter, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1983). 11. Dana Frank, Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism (Boston: Beacon, 1999); Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 12. Max M. Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 191–205. 13. On the gendered nature of citizenship, see Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract: Aspects of Patriarchal Liberalism (Cambridge: Polity, 1988); Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies; Nancy F. Cott, Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard

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University Press, 2000); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 14. On gendered consumption patterns and discourse, see John Styles and Amanda Vickery, eds., Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 15. Nicole Eustace makes this point with absolute clarity. See Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 267n56. 16. “Reflections on the Comparative Effects of a WAR,” United States Gazette (Philadelphia), August 13, 1807. 17. This did not include the purchase of slaves. The ban on the international slave trade had come into effect in 1808, and the purchase of slaves was not a part of the national discussions that Americans had on the restriction of foreign imports. However, purchasing items required to clothe slaves (especially coarse fabrics such as osnaburgs) did remain a part of the debate. Slavery thus informed the discussions over consumption in important ways. On slave owners as consumers on behalf of their slaves, see Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 37–69. 18. Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). This idea had older roots. See Cathy Matson and Peter Onuf, “Toward a Republican Empire: Interest and Ideology,” American Quarterly 37 (Autumn 1985): 496–531; Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 19. An Examination of the Reasons Why the Present System of Auctions Ought to be Abolished: As Set Forth by the Committee of New York Merchants, Opposed to the Auction System (Boston: Beals, Homer, 1828), 15–16. 20. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001); C. P. Kindleberger, “The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–1875,” Journal of Economic History 35 (March 1975): 28–36; John Vincent Nye, “The Myth of Free Trade Britain and Fortress France: Tariffs and Trade in the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of Economic History 51 (March 1991): 23–46; Douglas A. Irwin, “Free Trade and Protection in Nineteenth-Century Britain and France Revisited: A Comment on Nye,” Journal of Economic History 53 (March 1993): 146–152; Simon Morgan, “The Anti–Corn Law League and British Anti-Slavery in Transatlantic Perspective, 1838–1846,” Historical Journal 52 (March 2009): 87– 109; Richard Huzzey, “Free Trade, Free Labour and Slave Sugar in Victorian Britain,” Historical Journal 53 (June 2010): 359–379; and Anthony Howe, “John Bull and Brother Jonathan: Cobden, America and the Liberal Mind,” in The American Experiment and the Idea of Democracy in British Culture, 1776–1914, ed. Ella Dzelzainis and Ruth Livesey (Farnham: Ashgate, 2013): 107–120. 21. This is not an aspect of the Young America movement that is often highlighted. Instead, historians have spent more time on the writers and journalists, such as John O’Sullivan, who promoted manifest destiny and territorial expansion as the key to democracy. See Edward L. Widmer, Young America: The Flowering of Democracy in New York City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For a clearer picture of the movement’s economic ideas, see Yonatan Eyal, The Young America Movement and the Transformation of the Democratic Party 1828–1861 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 22. A. Dudley Mann, “Southern Direct Trade with Europe,” DBR 24 (May 1858): 373. 23. The line between what constitutes intellectual history and cultural history has long been disputed somewhat fruitlessly. In the case of economic ideas, I argue that to ignore either

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methodological approach is to overlook how economic ideas take shape and become powerful. It is through being embodied as habit and communal practice that an economic idea becomes meaningful, and it is through attempting to negotiate the challenges of everyday commercial life and the effort to maintain or transgress collective economic values that new economic ideas are very often born. On divisions between these disciplines, see David D. Hall, “Backwards to the Future: The Cultural Turn and the Wisdom of Intellectual History,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (April 2012): 171–184. 24. On imagined economies, see John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). This idea of course builds on Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991). 25. Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures; Selected Essays (1973; London: Fontana, 1993), 90. 26. On the liberal consensus, see Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought Since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955); and Richard Hofstadter, American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It (New York: Knopf, 1948). More recent work includes Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order. In the 1970s, historians began to challenge the view that America had always been capitalistic. See Michael Merrill, “ ‘Cash Is Good to Eat’: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 4 (Winter 1977): 42–71; James A. Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 35 (January 1978): 3–32. This literature blossomed in the 1980s and 1990s; see, for example, Steven Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983); Christopher Clark, The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts 1780–1860 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). The debate continues to be waged, particularly in larger synthetic works of the time period. See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). The most convincing recent work characterizes the market revolution as a series of interrelated structural, cultural and intellectual shifts leading to a new understanding of capitalism as a dominant ideology in nineteenth-century America. See Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America eds., Michael Zakim and Gary J. Kornblith, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). 27. The classic articulation of slavery as “in but not of ” a capitalist society is Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 55. See also Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1967). The rejoinder to this position was James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982). However, moving past the Marxist definition of capitalism has allowed recent scholars to demonstrate clearly the capitalist nature of the antebellum slave society. See Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013). For a more critical response, see Scott Reynolds Nelson, “Who Put Their Capitalism in My Slavery?” Journal of the Civil War Era 5 (June 2015): 289–310. For an outline of where this debate may be heading see, Seth Rockman, “The Future of Civil War Era Studies: Slavery and Capitalism,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (March 2012): 5.

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28. For a sample of this literature, see Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Scott A. Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005); Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007); Jessica M. Lepler, The Many Panics of 1837: People, Politics, and the Creation of a Transatlantic Financial Crisis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Wendy Woloson, In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence Through the Great Depression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); Brian P. Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2011); Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy; Rosanne Currarino, “Toward a History of Cultural Economy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 2 (December 2012): 564–585. For an outstanding account of the development of this scholarship and some critiques, see Seth Rockman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?” JER 34 (Fall 2014): 439–66. 29. See for example, Victoria de Grazia and Ellen Furlough, eds., The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Kathy Lee Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1998); Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994); Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of a Consumer Society (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Lizabeth Cohen, Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago, 1919–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 30. For crucial exceptions to this observation see, Maxine Berg, “In Pursuit of Luxury: Global History and British Consumer Goods in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 182 (February 2004): 85–142; Sidney W. Mintz, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History (New York: Viking, 1985). 31. This phrase is borrowed from Michael Zakim. See Michael Zakim, “Bringing the Economy Back In,” Reviews in American History 42 (September, 2014): 398–404. 32. The term political economy has come back into use after several decades of neglect. I define it as the exercise of power to control a state’s economic affairs in the pursuit of promoting an interest. As Elkins and McKitrick have also pointed out, political economy embraces “the entire range of relations between government and the social and economic order, having a clear moral component.” I would add that it embraces the relationship between the state and the nation’s cultural values as well. See Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 19. 33. The early nineteenth-century U.S. state has received new attention from historians. See William Novak, The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Gautham Rao, “The Creation of the American State: Customhouses, Law and Commerce in the Age of Revolution” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008). 34. See Rockman, “What Makes the History of Capitalism Newsworthy?”; Jeffrey Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History 9 (April 2012): 233–248. There are exceptions; see Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, and Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 35. Breen, Marketplace of Revolution; and Haulman, Politics of Fashion. Again exceptions

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include Linzy A. Brekke, “The ‘Scourge of Fashion’: Political Economy and the Politics of Consumption in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies (Spring 2005): 106–139; and Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 36. In 2006 the Journal of American History published a review of literature on politics and consumption that jumped from the Revolutionary era to the early twentieth century, reflecting the gap in the literature. See David Steigerwald, T. H. Breen; and Lizabeth Cohen, “Exchange: American Consumerism,” Journal of American History 93 (September 2006): 385–413. 37. The phrase “world of goods” is taken from the title of John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 2003). The literature on consumption in American history has expanded exponentially in the last three decades. For some of the best examples, see Regina Lee Blaszczyk, Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgwood to Corning (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); Carson et al, eds., Of Consuming Interests; Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears, eds., The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983); William R. Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1994); T. J. Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); Peiss, Hope in a Jar. There have been a few studies that explore the political meanings of consumption in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution; Yokota, Unbecoming British; Brekke, “ ‘Scourge of Fashion’ ”; Frank, Buy American: Glickman, Buying Power; Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy; Merish, Sentimental Materialism. On the twentieth century, see Lizabeth Cohen’s work A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003); Charles McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007).

Chapter 1. Dilemmas of Abundance 1. Benjamin Franklin, “The Nature and Necessity of a Paper-Currency,” April 3, 1729, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (American Philosophical Society and Yale University), 1:139, www. franklinpapers.org, accessed August 3, 2013. See also “Examination Before the Committee of the Whole of the House of Commons,” February 13, 1766, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 13:124. This episode is beautifully described in T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumption Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 195–200. 2. Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Cooper, October 27, 1779, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 30:597. 3. Benjamin Franklin to Sarah Bache, June 3, 1779, Papers of Benjamin Franklin, 29:612. See Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 177. 4. Benjamin Franklin to Charles Thomson (unpublished), May 13, 1784, Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 5. Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughn (unpublished), July 26, 1784, Papers of Benjamin Franklin.

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6. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 52–75. 7. Don Higginbotham, “War and State Formation in Revolutionary America,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 67. Foreign governments insisted on making separate peace treaties with each state. See Max M. Edling, A Hercules in the Cradle: War, Money and the American State, 1783–1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014), 27. 8. Haulman, Politics of Fashion, 106–116, 126–129. 9. Recent scholarship has emphasized the international dimension of the problems facing the Congress during the Confederation period. See David M. Golove and Daniel J. Hulsebosch, “A Civilized Nation: The Early American Constitution, the Law of Nations, and the Pursuit of International Recognition,” New York University Law Review 85 (October 2010): 938–963. 10. E. James Ferguson, The Power of the Purse: A History of American Public Finance, 1776– 1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961), 220–250. See also Roger H. Brown, Redeeming the Republic: Federalists, Taxation and the Origins of the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 23–29. 11. T. H. Breen has called the Revolution a “key moment in the history of liberal thought,” when Americans transferred a liberal subjectivity and discourse about rights and powers onto the new egalitarian consumer marketplace. However, as this chapter demonstrates, this transformation was far from complete by 1783. Instead, the occasion of nationhood simply catapulted the issue of citizenship and consumption into a new phase of debate. See Breen, Marketplace of Revolution, 23–25. 12. Between October 1781 and August 1786, the states’ overall compliance rate to Confederation requisitions was 37 percent. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 11–39, 110–114. 13. The contention that citizenship is deeply differentiated by class, gender, race, and ablebodiedness is well established. See Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998); and Barbara Young Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 14. Joyce Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Consumer Society in American History: A Reader, ed. Laurence B. Glickman (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 134. 15. Noah Webster, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (From Sidney’s Press, for Hudson and Goodwin, Book-sellers, Hartford, and Increase Cooke and Co., Book-sellers, New-Haven, 1806), 181, 64. 16. Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” 134. 17. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 91–115, quote on 95. 18. Haulman, Politics of Fashion, 105–116, 130–151, 156–180; Susan Klepp, “Rough Music on Independence Day: Philadelphia,” in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. Matthew Dennis, Simon P. Newman, and William Pencak (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). 19. Haulman, Politics of Fashion, 177. 20. Linzy Brekke, “ ‘To Make a Figure’: Clothing and the Politics of Male Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, ed. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 225–246; Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Random House, 1993).

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21. Benjamin Franklin to Charles Thomson (unpublished), May 13, 1784, Papers of Benjamin Franklin; Edling, Hercules in the Cradle, 19. 22. Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughn (unpublished), July 26, 1784, Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 23. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees; or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (London: J. Roberts, 1714). See also Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger, eds., Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods (New York: Palgrave, 2007), 1–23. 24. Benjamin Franklin to Benjamin Vaughn (unpublished), July 26, 1784, Papers of Benjamin Franklin. 25. McCoy, Elusive Republic. 26. Robert Ralph Davis Jr., “Diplomatic Plumage: American Court Dress in the Early National Period,” American Quarterly 20 (Summer 1968): 167; Michael Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies: From Homespun to Ready-Made,” American Historical Review 106 (December, 2001), 1558–1571. 27. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 413–425, quote, on 422, is “Observer,” probably Samuel Adams in a criticism of the Sans Souci Club of Boston. 28. J. P. Brissot de Warville, New Travels in the United States of America, Performed in 1788 1792 (Otley, England: Woodstock Books, 2000), xvi. On the French context, see John Shovlin, The Political Economy of Virtue: Luxury, Patriotism and the Origins of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 175–181. 29. The possibility was raised by George Mason at the Constitutional Convention but dropped soon thereafter. Zakim, “Sartorial Ideologies,” 1572. 30. Massachusetts Spy OR Worcester Gazette (Worcester, Mass.), January 2, 1783; Connecticut Journal (New Haven, Conn.), January 23, 1783; Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), January 28, 1783; Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), February 19, 1783. 31. South Carolina Weekly Advertiser (Charleston, S.C.), March 12, 1783; “Albany June 16,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), July 3, 1783; Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), July 8, 1783. 32. Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), April 17, 1783. 33. He had also signed a declaration urging fellow citizens to promote the practices of selfsufficiency. See “Philadelphia January 30, Proceedings of the Convention,” Dunlap’s Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), January 30, 1775. On the committees, see Kate Haulman, “Fashion and the Culture Wars of Revolutionary Philadelphia,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 62 (October 2005): 641. 34. “Albany May 26,” Pennsylvania Evening Post (Philadelphia), June 9, 1783. 35. “New-York, July 17,” Salem Gazette (Salem, Mass.), August 7, 1783; “London May 29,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), August 16, 1783. Thomas Doerflinger, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1986), 263. 36. Peter J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire After American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 264. 37. “Deposition by Mr. Ross,” 1783, Folder 28/25/5, Gregorie Family Papers, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston (hereafter Gregorie Papers). 38. Tyler’s Quarterly Historical and Genealogical Magazine 7:110, reprinted in Anne Gregorie King, “Research Notes,” Folder 28/25/10, Gregorie Papers. 39. Joseph W. Barnwell, “The Evacuation of Charleston by the British,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 11:1 (January 1910): 7. 40. South-Carolina Weekly Gazette (Charleston), March 8, 1783.

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41. James Gregorie, “Petition to the Senate of South Carolina,” Folder 28/25/5, Gregorie Papers. 42. “Port News,” South Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser (Charleston), April 29, 1783, and May 10, 1783. 43. Richard Sylla, “Experimental Federalism: The Economics of American Government, 1789–1914,” in The Cambridge History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2:487. 44. Robert Morris to B. Franklin, September 30, 1783, cited in Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 264. 45. Richard Champion, Considerations on the Present Situation of Great Britain and the United States of America, with a View to Their Further Commercial Connexions, 2nd ed. (London: John Stockdale, 1784), 65. 46. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic, 265; Doerflinger, Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise, 263. The initial burst of trade gave way to economic depression by 1784. See Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 39. 47. Massachusetts Spy (Worcester, Mass.), June 5, 1783. 48. Another Patriot [pseud.], “Charleston, Saturday Oct. 25,” South-Carolina Gazette and General Advertiser (Charleston), October 21, 1783. 49. Haulman, Politics of Fashion, 194. 50. See “Those Persons Indebted to John Macnair,” South-Carolina Weekly Gazette (Charleston), December 5, 1783; “Donaldson and Coxe Have for Sale,” Pennsylvania Evening Herald and the American Monitor (Philadelphia), June 1, 1783; “For Sale by Jacob Lansing,” New-York Gazetteer or Northern Intelligencer (Albany, N.Y.), May 26, 1783; “Jeremiah & Ebenezer Platt,” Connecticut Courant (Hartford, Conn.), January 28, 1783; “Just Imported in the Ships Congress,” Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), February 15, 1783; “John Kean,” The Freeman’s Journal (Philadelphia), April 2, 1783. 51. “To Be Sold Wholesale or Retail by David Lamb,” South-Carolina Weekly Advertiser (Charleston), April 9, 1783. 52. Cited in Kenneth Morgan, “Business Networks in the British Export Trade to North America, 1750–1800,” in The Early Modern Atlantic Economy, ed. John J. McCusker and Kenneth Morgan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 53–54. 53. Robert E. Lipsey, “U.S. Foreign Trade and the Balance of Payments, 1800–1913,” in The Cambridge History of the United States, ed. Stanley L. Engerman and Robert E. Gallman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2:686. In contrast, southern merchants on the whole had exported directly to Britain. 54. The extent to which this trade actually diminished is hard to judge because data on imports and exports for the 1780s is incomplete and moreover only captures legal trade. But American exclusion from the British West India trade did less damage than might be expected. See Gordon C. Bjork, “The Weaning of the American Economy: Independence, Market Changes, and Economic Development,” Journal of Economic History 24 (December 1964): 553. 55. John Baker Holroyd, Earl of Sheffield, Observations on the Commerce of the American States with An Appendix, 2nd ed. (London: J. Debrett, 1783), 2. 56. Ibid., 4–5. 57. “Miscellany,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), January 10, 1787. 58. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790 to 1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 28. 59. [John Dunlap?], Pennsylvania Packet (Philadelphia), September 4, 1783.

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60. Eliga H. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2012), 119. 61. Merrill D. Peterson, “Thomas Jefferson and Commercial Policy, 1783–1793,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 22 (October 1965): 591–593. 62. Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth, 119. 63. James Madison to Richard Henry Lee, July 7, 1785, in The Writings of James Madison, ed. Gaillard Hunt, James Madison Papers, American Memory, Library of Congress, http://hdl. loc.gov/loc.mss/mjm.02_0425_0427, accessed January 25, 2013. 64. Ibid. See also Peter Onuf, “It Is Not a Union,” Wilson Quarterly 11 (Spring 1987): 100– 101, for comments by Pierce Butler of South Carolina and Thomas Jefferson, who both echoed Madison’s concern. 65. Honesty Shewed to Be a True Policy; or, A General Impost Considered (New York: Childs, 1786), 15–16. For an overview of the different tariff schedules imposed by the states in the mid1780s, see William Hill, “The First States of the Tariff Policy of the United States,” Publications of the American Economic Association 8 (November 1893): 38–55. 66. Michael Schwarz, “The Great Divergence Reconsidered: Hamilton, Madison and U.S.-British Relations, 1783–89,” JER 27 (Fall 2007): 418–423. 67. John Murrin, “A Roof Without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity,” in Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity, ed. Richard Beeman, Stephen Botein, and Edward C. Carter II (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 333–349. 68. Publius [Alexander Hamilton], “No. 12: The Utility of Union in Respect to Revenue,” Federalist Papers (1787), https://www.congress.gov/resources/display/content/The+Federalist+Papers, accessed October 22, 2015. 69. On debt and its relationship to morality, see Bruce H. Mann, The Republic of Debtors: Bankruptcy in the Age of American Independence (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). 70. “The Following Piece,” Daily Advertiser (New York), September 15, 1786. 71. John Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 72. Benjamin Franklin, “A True Description of the Interest and Policy of the Continent of America,” New-Hampshire Mercury and the General Advertiser (Portsmouth, N.H.), December 20, 1786. 73. James Madison, “Essay on Money” (1779–1780), in The Selected Writings of James Madison, ed. Ralph Louis Ketcham (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 4–10. See also Janet A. Riesman, “Money, Credit and Federalist Political Economy,” in Beyond Confederation, ed. Beeman et al., 142. 74. Brown, Redeeming the Republic, 18–20, 33. 75. Richard Buel Jr., “The Public Creditor Interest in Massachusetts Politics, 1780–1786,” in In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion, ed. Robert A. Gross (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1986), 51–55. 76. “The Honorable Judge Pendleton’s Charge,” Charleston Morning Post and Daily Advertiser (Charleston), December 13, 1786. 77. David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 23–24, 28. 78. On taxation during the 1780s, see, Max M. Edling and Mark D. Kaplanoff, “Alexander

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Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform: Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 61 (October 2004): 713–744. On Massachusetts, see Buel, “Public Creditor,” 51–55. 79. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 31–34. 80. Quote taken from Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion, 67. 81. “Boston Nov. 18 1786,” Massachusetts Gazette (Boston), November 24, 1786. See also American Herald (Boston), November 27, 1786; American Mercury (Hartford, Conn.), November 27, 1786. 82. “Boston, November 27,” United States Chronicle (Providence, R.I.), November 30, 1786; “Association for Economy,” Worcester Magazine, 2:36 (December, 1786), 437–438. 83. “From the Independent Chronicle,” Salem Mercury (Salem, Mass.)February 10, 1787; “From the New-Jersey Journal of May 2,” Boston Gazette and the Country Journal, May 21, 1787. 84. Abigail Smith Adams to Mary Smith Cranch, February 25, 1787, in Letters of Mrs. Adams, the Wife of John Adams, 3rd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1841), 2:170–174. 85. Abigail Smith Adams to Thomas Jefferson, January 29, 1787, in Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress, Series 1, General Correspondence, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib002499, accessed February 2, 2013. 86. Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (Montpelier, Vt.: Printed for Josiah Parks at the Press of Walton and Gross, 1810), 23. The Way to Wealth was first printed in 1758 and remained a popular and persistent guide to economic behavior in America. See James Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2006). 87. “The Following Piece.” 88. Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton, 1988, 263–287). 89. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Institute of Early American History and Culture at Williamsburg, Va., by the University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 1969. See also J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (1975; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 90. “Extract from the Concluders of the Address to the General Court of Massachusetts to the People,” Middlesex Gazette (Middletown, Conn.) January 1, 1787. 91. “Newbury-Port March 28,” Essex Journal and New Hampshire Packet (Newburyport, Mass.), March 28, 1787; “Salem April 28,” Salem (Mass.) Mercury, April 28, 1787; Cumberland Gazette (Portland, Me.), May 4, 1787; Connecticut Courant (Hartford, Conn.), April 30, 1787. 92. “Mr. Wheeler, Your Attention Is Requested to the Enclosed Piece from a Female Correspondent,” United States Chronicle, (Providence, R.I.), May 11, 1786. 93. “Mr. Printer,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), October 11, 1786. 94. “Extract of a Letter from New-Jersey April 15,” Connecticut Courant and Weekly Intelligencer (Hartford), May 8, 1786; Salem (Mass.) Mercury, April 28, 1787. 95. “Poeticks,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), January 27, 1787. This poem was reprinted in the New-Jersey Journal and Political Intelligencer (Elizabethtown, N.J.), August 16, 1786; Continental Journal (Boston), August 17, 1786. 96. Carole Shammas, “Re-Assessing the Married Women’s Property Acts,” Journal of Women’s History 6 (Spring 1994): 9–10. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 31–32. 97. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor, The Ties That Buy: Women and Commerce in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 13–38, 70–85.

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98. “Remarks on Manners, Government, Laws and the Domestic Debt of America— Addressed to the Citizens of the United States,” Pennsylvania Herald and General Advertiser (Philadelphia), February 21, 1787. 99. Rosemarie Zagarri, “The Rights of Man and Woman in Post-Revolutionary America,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 55 (April 1998): 203–230. Zagarri points out that it was the Federalists, rather than the Jeffersonians, who placed an emphasis on the obligations inherent in citizenship. 100. “Number III: To the Inhabitants of Massachusetts,” Boston Gazette and the Country Journal (Boston), July 2, 1787. 101. “Remarks on Manners,” Pennsylvania Herald and General Advertiser (Philadelphia), February 21, 1787. 102. “New York July 5,” Impartial Gazetteer and Saturday Evening Post (New York), July 5, 1788. 103. Mandeville, Fable of the Bees. 104. “For the Independent Chronicle: Number X,” Independent Chronicle and the Universal Advertiser (Boston), June 21, 1787. 105. “Miscellany for the Centinel,” Massachusetts Centinel (Boston), July 11, 1787. 106. Benjamin Franklin, “A True Description of the Interest and Policy of the Continent of America,” New-Hampshire Mercury and the General Advertiser (Portsmouth, N.H.), December 20, 1786. 107. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st Session (April 8, 1789), 106, 115. 108. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 66–71. 109. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st Session (April 17, 1789), 174. 110. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st Session (April 9, 1789), 110. 111. Annals of Congress, 1st Congress, 1st Session (April 14, 1789), 118, 134. 112. Hugh Williamson, “From the American Museum,” Norwich (Conn.) Packet, March 27, 1789. 113. “From the Connecticut Courant,” Middlesex Gazette: Or Federal Advertiser (Middletown, Conn.), May 16, 1789. 114. “Salem May 19, Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman in Congress to His Friend in This Town, May 11,” Salem Mercury (Salem, Mass.), May 19, 1789. 115. Edling and Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform,” 716. For the distribution of Adam Smith among the founding fathers, see Samuel Fleischacker, “Adam Smith’s Reception Among the American Founders, 1776–1790,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 59 (October 2002): 916. 116. A Citizen of Philadelphia, “An Essay on Free Trade and Finances,” Gazette of the United States (New York), June 10, 1789.

Chapter 2. The Marketplace of Retribution 1. An Exact and Authentic Narrative of the Events Which Took Place in Baltimore on the 27th and 28th of July Last, Carefully Collected from Some of the Sufferers and Eye-Witnesses (Printed for the Purchasers, September 1, 1812), 4–7. See also Paul A. Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History 13 (Summer 1980): 549–554; and Alan Taylor, The Civil War of 1812: American Citizens, British Subjects, Irish rebels and Indian Allies (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 177–179. 2. An Exact and Authentic Narrative of the Events Which Took Place in Baltimore, 7–24.

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3. Gilje, “Baltimore Riots of 1812,” 555. 4. “Address of the Editors of the Baltimore Federal Republican,” Spectator (New York), August 8, 1812. 5. Donald R. Hickey, The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 51. 6. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 8–9. 7. Douglass C. North, The Economic Growth of the United States 1790 to 1860 (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 17. 8. Donald R. Hickey, “American Trade Restrictions During the War of 1812,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 517; Burton Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis: Commerce, Embargo and the Republican Revolution (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979). 9. John E. Crowley, The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). 10. Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1990); and Cathy D. Matson, “Capitalizing Hope: Economic Thought and the Early National Economy,” JER 16 (Summer 1996): 273–291. 11. Harriet Trumbull and Maria Trumbull, A Season in New York, 1801: Letters of Harriet and Maria Trumbull, ed. Helen M. Morgan (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1969), 1–19. A mantua was a loose gown that fitted over the top of stays or corsets. The mantua maker was usually female, but women were not permitted by guild law to make the stays. This task was performed by a tailor. See John E. Crowley, The Invention of Comfort: Sensibilities and Design in Early Modern Britain and Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 143–144. 12. Maria Trumbull to Gov. and Mrs. Trumbull, December 17, 1800, in Trumbull and Trumbull, Season in New York, 68. 13. Maria Trumbull to Mrs. Trumbull, December 2, 1800, in Trumbull and Trumbull, Season in New York, 51. 14. Harriet Trumbull to Gov. Trumbull, January 10, 1801, in Trumbull and Trumbull, Season in New York, 88. 15. Maria Trumbull to Gov. Trumbull, January 26, 1801, in Trumbull and Trumbull, Season in New York, 106. 16. Trumbull and Trumbull, Season in New York, 106n4. 17. In 1790 the dollar value of imports stood at $23.5 million, and in 1807 that figure was $81.8 million. Douglass C. North qualifies these figures with two caveats: first, that some of this increase would have been due to imports destined to be reexported and should not therefore be seen as part of the nation’s consumable goods; second, more important, that Americans did not keep specific information on imports during this period, so the reconstruction of these figures is more of a rough sketch than a precise reflection. North, Economic Growth of the United States, 28. 18. John F. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Times (Philadelphia: Leary, Stuart, 1909), 1:243. 19. This development had begun in the 1750s. On the geography of this early shift in New York, see Thomas David Beal, “Selling Gotham: The Retail Trade in New York City from the Public Market to Alexander T. Stewart’s Marble Palace, 1625–1860” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1998), 243–253. 20. Ibid., 455.

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21. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 340. 22. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 1:226–227. 23. Charles Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston (Charleston, S.C.: John Russell, 1854), 12. 24. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 1:222. Not all cities developed as quickly. On Charleston, see Fraser, Reminiscences of Charleston, 13; and Jennifer L. Goloboy, “Strangers in the South: Charleston’s Merchants and Middle-Class Values in the Early Republic,” in The Southern Middle-Class in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Jonathan Daniel Wells and Jennifer R. Green (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2011), 40–48. 25. Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 1:222. 26. Harmon Wendell, account book, 1807–1810, MSS Collection, N-YHS, 1–2. 27. Ibid., 3. 28. Brian Luskey, On the Make: Clerks and the Quest for Capital in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: New York University Press, 2011). 29. Wendell, account book, 23, 31, 35. 30. The extent to which rural Americans engaged with a market economy has provoked long-standing debate. Scholars who argued that rural Americans lived outside a capitalist market system were James Henretta, “Families and Farms: Mentalité in Pre-Industrial America,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 35 (January 1978): 3–32; Michael Merrill, “Cash Is Good to Eat: Self-Sufficiency and Exchange in the Rural Economy of the United States,” Radical History Review 4 (Winter 1977): 42–72; and Christopher Clark, “Household Economy, Market Exchange and the Rise of Capitalism in the Connecticut Valley, 1800–1860,” Journal of Social History 13 (Winter 1979): 169–189. The scholars that refuted this argument are Carole Shammas, “How Sufficient Was Early America?” Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (Autumn 1982): 247–272; Bettye Hobbes Pruitt, “Self-Sufficiency and the Agricultural Economy of Eighteenth Century Massachusetts,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 41 (July 1984): 333–364; and Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert, eds., Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994). More recent scholarship confirms that rural Americans did engage with and shape the market economy in the United States. See T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820, ” WMQ, 3rd. ser., 62 (October 2005): 577–624; Anne Smart Martin, Buying into the World of Goods: Early Consumers in Backcountry Virginia (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 31. For the political economy and mindset of the Federalists, see, Steven Watts, “Ministers, Misanthropes and Mandarins: The Federalists and the Culture of Capitalism, 1790–1820,” in Federalists Reconsidered, ed. Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 157–178; Andrew Siegel, “ ‘Steady Habits’ Under Siege: The Defense of Federalism in Jeffersonian Connecticut,” in Federalists Reconsidered, 199–224. 32. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); and Brian Schoen, “Calculating the Price of Union: Republican Economic Nationalism and the Origins of Southern Sectionalism, 1790– 1828,” JER 23 (Summer 2003): 173–206. For an excellent overview of how the two parties consolidated their understanding of political economy in the early nineteenth century, see Lawrence Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 188–206.

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33. Samuel Miles speaking to the Pennsylvania Society for the Promotion of Manufactures and Useful Arts (1787), quote from Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 105–106. 34. Douglass C. North and Robert Paul Thomas, eds., The Growth of the American Economy to 1860 (New York: Harper and Row, 1968), 9–10. 35. Reginald Horsman, The Causes of the War of 1812 (New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 31–34; and North and Thomas, Growth of the American Economy, 175–178. 36. This contravened the agreement reached by the Jay Treaty, which in 1795 had accorded America most favored nation status. France had opened all its West Indian ports to the Americans in 1793. See Michelle Craig McDonald, “The Chance of a Moment: Coffee and the New West Indies Commodities Trade,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 62 (July 2005): 460. 37. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 211–216. 38. As well as trade, impressment was a major issue. Taylor, Civil War of 1812, 110. 39. James Monroe to Thomas Jefferson, October 6, 1805, The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress, Series 1, General Correspondence, http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mtj.mtjbib015177, accessed November 14, 2015. 40. Annals of Congress, 9th Congress, 1st Session (January 29, 1806), 412–413. 41. Spivak, Jefferson’s English Crisis, 2–66. 42. “Minutes of Proceedings in the House of U.S. Representatives,” Aurora General Advertiser (New York), March 8, 1806. Between 1801 and 1806 nearly all the public revenues were derived from customs, resulting in an income that ranged from $11 to $13 million annually. See Donald H. Kagin, “Monetary Aspects of the Treasury Notes of the War of 1812,” Journal of Economic History 44 (March 1984): 70. Additional government revenues were supplied by loans, the largest of which were obtained from Holland in 1792, with smaller bridging loans coming from prominent capitalists or one of the four existing private banks in the United States. 43. “Minutes of Proceedings in the House of U.S. Representatives.” 44. Thomas Jefferson, Sixth Annual Message, December 2, 1806, www.millercenter.org/ scripps/archive/speeches, accessed January 19, 2009. 45. “Minutes of Proceedings in the House of Representatives U.S.” 46. New-York Commercial Advertiser (New York), March 29, 1806. 47. New-York Commercial Advertiser (New York), March 31, 1806. 48. Ibid., 186. 49. Herbert Heaton, “Non-Importation, 1806–1812,” Journal of Economic History 1 (November 1941): 179. 50. See, for example, the account book of Oliver Wolcott, who was the secretary of the Treasury after Alexander Hamilton as well as a New York merchant. Oliver Wolcott and Co., account books, 1804–1810, MSS Collection, N-YHS, 1–3, 97, 162–163. 51. Albert Gallatin to Thomas Newton, Chairman of the Committee of Commerce and Manufactures, December 5, 1807, H.R. 10A-B1, Documents Accompanying House Bill No. 16 . . . [Bill introduced December 8, 1807], M1711, Roll 1 Unbound Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, 10th Congress, 1807–1809, RG233, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C. 52. McCoy, Elusive Republic, 217. 53. Gautham Rao, “The Production of Authority: Regulating the Market in the Age of Jefferson.” Paper presented to the Joint Seminar of the Program in Early American Economy and Society at the Library Company of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pa., February 20, 2009, 15–17. 54. Heaton, “Non-Importation, 1806–1812,” 187. 55. Aurora (Philadelphia), March 3, March 17, March 24, April, 7, 1808.

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56. Albert Gallatin to David Gelston, November 16, 1808, “Circular,” Box 83, Folder “Letters to David Gelston, 1808–1810,” Gallatin Papers, N-YHS (hereafter cited as Gallatin Papers). 57. Heaton, “Non-Importation, 1806–1812,” 192. 58. Albert Gallatin to David Gelston, May 15, 1809, Box 83, Folder “Letters to David Gelston, 1808–1810,” Gallatin Papers. 59. “American Navigation Act,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), January 20, 1810. 60. Tuckerman and Rogers to Cushing, April 3, 1811, Letterbook, 1810 to 1815, AAS. 61. Hickey, “American Trade Restrictions During the War of 1812,” 525. 62. Ibid., 532. 63. Ibid., 536. 64. “Non-Importation Act,” Aurora (Philadelphia), December 10, 1806. 65. “Reflections on the Comparative Effects of a WAR,” United States’ Gazette (Philadelphia), August 13, 1807. 66. Michael Zakim also argues that early nineteenth-century concerns about luxury as corruption were just as often concerns about a level of material comfort spreading beyond the elite classes. See Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 32. 67. “For the Aurora, No. III,” Aurora (Philadelphia), January 18, 1810. 68. See Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 11–36; Linzy Brekke, “ ‘To Make a Figure’: Clothing and the Politics of Male Identity in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, ed. John Styles and Amanda Vickery (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 225–246. 69. For rhetoric in support of mechanics, see, for example, “Politics for Mechanics,” Aurora (Philadelphia), January 20, 1807; “On Manufactures,” Aurora (Philadelphia), June 25, 1807; “Constitution of Philadelphia Premium Society,” Aurora (Philadelphia), June 9, 1808; “For the Aurora,” Aurora (Philadelphia), February 23, 1809. 70. “A. Vitry,” Aurora (Philadelphia), February 19, 1807; “New and Fashionable,” Aurora (Philadelphia), September 17, 1807; “Improvement in Domestic Manufactures,” Aurora (Philadelphia), January 7, 1808. “Domestic Manufactures,” Aurora (Philadelphia), June 18, 1807; “American Manufactures,” Aurora (Philadelphia), March 31, 1808. 71. I use the phrase “American producers” to encompass the many varieties of producer that Duane was encouraging, a variety that reflected the broad range of manufacturing activities that was taking place in the United States at this point. There is an excellent discussion of the ways that terms to describe producers were changing in the 1800s and 1810s in Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 139–161. On household production, the best account remains Rolla Tryon, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917). On artisan and mechanic production in Philadelphia in particular, see Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), and for a good account of the different types of factories that were growing up in both Pennsylvania and New England, see Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The classic account of New York production is Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 107–145, which provides an excellent description of metropolitan industrialization. For a discussion of women workers, see also Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860, 3rd ed. (1982; Urbana: Illini Books edition, University of Illinois Press, 1987). 72. Aurora (Philadelphia), June 2, 1808. The Aurora was not the only newspaper to identify

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the ideal consumer as a farmer. “Encourage American Manufacturers,” Bee (Hudson, N.Y.), December 7, 1810. 73. Tench Coxe, Digest of Manufactures, January 5, 1814, American State Papers: Finance 2:677–689. Coxe’s observations came after the imposition of the embargo, which had boosted American manufacturing by making importation that much harder. On Tench Coxe and his support of American manufacturing, see Jacob E. Cooke, Tench Coxe and the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 182–200. 74. Tench Coxe, Digest of Manufactures, 678. 75. Ibid., 678. On the problems of creating red dye with cochineal and madder, see Susan Fairlie, “Dyestuffs in the Eighteenth Century,” Economic History Review 17 (April 1965): 490– 491, 508–509. 76. United States’ Gazette (Philadelphia), March 24, 1808. Amaranth was a red-colored dye, and cocquelicot was the French word for poppy, thus denoting a bright red-orange color. See also United States’ Gazette (Philadelphia), April 28, 1808. 77. Betty-Bright P. Low, “Of Muslins and Merveilleuses: Excerpts from the Letters of Josephine du Pont and Margaret Manigault,” Winterthur Portfolio 9 (1974): 29–75. This textile literacy was not limited to women. See also David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth Century MidAtlantic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 65 (April 1999): 243–272. 78. “Domestic: Lynchburg, Vir, Sept. 2,” American Monitor (Plattsburgh, N.Y.), October 21, 1809. 79. Joanna Cohen, “Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1800–1850,” Winterthur Portfolio 48 (Summer/Autumn 2014): 163–190. 80. Tuckerman and Rogers to Cushing, March 29, 1810, “Tuckerman and Rogers Letterbook, 1810 to 1815,” AAS. 81. Ibid., April 30, 1810. 82. For an account of how New Jersey judge Robert Morris allowed goods through, see “From the Fredonian,” Columbian (New York), December 21, 1811. See also Rao, “The Production of Authority,” 15–17. 83. Both the Aurora and the United States’ Gazette, two newspapers with such opposing political views, are full of these auction notices. Browsing through the newspapers reveals auction sales occurring on a weekly basis. 84. On the ambiguity of the auction sale, see Ira Cohen “The Auction System in the Port of New York, 1817–1837,” Business History Review 45 (Winter 1971): 489. On privateering, see, for example, “Rich Prizes,” Aurora (Philadelphia), November 1, 1814. 85. See, for example, Message of President Madison: Communicated on Tuesday, November 5, 1811, American State Papers: Foreign Relations, 1:78. 86. For an example of how to explore smuggling as part of a much more complex pattern of existing trade networks, see McDonald, “Chance of the Moment.” On borderland economies, see Joseph Smith, Borderland Smuggling: Patriots, Loyalists, and Illicit Trade in the Northeast, 1783–1820 (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 3. 87. “From the National Intelligencer,” War (New York), December 28, 1813. 88. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 10. 89. “Gross Partiality,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), May 15, 1812. 90. “To the Editors,” Herald (Otsego, N.Y.), September 25, 1813. 91. Albert Gallatin to David Gelston, October 21, 1811, Gallatin Papers, Box 83, Folder

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“Letters to David Gelston July, 1811–1812.” See also “Trenton,” Evening Post (New York), December 28, 1813. 92. “From the Fredonian,” Columbian (New York), December 21, 1811. 93. James Buckley to Abel Buckley, November 6, 1811, Buckley Letterbook, MSS Collection, N-YHS. 94. James Buckley to Abel Buckley, September 22, 1812, and November 10, 1812, Buckley Letterbook, MSS Collection, N-YHS. 95. “What Does This Mean,” Patriot (Saratoga, N.Y.), October 7, 1812. 96. Star (Long-Island, N.Y.), March 16, 1814, and Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), July 21, 1814. 97. Smith, Borderland Smuggling, 49–80. 98. “London Fashions for April,” Commercial Advertiser (New York), May 19, 1814. This type of article was a common feature of newspapers and were so popular that they also warranted publication as a book. See, for example, The Mirror of Graces; or, The English Lady’s Costume . . . by a Lady of Distinction (New York: I. Riley, 1813). 99. Figure for 1806 comes from Thomas Jefferson, Sixth Annual Message, December 2, 1806 in A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, Prepared Under the Direction of the Joint Committee on Printing of the House and the Senate (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897) 1:396; the other figures come from Kagin “Monetary Aspects of the Treasury Notes of the War of 1812,” 71. 100. “Congress, House of Representatives: Debates on Foreign Relations,” United States’ Gazette (Philadelphia), February 16, 1809. 101. Ibid. 102. Act of January 9, 1815, c. 21, 3, Stat. 164. This act was repealed on December 23, 1817. 103. Act of January 18, 1815, c. 22, 3, Stat. 180; Act of January 18, 1815, c. 23, 3, Stat. 186. The first of these acts was repealed on February 22, 1816, and the second on April 9, 1816. 104. Act of February 5, 1816, c. 10, 3, Stat. 253. 105. “An Eruption at the Eastward,” Evening Post (New York), March 31, 1814. For another example of customs officers being threatened with the “tar and feather” treatment, see “NonIntercourse,” Albany Register (Albany, N.Y.), October 13, 1811. 106. An American [pseud.], “Washington, Monday January 23, 1815: To the People of the United States,” Daily National Intelligencer (Washington D.C.), January 23, 1815. 107. Ezra Sampson, The Brief Remarker on the Ways of Man; or, Compendious Dissertations, Respecting Social and Domestic Relations and Concerns, and the Various Economy of Life; Intended and Calculated, More Especially, for the Use of Those in the Common Ranks of American Society (Hudson, N.Y.: Pub for the author by Stone and Cross, 1818), 34. The Connecticut Courant was a well-known Federalist organ. See Frank Luther Mott, American Journalism: A History: 1690–1960 (New York: Macmillan, 1962), 136. 108. Sampson, Brief Remarker, 31. 109. A Friend of Peace and Commerce [pseud.], “For the Palladium,” New-England Palladium (Boston), February 28, 1815; Allegany Federalist [pseud.], American Telegraph (Brownsville, Pa.), September 13, 1815. 110. “From the Virginia Patriot, Richmond March 8,” Evening Post (New York), March 15, 1815. 111. This is despite the fact that slaves did enter into a market economy, to spend earnings on goods within their limited circumstances. See Ira Berlin and Philip Morgan, “Introduction:

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Special Issue; The Slaves’ Economy; Independent Production by Slaves in the Americas,” Slavery and Abolition 12:1 (1991): 1–27. 112. Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001), 117–134. 113. This builds on the argument of Waldstreicher, in “Reading the Runaways,” 251–254, 257. 114. John Bristed, The Resources of the United States of America; or, A View of the Agricultural, Commercial Manufacturing, Financial, Political, Literary, Moral and Religious Capacity and Character of the American People (New York: James Eastburn, 1818), 391. 115. Bristed, Resources of the United States of America, 389. See also John Taylor of Caroline, Arator: Being a Series of Agricultural Essays, Practical and Political, 3rd ed. (Baltimore: J. Robinson, 1917), 41. 116. Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 213–225. 117. Yokota, Unbecoming British, 225. On the problem of how to situate a black population culturally within the U.S. citizenry, see also Nicole Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 176–180. 118. Emma Jones Lapsansky, “ ‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 32 (Spring 1980): 68–71. 119. On Marcet’s background, see Saba Bahar, “Jane Marcet and the Limits to Public Science,” British Journal for the History of Science 34 (March 2001): 30–32. On Marcet’s reputation in America, see “Contemporary Female Genius,” Ladies’ Literary Cabinet, Being a Repository of Miscellaneous Literary Productions, Both Original and Selected in Prose and Verse 4 (August 25, 1821): 125. 120. Jane Haldimand Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy in Which the Elements of That Science Are Familiarly Explained (Philadelphia: Moses Thomas, 1817), 363. 121. Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also Stansell, City of Women, 11–18. 122. Essays from the Desk of Poor Robert the Scribe Containing Lessons in Manners, Morals and Domestic Economy: Originally Published in the Gleaner (Doylestown, Pa.: Asher Miner, 1815), 49–52. 123. Marcet, Conversations on Political Economy, 14. This was a doctrine she had absorbed from fellow political economists. See Jean Baptiste Say, Catechism of Political Economy; or, Familiar Conversations on the Manner in Which Wealth Is Produced, Distributed and Consumed in Society, trans. John Richter (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1817), 63. 124. Nicole Eustace makes a similar point on the emerging discourse of female choice during the War of 1812 with regards to marriage, the importance of their cultural performances, and the attending lack of real economic independence. See Eustace, 1812: War and the Passions of Patriotism, 87, 100, 107. 125. The blurring of boundaries between elite and middling class is something that historians have commented on with regards to manners. See C. Dallet Hemphill, “Middle Class Rising in Revolutionary America: The Evidence from Manners,” Journal of Social History 30 (Winter 1996): 317–344.

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Chapter 3. The Perils of the Public Auction 1. The Beneficial Tendency of Auctioneering and the Danger of Restraining It by a Friend to Trade (New York: J. H. Sherman, 1817), 14. 2. On the construction of the domestic sphere and its relationship to the marketplace see Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). For an overview of the domestic sphere as a concept in the scholarship see Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of History,” Journal of American History 75 (June 1988): 9–39. 3. Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), 76–81. On the War of 1812, see Donald R. Hickey, “American Trade Restrictions During the War of 1812,” Journal of American History 68 (December 1981): 527–538. 4. An Examination of the Reasons Why the Present System of Auctions Ought to be Abolished: As Set Forth by the Committee of New York Merchants, Opposed to the Auction System (Boston: Beal, Homer, 1828), 15–16. 5. On auctions in the colonial period, see Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 78–79, 276. After 1815, see R. G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1939), 13, 61, 276–280; Norman Sydney Buck, The Development of the Organization of Anglo-American Trade 1800–1850 (New York: Greenwood, 1968), 135–139; Ira Cohen, “The Auction System in the Port of New York, 1817–1837,” Business History Review 45 (Winter 1971): 489–493; Ray Westerfield, “The Early History of American Auctions—A Chapter in Commercial History,” Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences 23 (May 1920): 159–210; Roland Arkell and Catherine Saunders-Watson, The Vendue Masters: Tales from Within the Walls of America’s Oldest Auction House (Pottstown, Pa.: Antique Collectors Club, 2005), 27; and Wendy Woloson, “In Hock: Pawning in Early America,” JER 27 (Spring 2007): 38. 6. For Franklin’s critique of auctions, see Benjamin Franklin, The Way to Wealth (Montpelier, Vt.: Printed for Josiah Parks at the Press of Walton and Gross, 1810), 15–16. For more on the incredible persistence and popularity of Franklin’s The Way to Wealth, which was first published in 1758, see James Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, Del.: Oak Knoll, 2006). 7. Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt, 276. 8. Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 489–490. 9. For a look at the kind of goods that sold at auction, although for a slightly later period, see “Returns 1825–1831,” Auction Records, 1818–1839, N-YHS. 10. Buck, Development of the Organization of Anglo-American Trade, 142–143. 11. Diaries 1821–1824, Summer 1821, MSS Collection, N-YHS. 12. Buck, Development of the Organization of Anglo-American Trade, 139; Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 496. 13. For a list of New York auctioneers, see “Appointments by the Council of Appointment March 4th 1817,” Albany Advertiser (N.Y.), March 8, 1817. For Philadelphia’s auctioneers I constructed a list of names by surveying the adverts from Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), for 1816 and cross-checking with James Robinson, Philadelphia Directory for 1816

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Containing the Names, Trades, and Residences of the Inhabitants of the City, Southwark, Northern Liberties and Kensington (Philadelphia: Printed for the Publisher, 1816). On Charles Town, see Edwin Williams, The New-York Annual Register (New York: J. Leavitt, 1835), 205, 235; on Martin Hoffman, see Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City, 2nd series (New York: Carleton, 1864), 53–55; on Frederick Montmollin, see Genealogies of Pennsylvania Families from the Pennsylvania Genealogical Museum (Baltimore: Genealogical Publishing Company, 1982), 3:491, www.ancestry.com, accessed October 23, 2008; for Robert McMenomy, see John Edwin Stillwell, First Families of Old Monmouth (Washington, D.C.: R. Beresford, 1882), 4–6; and on Mordecai Myers, see “Political Reminiscences: Two Chapters from the Recollections of a Political Journalist,” New York Times, May 20, 1866. Other Jewish auctioneers included Simon Nathan of New York; for more, see www.jewishencyclopaedia.com, accessed July 14, 2008; and Solomon Seixas of New York, whose career is noted in Woloson, “In Hock,” 40, 50. 14. Annals of Congress, 15th Congress, 1st Session, 426–429. 15. Martin Hoffman, Philip Stone, and Daniel Dedham to Silas E. Weir, December 19, 1817, Mrs. Howard W. Lewis Collection, HSP (hereafter cited as Lewis Collection); on Weir’s business, see Aaron Levy Jr. to Weir, August 17, 1814, Lewis Collection; Moses Poor to Weir, August 24, 1814, Lewis Collection; Thomas Didery to Weir, May 16, 1816, Lewis Collection; James Gilespie to Weir, June 20, 1816, Lewis Collection; R&G Gould to Weir, February 12, 1817, Lewis Collection. Weir was listed at this address in James Robinson, The Philadelphia Directory for 1810 Containing the Names, Trades and Residence of the Inhabitants of the City, Southwark and Northern Liberties (Philadelphia: Printed for the Publisher, 1810). 16. For national coverage of the debate, see Daily National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), December 12, 1817; Alexandria Gazette (Va.), December 12, 1817; Commercial Advertiser (New York, N.Y.), December 13, 1817; Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia), December 13, 1817; Washington Whig (Bridgetown, N.J.), December 15, 1817; Boston Daily Adviser (Boston), December 16, 1817. 17. Martin Hoffman, Philip Stone, and Daniel Denham to Weir, December 29, 1817, Lewis Collection. 18. Auctions Inconsistent with Regular Trade and Injurious to the City: Addressed to the People of New York (New York: Van Winkle, Wiley, 1817), 5. 19. The quote comes from Hoffman’s letter to Weir; see Martin Hoffman, Philip Stone, Daniel Dedham to Weir, December 19, 1817, Lewis Collection; Adam Seybert to Weir, December 29, 1817, Lewis Collection. This phrase also highlights a related facet of this debate: the question of “who should serve whom” in the economy of the early Republic. See Ellen HartiganO’Connor, “ ‘Auctioneer of Offices’: Patronage, Value and Trust in the Early Republic Marketplace,” JER 33 (Fall 2013): 466. 20. The Beneficial Tendency of Auctioneering, 5. 21. Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 493. Cohen notes that the Auction Law provided DeWitt Clinton with $1,247,319.21, which Clinton used to construct the Erie Canal. 22. Act of December 23, 1817, c. 1, 3, Stat. 401. 23. For Philadelphia figures, see Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), August 2, 1823; and The Register of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia), January 19, 1828. For New York City figures, see Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), March 7, 1818; and Western Recorder (Utica, N.Y.), February 14, 1826. 24. Auctions Inconsistent with Regular Trade (New York, 1817), 4. 25. Ibid., 6.

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26. The debate over holding the Union together through economic regulation had its roots in the constitutional convention of 1787. See Cathy D. Matson and Peter S. Onuf, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1990); and Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 27. Martin Hoffman, Philip Stone, Daniel Dedham to Weir, December 19, 1817, Lewis Collection. 28. For the auctioneers’ accusations that merchants monopolized trade, see Beneficial Tendency of Auctioneering, 12–14. However, anxieties over the question of monopoly surfaced on both sides of the debate. See Joshua R. Greenberg, Advocating the Man (2006), accessed January 14, 2008, http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/Chapter3JRG.html, 5–10. 29. Weir, for example, was employed to find “purchasers for back country consumption.” See Josiah Roberts to Lisle, Weir and Co., February 4, 1819, Lewis Collection. For a discussion on how wholesale and retail business was changing in these years, see Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 41–68; Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 14–33; and Bruce Laurie, Working People of Philadelphia 1800–1850 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980), 4–29. 30. Daniel S. Dupre, “The Panic of 1819 and the Political Economy of Sectionalism,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy D. Matson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 276. 31. For an example of the anti-auction memorials, see The Chamber of Commerce of the City of New York, January 6th 1820 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1820); City of New York Praying for Cash Payment of Duties and High Duties on Sales at Auction January 7th 1820 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1820). On the scale of petitions reaching Congress, see U.S. House Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, February 7, 1820, 198; U.S. House Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, February 10, 1820, 208; U.S. House Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, February 11, 1820, 210; U.S. House Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, March 13, 1820, 299–300; U.S. House Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, March 18, 1820, 318; U.S. Senate Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, February 8, 1820, 147; U.S. Senate Journal, 16th Congress, 1st Session, February 18, 1820, 168. For the bill, see H.R. 51, 16th Congress (1820). 32. Annals of Congress, 16th Congress, 1st Session (1820), 2175–2176. 33. Ibid. 34. For Baldwin’s quote, see Malcolm Rogers Eiselen, The Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism (Philadelphia: Porcupine, 1974), 54. 35. Annals of Congress, 16th Congress, 1st Session (1820), 2175, 2198. 36. Annals of Congress, 16th Congress, 1st Session (1820), 2175. 37. Robert J. Gamble, “The Promiscuous Economy: Cultural and Commercial Geographies of Secondhand in the Antebellum City,” in Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Brian P. Luskey and Wendy Woloson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31–52. 38. Eiselen, Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism, 54; and Westerfield, “Early History of American Auctions,” 204. 39. Memorial of the Auctioneers of the City of New York (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1821), 11; Beneficial Tendency of Auctioneering, 13. 40. For the anti-auction response that failed to highlight the plight of the consumer, see “Sales at Auction,” Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), July 21, 1821; and Memorial of the American

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Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures January 21, 1822 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1822). 41. Memorial of the Auctioneers of the City of New York , 8. 42. Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 496. 43. “Auction Duties,” Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), October 13, 1821; and Westerfield, “Early History of American Auctions,” 199. 44. On auctions as opportunities for crime, see “Aiding, Abetting and Assisting,” New-York City-Hall Recorder, 4:12 (December 1819), 179; “John Shotwell’s Cases,” New-York City-Hall Recorder, 3:6 (June 1818), 95; “Larceny,” New-York City-Hall Recorder, 3 (1818), 210; “Article 5,” NewYork Weekly Museum, December 30, 1815, 144. 45. W. Laverty to Weir, March 11, 1817, Lewis Collection. For other instances of customs fraud, see Smith M. Call and Co. to Weir, March 22, 1817, Lewis Collection. On efforts to get around paying duty, see William E. Ross to William L. Marcy Esq., March 25, 1828, Auction Returns, N-YHS. 46. On the wildbore scheme, see Otis Swan to Weir, July 23, 1817, Lewis Collection. For the idea that the buyer at an auction required experience, see Memorial of the Auctioneers of the City of New York, 8. 47. Memorial of the Merchants, Traders and Others, Citizens of the City and Country of Philadelphia, January 8, 1824, HR 18-F9.2, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 48. An Exposition of Some of the Evils Arising from the Auction System (New York: Van Pelt and Spear, 1822), 8, 6. 49. Ibid., 8. 50. On the history of caveat emptor and its implementation in U.S. law in the early Republic, see Walton H. Hamilton, “The Ancient Maxim of Caveat Emptor,” Yale Law Journal 40 (June 1931): 1133–1187. 51. The Auction System Being a Series of Numbers Published in the Federal Gazette, Addressed to the Citizens of Baltimore (Baltimore: John D. Toy, 1824), 31. 52. Lewis Tappan to Daniel Webster, Boston, November 24, 1823, Folder 1, HR 18 A-C 9.1, Various Subjects—Unarranged, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 53. Samuel Harvey, Copy of a Letter Addressed to Each Member of Congress by the Delegates from the Committee Appointed at a Meeting of the Merchants of Philadelphia, (Philadelphia?, 1824), 4. 54. C. L. and J. E. Haight and Co. to Hector Craig, New York, December 17, 1823, Folder 1, HR 18 A-C 9.1, Various Subjects—Unarranged, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. See also A. and A. Laurence to John Todd, Boston, January 19, 1824, Folder 1, HR 18 A-C 9.1, Various Subjects—Unarranged, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 55. For a sample of advertisements that boast of “auction prices,” see Rochester (N.Y.) Telegraph, January 6, 1824; Ithaca (N.Y) Journal, April 21, 1824; Rochester (N.Y.) Telegraph, November 9, 1824, and April 26, 1825. See also Henry H. Chamberlin, Chamberlin and Co.’s Cheap Cash Store (Worcester, Mass., 1841).

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56. Harvey, Copy of a Letter, 4. On the debate over sale versus use, see Beneficial Tendencies of Auctioneering, 10; and A Plain Practical Man [pseud.], Remarks upon the Auction System to Which Are Added Numerous Illustrations (New York, 1828), 9, 18; “Gone to a Book Auction,” Ariel (Philadelphia), July 10, 1830. For the “here and there” folk, see “Here and There Folks,” New-York Weekly Museum, March 8, 1817, 304. See also Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy, 17–19, 41–47. For the vaudevillian nature of auctions, see A Plain Practical Man [pseud.], Remarks upon the Auction System, 46; “On Metropolitan Auctions,” Atheneum; or, Spirit of the English Magazines (Boston), March 15, 1825, 472. 57. A Plain Practical Man [pseud.], Remarks upon the Auction System, 26. 58. Ibid., 18. 59. Auction System Being a Series of Numbers, 31. 60. Ibid., 29. 61. Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 496, 498. 62. Westerfield, “Early History of American Auctions,” 206. 63. For the American Institute’s position, see Report of a Special Committee of the American Institute on the Subject of Cash Duties, the Auction System &c. January 12 1829 (New York: J. M. Danforth, Printer, Evening City Gazette Office, 1829), Box 466, American Institute Collection, N-YHS; see also Memorial of the American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures January 21, 1822 (Washington, D.C.: Gales and Seaton, 1822). See also Eiselen, Rise of Pennsylvania Protectionism, 83–88. 64. Reasons Why the Present System of Auctions Ought to Be Abolished (New York, 1828), reprinted as “The Auction System,” Niles’ Weekly Register, June 14, 1828, 258. 65. Barrett, Old Merchants of New York City, 249–250. 66. Horace Secrist, “The Anti-Auction Movement and New York Workingmen’s Party of 1829,” Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 17 (June 1914): 150–152. 67. “The Auction System,” Niles’ Weekly Register, July 26, 1828, 349. 68. “Auctions,” Niles’ Weekly Register, November 29, 1828, 898; Anti-Auctioneer (New York), November 1, 1828; Westerfield, “History of Early American Auctions,” 206; Secrist, “AntiAuction Movement,” 150–154. 69. Greenberg, Advocating the Man, http://www.gutenberg-e.org/greenberg/Chapter3JRG. html, 5–10, accessed January, 14, 2008. 70. New-York Evening Post, February 17, 1829, 4; New York American, January 3, 1829, 2, both cited in Secrist, “Anti-Auction Movement,” 155–157. 71. Report of the Committee of Fifty (New York, 1829), 9. 72. An Examination of the Reasons Why the Present System of Auctions Ought to Be Abolished: As Set Forth by the Committee of New York Merchants, Opposed to the Auction System (Boston: Beals, Homer, 1828), 15–16. 73. Cohen, “Auction System in the Port of New York,” 506–507. 74. On jobber entertaining, see John Beauchamp Jones, Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, During His Travels and in the Cities; Designed to Amuse and Instruct (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 254–277. 75. Asa Greene[?], The Perils of Pearl Street Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street, by a Late Merchant (New York: Betts & Anstice, and Peter Hill, 1834), 51–55; Corey Goettsch, “ ‘The World Is but One Vast Mock Auction’: Fraud and Capitalism in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Capitalism by Gaslight, ed. Luskey and Woloson, 118–125. 76. On the sentimentalization of personal property and the ways in which goods became the repository of feeling rather than simply reflections of status, see Woloson, “In Hock,” 55.

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77. “The Red Flag,” Harper’s Weekly (April 25, 1857); “Scenes in an Auction-Room,” NewYork Mirror: A Weekly Gazette of Literature and Fine Arts, September 20, 1834. See also the article of the same title in the Poughkeepsie (N.Y) Casket, April 23, 1836. 78. Seixas Return, Folder “1828,” Box “Returns 1825–31 Auctions,” N-YHS; and also Woloson, “In Hock,” 50. 79. “Scenes in an Auction-Room,” 91. 80. See “Auction Eloquence,” New-Yorker, November 16, 1839, 136; “Mock Auctions,” Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), August 25, 1838; “Auction-Burners,” NewYorker, September 8, 1838, 397; “Another Auction Outrage,” Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), September 15, 1838; “Scene at a Petty Auction,” New-Yorker, January 12, 1839, 269. 81. “The Red Flag.” On women who sold goods at auction when they were on the move, see Frances Marvin Smith Webster to Lucien Bonaparte Webster, May 21, 1846, in The Websters: Letters of an Army Family in Peace and War, 1836–1853, ed. Van R. Baker (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2000), 327. For the classic story of how bargain hunting at auction ended in disaster, see “How We Furnished Our House,” Harper’s Weekly, April 3, 1858. 82. A Plain Practical Man, Remarks upon the Auction System, 18. 83. Luskey and Woloson, Capitalism by Gaslight, 1–9.

Chapter 4. Of Tariffs and Taste 1. “Minute Book of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute 1824–25,” The Records of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute, 1824–1900 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 1977), Text-fiche 208-A-1 to 208-E-2. 2. Act of May 22, 1824, ch.136, 4 United States Statutes at Large, 25–30. 3. F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (1892; New York: Knickerbocker, 1923), 24; Daniel Peart, “Looking Beyond Parties and Elections: The United States Tariff Policy During the Early 1820s,” JER 33 (Spring 2013): 108. 4. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts to Which Are Affixed the Charter, Constitution and By-Laws of the Institute with a List of Members and Officers for 1824 and 1825 and the Standing Committees for 1825 (Philadelphia: J. Harding, 1825), 37. 5. “The Franklin Institute,” Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), July 10, 1824. 6. Franklin Institute, Address of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania with a List of Premiums: Offered to Competitors at the Exhibition to Be Held in September (Philadelphia: J. Harding, 1830), 3. 7. “The Franklin Institute,” American Farmer (Baltimore), October 15, 1824. 8. “Minute Book of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute 1824–25”; First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 64–66. 9. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 67. 10. Ibid. 11. “Minute Book of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute 1824–25.” 12. J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufactures 1606–1860, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: Edward Young, 1866); Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Philip Scranton, Proprietary Capitalism: The Textile

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Manufacture at Philadelphia, 1800–1885 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Anthony F. C. Wallace, Rockdale: The Growth of an American Village in the Early Industrial Revolution, rev. ed. (1978; Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005). 13. Paul K. Conklin, Prophets of Prosperity: America’s First Political Economists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980), vii. See also Esther Lowenthal, “American Reprints of Economic Writings, 1776–1848,” American Economic Review 42 (December 1952): 876–880; and Esther Lowenthal, “Additional American Reprints of Economic Writings 1776–1848,” American Economic Review 43 (December 1953): 884. 14. Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, introduction by Robert Reich, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 715. Mercantilist writers were also able to see this connection. See, for example, Charles Ganilh, An Inquiry into the Various Systems of Political Economy: Their Advantages and Disadvantages; And the Theory Most Favorable to the Increase of National Wealth, trans. D. Boileau (New York: Peter A. Mesier, 1812), 179–180. 15. Douglas A. Irwin, Against the Tide: An Intellectual History of Free Trade (Princeton, N.J., Princeton University Press, 1996); James Ashley Morrison, “Before Hegemony: Adam Smith, American Independence, and the Origins of the First Era of Globalization,” International Organization 66 (Summer 2012): 395–428; C. P. Kindleberger, “The Rise of Free Trade in Western Europe, 1820–1875,” Journal of Economic History 35 (March 1975): 28–36. For the classic account of the European embrace of free trade, see Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, 2nd ed. (Boston: Beacon, 2001). 16. See, for example, David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1817), 486. This was one of the most influential books on political economy to appear since the Wealth of Nations. See Conklin, Prophets of Prosperity, 30–39. 17. Daniel Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy (Baltimore: Fielding Lucas, Jnr., 1820), vi. 18. The American System was a political philosophy most clearly expressed by Henry Clay who imagined a system that enabled the federal government to subsidize the growth of American manufacturing and agriculture through the use of tariffs, direct subsidies, and the funding of internal improvement projects. See Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 270–271. 19. Raymond, Thoughts on Political Economy, 37. 20. Ibid., 219. 21. Ibid., 218. 22. Daniel Raymond, The Elements of Political Economy (Baltimore: F. Lucas and E. J. Coale, 1823), 2:229. 23. Ibid., 2:230. 24. Ibid., 2:200–201. 25. Ibid., 2:204. 26. This debate had been ongoing since the 1780s. See Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 136–165; 236–250; Lawrence A. Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution: The Intellectual Origins of Early American Industry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 93–114; 164–186; 197–200. 27. Theodric Romeyn Beck, M.D., Annual Address Delivered by Appointment Before the Society for the Promotion of Useful Arts, at the Capitol in the City of Albany, on the 3rd of February, 1813 (Albany, N.Y.: Websters and Skinners, 1813), 8. 28. Taussig, Tariff History of the United States, 17–23; and Daniel S. Dupre, “The Panic of

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1819 and the Political Economy of Sectionalism,” in The Economy of Early America: Historical Perspectives and New Directions, ed. Cathy Matson (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania State University, 2006), 270–271. 29. The Proceedings of a Convention of the Friends of National Industry Assembled in the City of New York, November 29, 1819 (New York: C. S. Van Winkle, 1819), 16. Critics of the New York auction sales also used this imagery. See, for example, Auctions Inconsistent with Regular Trade and Injurious to the City: Addressed to the People of New York (New York: Van Winkle, Wiley, 1817), 4. See also Dupre, “Panic of 1819.” 30. “Seventy-Six,” Cause of, and Cure for Hard Times: Containing a Definition of the Attributes and Qualities Indispensible in Money as a Medium of Commerce; and Also an Investigation into the Effects of the Banking System (New York, 1819), 57, cited in Dupre, “Panic of 1819,” 277. 31. Proceedings of a Convention of the Friends of National Industry, 10. 32. Peart, “Looking Beyond Parties and Elections,” 107–108. 33. M. M. Noah, An Address Delivered Before the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen of the City of New York on the Opening of the Mechanic Institution, by M. M. Noah, Esq. a Member of the Mechanics’ Society: To Which Is Added the Remarks Made at the Request of the Mechanics’ Society on Laying the Corner Stone of That Edifice, by Thomas R. Mercein, a Member of the Society (New York: William A. Mercein, 1822). 34. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 7; Charter of the American Institute of the City of New York: Incorporated May 2, 1829, Accompanied with the By-Laws, Adopted May, 1830 (New York: Elliot and Hegermann, 1832). The support for protectionism runs throughout all the published documents of both institutes, but for the American Institute’s specific efforts to appeal to Congress, see Remonstrance of the American Institute of the City of New York Against the Bill for Reducing the Revenue, Reported by the Committee of Ways and Means of the House of Representatives of the United States (New York, 1833), Box 466, American Institute Collection, N-YHS. Contemporaries acknowledged the prominence of both the Franklin Institute and American Institute, and many fledgling organizations wrote to both looking for advice on how to start their associations. See S. Newton to the Franklin Institute, April 26, 1832, Text-fiche 202-B-12; W. Heintish to the Franklin Institute, June 18, 1859, Text-fiche 205-E-1; J. Watson Corr to the Franklin Institute, December 25, 1830, Text-fiche 206-A 09; all in Records of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute; Jas. L Homer to T. B. Wakeman, December 15, 1836, Box 75, Folder 16, American Institute Collection, N-YHS. See also Bruce Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics: A History of the Franklin Institute 1824–1865 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974); Stephen P. Rice, Minding the Machine: Languages of Class in Early Industrial America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 42–68. 35. “Splendid Exhibition,” Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), August 12, 1826. 36. John P. Kennedy, “Sixth Annual Address,” Journal of the American Institute 1 (June 1836): 61. 37. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 17, 47. Lukens is listed as a town clock maker and mechanist in Robert Desilver, The Philadelphia Index or Directory for 1824 (Philadelphia: Desilver, 1824). It is noteworthy that Carey is listed as a gentleman in the same directory. 38. See William Duane to Binny and Ronaldson, February 9, 1808, Box 1, Folder 19; John Poulson to Binny and Ronaldson, June 14, 1811, Box 1, Folder 43; Mathew Carey to Binny and Ronaldson, April 2, 1805, Box 1, Folder 7; Hezekiah Niles to Binny and Ronaldson, January 28, 1820, Box 1, Folder 39; all in the Binny and Ronaldson Papers (McA. MSS 006), McAllister Collection, LCP, on deposit at HSP.

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39. “Minute Book of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute 1824–25.” 40. Andrew Dawson, Lives of Philadelphia Engineers: Capital, Class and Revolution, 1830– 1890 (London: Ashgate, 2004), 21, 84, 97, 118. Testament to Merrick’s success is that he was listed as a gentleman living at 48 North Sixth Street by 1824. See Desilver, Philadelphia Index or Directory for 1824. 41. Adam Ramage, Bill to James Ronaldson, October 20, 1812; and Adam Ramage, Bill to James Ronaldson, January 5, 1815, Box 1, Folder 70; both in Binny and Ronaldson Papers, HSP. 42. Elizabeth Ingerman Wood, “Thomas Fletcher: A Philadelphia Entrepreneur of Presentation Silver,” Winterthur Portfolio 3 (1967): 136–171. 43. Keating is listed as a professor of mineralogy and chemistry in Desilver, Philadelphia Index or Directory for 1824. Biography from the notes in the finding aid: William H. Keating, “Account Books,” American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 44. An excellent discussion of this changing category can be found in Peskin, Manufacturing Revolution, 139–161. 45. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 8; Sinclair, Philadelphia’s Philosopher Mechanics, 15. 46. [Joseph A. Scoville], The Old Merchants of New York City (New York: Carlton, 1864), 92–93. For more on David Gelston, see Chapter 2. 47. No. 29, February 4, 1839, Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, Sixty-Second Session, 1839 (Albany: E. Croswell, 1839), 1:1–2. 48. [Scoville], Old Merchants of New York, 93. 49. No. 29, February 4, 1839, Documents of the Senate of the State of New York, 2. 50. “An Act to Incorporate the Onondaga Manufacturing Company, Passed June 19, 1812,” Laws of the State of New York Passed at the 35th Session of the Legislature (Albany: S. Southwick, 1812), 439. 51. American State Papers, Finance, 4:417. 52. Edwin Williams, The New-York Annual Register for the Year of our Lord 1830 (New York: J. Leavitt, 1830), 207. 53. “New York National Institute,” Niles’ Weekly Register (Baltimore), September 3, 1831. 54. Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New-York for the Year 1853 (Albany: C. Van Benthuysen, 1853), 69–71. See also “James Tallmadge,” www.bioguide.congress.gov, accessed March 13, 2009. 55. 20 Cong. Deb. 862 (1827). On the date of the foundation of the American Institute, see Edwin Williams, The New York Annual Register for 1832 (New York: J. Seymour, 1832), 219. 56. “Testimony from Mr. Schenck,” January 24 1828, Folder 7, HR 20.A-D12.1, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 57. Petition of the Committee of Wool Growers in New London and Windham Counties, Connecticut, January 8, 1827, Folder 1, HR 19 A. G10.1, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 58. Memorial: Adopted at the Meeting of Wool-Growers and Woollen Manufacturers, Held in Woodstock, Vermont, the 13 December, 1826, Folder 1, HR 19 A. G10.1, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 59. Memorial of the Woollen Manufacturers of Providence and Its Vicinity, December 7,

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1826, Folder 2, HR 19 A. G10.1, Petitions and Memorials, 1819–1911, Committee on Manufactures, Records of the U.S. House of Representatives, Record Group 233, National Archives Building, Washington, D.C. 60. Ibid. 61. Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 100–145. 62. Thomas P. Jones, M.D., An Address on the Progress of Manufactures and Internal Improvement in the United States: And Particularly, on the Advantages to Be Derived from the Employment of Slaves in the Manufacturing of Cotton and Other Goods; Delivered in the Hall of the Franklin Institute, November 6th 1827 (Philadelphia: Judah Dobson, 1827), 1–2. 63. Ibid., 11. 64. James Tallmadge, Address of Gen. Tallmadge Delivered Before the American Institute of the City of New York at Clinton Hall, August 1831 (New York: John M. Danforth, 1831). In this speech Tallmadge was only concerned with male workers. This was typical of most discussions of production that took place in the institute. The only industry where the American Institute acknowledged female labor was in the semi-agricultural work of sericulture. See “Silk,” Journal of the American Institute 1 (April 1836): 355. 65. Remonstrance of the American Institute of the City of New York Against the Bill for Reducing the Revenue (New York, 1833), Box 466, American Institute Collection, N-YHS. 66. While the American Institute chose to lobby Congress directly, the Franklin Institute was more circumspect, choosing to hold its annual exhibition in 1831, at the same time that the Free Trade convention gathered in Philadelphia that year. See “Life in Philadelphia,” Ariel (Philadelphia), October 15, 1831; and “Franklin Institute,” Atkinson’s Saturday Evening Post (Philadelphia), October 8, 1831. 67. See, for example, Report of a Special Committee of the American Institute on the Subject of Cash Duties, the Auction System &c. January 12 1829 (New York: J. M. Danforth, Printer, Evening City Gazette Office, 1829). 68. John M. Belohlavek, “Economic Interest Groups and the Formation of Foreign Policy in the Early Republic,” JER 14 (Winter 1994): 483. 69. “The Plundering System,” Banner of the Constitution (Washington, D.C.), December 21, 1831. 70. “Free Trade,” Banner of the Constitution (Washington, D.C.), March 31, 1830. 71. “Politics and Statistics,” New-England Magazine, 2 (March 1832): 247. 72. Address of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute (1830), 6–7. 73. Address of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts with a List of Premiums Offered to Competitors at the Exhibition to be Held in October (Philadelphia: J. Harding, 1831), 3. 74. Address of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts with a List of Premiums, Offered to Competitors at the Eighth Exhibition, to Be Held in October 1832 (Philadelphia: J. Harding, 1832), 3. 75. Henry Baldwin, Anniversary Address Delivered Before the American Institute of the City of New York at the Chatham Street Chapel October 9, 1834 During the Seventh Annual Fair (New York: Office of the Mechanics’ Magazine, No. 35 Wall Street, 1834), 5. 76. Charles J. Ingersoll, “Address of Charles Ingersoll,” Journal of the American Institute 1 (November 1835): 73. 77. Prof. C. Mason, The Oration Before the American Institute, 2nd ed. (New York: D.

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Appleton, 1840), 19–20. See also Rev. Orville Dewey, “Annual Address,” American Institute Journal 3 (October 1837): 4. 78. Joseph R. Chandler, Address Delivered at the Close of the Seventeenth Exhibition of American Manufactures Held by the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts, October 1847 (Philadelphia: Franklin Institute, 1847), 10. 79. “New-York, November, 1835,” Journal of the American Institute 1 (November 1835): 57; James Tallmadge, Address Delivered at the Close of the Sixteenth Annual Fair of the American Institute Held at Niblo’s Saloon, New York, October 1843, 2nd ed., (New York: James Van Norden, 1843), 19. 80. Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty-Second Exhibition of American Manufactures, Held in the City of Philadelphia, from the 19th to the 30th of October, 1852 by the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania, for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts with the Address of the Hon. Judge Kelley (Philadelphia: R. W. Barnard, 1852), 3. 81. “Minute Book of the Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions for 1827 and 1828,” April 28, 1827, Franklin Institute: Unprinted Records: Committee on Premiums and Exhibitions, The Records of the Committee on Science and the Arts of the Franklin Institute, 1824–1900, 208-E-3 to 209-B-3. 82. On ticket for admission, see “Rules and Regulations to be Observed During the Fair,” Box 75, Folder 2, American Institute Collection, N-YHS. 83. All these items won awards at the exhibition. First Annual Report of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute, 59–67. 84. Tallmadge, Address Delivered at the Close of the Sixteenth Annual Fair of the American Institute, 19. 85. On the American Institute, see James J. Mapes, Address Delivered at the Opening of the 18th Annual Fair of the American Institute at Niblo’s Garden, Tuesday October 7th 1845 (New York: James Van Norden, 1845), 6. On the Franklin Institute, see Open Letter from Thomas Braidwood, September 9th, 1853, Box entitled: “Committee on Instruction, School of Design for Women 1850–1853, Miscellaneous Schools,” Folder 10, Franklin Institute Archives, Franklin Institute, Philadelphia; F. Graeme Chalmers, “The Early History of the Philadelphia School of Design,” Journal of Design History 9:4 (1996): 239; and Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty Second Exhibition, 17. 86. On Sarah Peters and the origins of the School of Design, see Theodore C. Knauff, An Experiment in Training for the Useful and the Beautiful: A History (Philadelphia: Philadelphia School of Design for Women, 1922), 9–17; Nina de Angeli Walls, “Educating Women for Art and Commerce: The Philadelphia School of Design, 1848–1932,” History of Education Quarterly 34 (Autumn 1994): 329–355. 87. Copy of the Proceedings of the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania for the Promotion of Mechanic Arts, Relative to the Establishment for a School of Design for Women, Box Entitled: “Committee on Instruction, School of Design for Women, Miscellaneous Schools,” Folder 1, Franklin Institute Archives, Franklin Institute. 88. Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty Second Exhibition, 14. 89. Ibid., 17. 90. On the ways in which the American Institute became a site where class could be performed and sustained see Ethan Robey, “The Steady Supporters of Order: American Mechanics’ Institute Fairs as Icons of Bourgeois Culture,” in The American Bourgeoisie: Distinction and Identity in the Nineteenth Century ed. Sven Beckert and Julia B. Rosenbaum (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 119–134. On the performance of class and the maintenance of class boundaries more

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generally see Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789–1860, 3rd ed. (1982; Urbana: Illini Books edition, University of Illinois Press, 1987). 91. Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty Second Exhibition, 13. 92. “Industry of the Southern and Western States,” DBR 6 (October–November 1848): 291. 93. Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 22. 94. See ibid., 23; and also R. G. Albion, The Rise of New York Port (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1939). See also Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 160. 95. See, for example, “Art. IV—Direct Trade of the South,” DBR 14 (May 1853): 437–449. 96. Mr. Garnett, “The South and the Union—the Union, Past and Present, How It Works and How to Save It, Part III,” DBR 18 (April 1855): 433–434. 97. William Gregg, “Manufactures in South Carolina and the South,” DBR 11 (August 1851): 127–129. 98. “Gallery of Industry and Enterprise: No. 3, William Gregg,” DBR 10 (March 1851): 348–352. 99. Art. I., Sec. 2, The Constitution of the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art, Mechanical Ingenuity and Industry (Charleston: Walker and James, 1849). 100. Art. II, Sec. 4; Art. II, Sec. 8, Constitution of the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art. 101. Art. VII, Constitution of the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art. 102. Ellwood Fisher Esq., “The North and the South Part III,” DBR 7 (October 1849): 316. 103. Constitution of the South Carolina Institute for the Promotion of Art, 15. 104. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 308. 105. “Home Manufactures,” DBR 8 (January 1850): 74. 106. Gregg, “Manufactures in South Carolina and the South,” 137. 107. Ibid., 131. 108. Ted Owenby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty and Culture, 1830– 1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 33–60. 109. Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery, 161–162. 110. J. H. Lumpkin, “The Industrial Regeneration of the South,” DBR 12 (January 1851): 42–43. The same speech was given to the audience at the second annual fair of the South Carolina Institute. 111. Lumpkin, “Industrial Regeneration of the South,” 49. 112. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 113. Lumpkin, “Industrial Regeneration of the South,” 43. 114. Address of the Hon. Benj. F. Perry Before the South Carolina Institute at Their Annual Fair, November 1856 (Charleston: Walker, Evans, 1857), 11. 115. Address of the Hon. Benj. F. Perry, 10. 116. William Gregg, “Southern Patronage to Southern Imports and Southern Industry, Chapter 1,” DBR 29 (July 1860): 80.

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Chapter 5. “They Now Advertise Liberally” 1. On Freeman Hunt’s support for free trade, see Jerome Thomases, “Freeman Hunt’s America,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 30 (December 1943): 402. Despite the fact that Kettell became increasingly proslavery over the course of his life, he began his career as a contributor to Freeman Hunt’s magazine. There is little specific scholarship on Kettell. See Kettell’s obituary in “Death of Thomas P. Kettell,” Daily Alta California (San Francisco), October 23, 1878. 2. Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987; London: Basil Blackwell, 1989). However, Campbell is not interested in tracing the intersection of pleasure and citizenship. As a result of this focus, my argument presents a different time line than the one that Campbell pursues. 3. On household manufacturing, see Rolla Tryon, Household Manufacturing in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 372–373; and for Southern consumers, see Tryon, Household Manufacturing, 296. 4. Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 140; David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production 1800–1932: The Development of Manufacturing Technology in the United States (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 51–65; David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). 5. Paul G. E. Clemens, “The Consumer Culture of the Middle Atlantic, 1760–1820” WMQ, 3rd ser., 62 (October 2005), http://www.historycooperative.org/journal/wmq/62.4/clemens.html, accessed January 27, 2009. 6. Fred Mitchell Jones, “Retail Stores in the United States, 1800–1860,” Journal of Marketing 1 (October 1936): 134. On Massachusetts, see David Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760–1860,” Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 531–533. For the south in particular, see Lewis E. Atherton, The Southern Country Store 1800–1860 (1949: New York: Greenwood, 1968), 63–86; and Michael Shirley, “The Market and Community Culture in Antebellum Salem, North Carolina,” JER 11 (Summer 1991): 232. 7. These figures come from the 1840 decennial census. See Compendium of the Enumeration of the Inhabitants and Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C.: Thomas Allen, 1841), 121, 133, 277, 193. 8. Susan Augusta Fenimore Cooper, [January 1850?], Journal of a Naturalist in the United States (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1855), 2:219–246. 9. Ibid. 10. Ellen Douglas Birdsye, The Diary of Ellen Birdseye Wheaton (Boston: Privately published, 1923), 57. See also John Beauchamp Jones, Life and Adventures of a Country Merchant: A Narrative of His Exploits at Home, During His Travels and in the Cities (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, 1854), 14–17. 11. Diane Lindstrom, Economic Development in the Philadelphia Region, 1810–1850 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). 12. Eleanor Huse Ames, Diary, vol. 2, October 8, 1846, AAS. 13. Ibid. For the purchase of cotton lengths, see January 5, 1849, March 2, 1849; on the hood and cravat, see January 12, 1849; on the lace collar, see November 24, 1849; and on the sunshade, see June 19, 1849.

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14. Ibid. On the carpet, see April 19, 1849; and for the purchase of the delaine, see July 5, 1849. 15. Ames, Diary, October 8, 1846, AAS. See also George Rogers Taylor, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York: Rinehart, 1951). 16. Walter A. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 14–33; and Jaffee, “Peddlers of Progress,” 511–535. 17. Daniel G. Helms Papers, vol. 2, octavo 2–3, 19, 36–39, 41–44, AAS. 18. Ibid., 50–52, 62. 19. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman, 16. 20. Helms Papers, vol. 2, octavo 69. 21. Thomas David Beal, “Selling Gotham: The Retail Trade in New York City from the Public Market to Alexander T. Stewart’s Marble Palace, 1625–1860” (PhD diss., State University of New York at Stony Brook, 1998), 273–288; Robert J. Gamble, “The Promiscuous Economy: Cultural and Commercial Geographies of Secondhand in the Antebellum City,” in Capitalism by Gaslight: Illuminating the Economy of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Brian P. Luskey and Wendy A. Woloson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015), 31–34. 22. George G. Foster, New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver (New York: William H. Graham, 1849), 4. The shilling side was the east side of the street and considered less desirable because of its exposure to the afternoon heat and light. See Jay E. Cantor, “A Monument of Trade: A. T. Stewart and the Rise of the Millionaire’s Mansion in New York,” Winterthur Portfolio 10 (1975): 66. 23. For just a few examples, see Samuel Irenaeus Prime, Life in New York (New York: Robert Carter, 56 Canal Street, 1847); E. Porter Beldon, New York: Past, Present and Future (New York: George P. Putnam, 1849); William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City by a South Carolinian Who Had Nothing Else to Do (Charleston: J. J. McCarter, 1852). 24. Ellen W. Kramer, “Contemporary Descriptions of New York City and Its Public Architecture ca. 1850,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 2 (December 1968): 269. 25. Joel H. Ross, What I Saw in New York (Auburn, N.Y.: Derby and Miller, 1851), 176. 26. On techniques of showing goods in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Ann Smart Martin, “Ribbons of Desire: Gendered Stories in the World of Goods,” in Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America, 1700–1830, ed. Amanda Vickery and John Styles (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006), 179–200. 27. Hunt quote in Beal, “Selling Gotham,” 494. 28. Glenn and Co., Catalogue of London, Paris, Leipsic, Vienna and Other Fancy and Useful Articles Imported by Glenn & Co. and for Sale at Their Great Depot, No. 180 Chesnut Street, Opposite the Masonic Hall, Philadelphia (Philadelphia: T&G Town, Printers, No. 120 Chestnut Street, 1853). 29. Nancy Dunlap Bercaw, “Solid Objects/Mutable Meanings: Fancywork and the Construction of Bourgeois Culture, 1840–1880,” Winterthur Portfolio 26 (Winter 1991): 231–247. 30. Richard Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” in Of Consuming Interests: The Style of Life in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Cary Carson, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), 235. 31. Joseph Devorkin, Great Merchants of Early New York, “The Ladies Mile” (New York: Society for the Architecture of the City, 1987), 44–45. Note that Devorkin dates the establishment of the store to 1848, but all other sources date it to 1846. 32. Beal, “Selling Gotham,” 498. See also Stephen N. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1992), 60, 62–63.

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33. Henry Southworth Clay, Diary, vol. 1, June 3, 1850, N-YHS. See also New York City Directory for 1851–1852 (New York: Doggett and Rode, 1851), 48 for the identification of Ira Beard’s millinery store. 34. See, for example, William Hoffman, Diary, January 7, 1849, N-YHS. Also [Asa Greene?], The Perils of Pearl Street Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street, by a Late Merchant (New York: Betts and Anstice and Peter Hill, 1834), 25–32. 35. See appendixes 9 and 10 in Beal, “Selling Gotham.” The retail sector did not grow disproportionately during this time span. Retail and wholesale constituted 17 percent of all occupations in 1800 and 18 percent by 1845. Fancy goods retailers did however become a larger proportion of the retail trade, rising from 0.07 percent in 1800 to 2.23 percent of all retail trades by 1845. 36. On credit rating agencies in America, see Scott Sandage, Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 99–128. 37. Report on Peterson and Humphrey, New York, vol. 192, p. 569, R. G. Dun and Co. Collection, Historical Collections, Baker Library, Harvard University (hereafter Dun Collection). 38. Report on Leary and Co., New York, vol. 228, p. 423, Dun Collection. 39. Report on Tiffany and Co., New York, vol. 318, p. 308, Dun Collection. 40. Prattle and Tattle, “A Dry-Goods Store,” Harper’s Weekly, May 23, 1857. 41. Bushman, “Shopping and Advertising in Colonial America,” 233–251. 42. David Tatham, ed., Prints and Printmakers of New York State, 1825–1940 (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1986), 4–6. 43. William Hoffman, Diary, April 14, 1848, N-YHS. 44. The first major national advertising agency, N. W. Ayer of Philadelphia, descended directly from Palmer’s efforts. See Mimi L. Minnick, “N. W. Ayer Finding Aid,” N. W. Ayer Advertising Agency Records, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C. 45. “Advertising,” V. B. Palmer’s Register 1 (October 1849). 46. Chester Woolworth, New Store! New Goods! (Sandusky, Ohio, 1844); George C. Varney, New-York Dry Goods Cash Store (Salem, Mass.: Printed at the Salem Gazette Office, 1839); Bucklin, Clark and Co., Something New! (Boston: Jenks, printer, 86 Hanover Street, 1850); Chamberlin and Co., Cheap Cash Store (Worcester, Mass.: Aegis Office, 1841); Franklin Reuben Elliot, F. R. Elliot Now Has for Sale (Hartford, Conn.: Elihu Geer, 1839?); J. H. Kibbee, One Hundred Thousand Lbs of Prime New Orleans Sugar (Warren, Ohio, 1854); James Gordon and Sons, New Goods! (Peoria, N.Y., 1867), AAS. 47. David Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 6–24, 41–65, 70–98. 48. The spread of publications like Godey’s Lady Book and the popularity of works like Andrew Jackson Downing, Cottage Residences; or, A Series of Designs for Rural Cottages (New York and London: Wiley and Putnam, 1842), are only two examples of how print culture enabled Americans to imagine a shared material culture. 49. Tatham, Prints and Printmakers, 2–3; Jenny Ambrose, “Picturing Factories and Storefronts: Mid-19th Century Advertising Lithographs,” paper delivered at “Impressions of Philadelphia: The North American Print Conference, 2007, on September 28, 2007, at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. 50. Joanna Cohen, “Promoting Pleasure as Political Economy: The Transformation of American Advertising, 1800 to 1850,” Winterthur Portfolio 48 (Summer/Autumn 2014): 163–190.

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51. For the local circulation of the “city views,” see Smith Brothers Subscription Book, Box 1, Philadelphia Views, Books 1, 3, and 4, and Box 1, New York Views, Books 1 and 2, Smith Brothers Collection, AAS. 52. Foster and Lee, Foster & Lee, Furniture Dealers, No. 35 Bowery, New York (New York: Excelsior Book and Job Printing Office, 211, 213 and 215 Centre Street, 1857). 53. The full set of E. W. Clay’s prints from 1828 and 1830 are at the Library Company of Philadelphia. For more on Clay, see Nancy R. Davison, “E. W. Clay: American Political Caricaturist of the Jacksonian Era” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1980). 54. Emma Jones Lapsansky, “ ‘Since They Got Those Separate Churches’: Afro-Americans and Racism in Jacksonian Philadelphia,” American Quarterly 32 (Spring 1980): 54–78; quote on p. 62 from John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia, 1830, 479. See also Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 254–258. 55. Charles H. Haswell, Reminiscences of New York by an Octogenarian (New York: Harper, 1896), 181. 56. This did not mean that all African American communities were attempting to assimilate into white middle-class culture. Ira Berlin identifies a stratifying free black culture in the North, with an educated black middle class cultivating a culture that more closely echoed white middle-class culture, and a black working-class culture that was more “boisterous and colorful.” See Ira Berlin, Generations of Captivity: A History of African-American Slaves (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2003), 110–111, 122–123. 57. Michael O’Malley, Face Value: The Entwined Histories of Money and Race in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 44–82. 58. Lawrence B. Glickman, “ ‘Buy for the Sake of the Slave:’ Abolitionism and the Origins of American Consumer Activism,” American Quarterly 56 (December 2004): 889–912. 59. Laura J. Scalia, “Who Deserves Political Influence? How Liberal Ideals Helped Justify Mid Nineteenth-Century Exclusionary Policies,” American Journal of Political Science 42 (April 1998): 358–360. 60. Lapsansky, “Since They Got Those Separate Churches,” 64, 68–71. 61. Rogers M. Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 212–213, 226–227, 243–285. 62. W. H. Rease, “W. P. Hacker, Importer and Wholesaler of China, Glass, Queensware and Fancy Goods” (Philadelphia: F. Kuhl, ca. 1848), lithograph, Print Department, LCP. 63. “Interior View of the Ladies’ Parlor; or, Instruction Room in Grover and Baker’s Sewing Machine Establishment on Broadway,” New-York Illustrated News, August 26, 1860, 252, Harry T. Peters Collection, N-YHS. 64. Edward Sachse, “Interior, George G. Evans Publishing House and Gift Book Store, Philadelphia, 1859,” chromolithograph, HSP. 65. Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, Consuming Subjects: Women, Shopping and Business in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 3–5; this idea persisted into the late nineteenth century; see Elaine Abelson, When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 66. The construction of a domestic sphere for and by middle-class women has been well documented. For the best work, see Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982); Mary Ryan, The Cradle of the Middle-Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981). For works that have looked more

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specifically at the ways in which the domestic sphere was constructed outside of the home, see Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics and Class in the Nineteenth Century United States (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990); on domesticity’s national and imperial dimension, see Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” in “No More Separate Spheres,” special issue of American Literature 70 (September 1998): 581–606. For an account of how literary sources have constructed the domestic sphere filled with consumer goods as a form of sentimental materialism, see Lori Merish, “ ‘The Hand of Refined Taste’ in the Frontier Landscape: Caroline Kirkland’s ‘A New Home, Who’ll Follow?’ and the Feminization of American Consumerism,” American Quarterly 45 (1993): 485–523. On the ways in which department stores in the 1890s were made into female spaces, see Susan Porter Benson, Counter Cultures: Saleswomen, Managers and Customers in American Department Stores, 1890–1940 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986). 67. On confidence men, see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women; on counterfeit notes, see Stephen Mihm, A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 209–259. 68. Henry Southworth Clay, Diary, July 9, 1851. 69. Smith, Civic Ideals, 233. 70. Henry Southworth Clay, Diary, January 21, 1851, February 5, 1851, and June 21, 1851; Edward Neufville Tailer, Diary, May 18, 1850, N-YHS. 71. James Dabney McCabe, Lights and Shadows of New York Life (1872; New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), 190. “Slop shops” was the name given to men’s ready-made clothing stores. 72. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York, 125. “Tens” was probably slang for “ton,” referring to the older phrase “the bon ton,” meaning the elite people of fashion. 73. Francis A. White, “Private Expenses: April 19, 1845 to April 19, 1845” Miscellaneous Folder, Caroline Barrett White Papers, AAS. On the auction, see “How We Furnished Our House,” Harper’s Weekly, April 3, 1858. On pawnbroking’s place in the secondhand economies of nineteenth-century America, see Wendy Woloson, “In Hock: Pawning in Early America,” JER 27 (Spring 2007): 35–81; Adam Mendelsohn, “The Rag Race: Jewish Second Hand Clothing Dealers in England and America,” in Capitalism by Gaslight, ed. Luskey and Woloson, 76–92. 74. The anxiety antebellum Americans expressed about the democratization of their political system and culture is well documented. For political anxiety, particularly on the rise of the mob, see David Grimsted, “Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting,” American Historical Review 77 (April 1972): 361–397; on fear of the working class, see Tyler Anbinder, Five Points: The 19thCentury New York City Neighborhood That Invented Tap Dance, Stole Elections and Became the World’s Most Notorious Slum (New York: Free Press, 2001). On pervasive fears about being unable to distinguish between “genteel and trustworthy” and “working class trickster,” see Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women. 75. Alexis de Tocqueville, quoted in Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 50. 76. C. Edwards Lester, Glances at the Metropolis: A Hundred Illustrated Gems (New York: I. D. Guyer, 1854), 9. 77. Ibid., 29. 78. Ibid., 65, 89, 99. See also 47 for women’s fashions. 79. See Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Knopf, 2003).

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80. Lawrence J. Friedman, Inventors of the Promised Land (New York: Alfred J. Knopf, 1975), 3–13. More recent work, including this book, has demonstrated that these anxieties were not confined to print culture, but were intimately connected to expressions of American material culture. See Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary American Became a Postcolonial Nation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 63–114. 81. Daniel Walker-Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815– 1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 407–410. 82. “Art II—Free Trade,” Merchants Magazine and Commercial Review 4 (March 1, 1841): 227. 83. Elizabeth Hewitt, “Romances of Real Life; or, The Nineteenth-Century American Business Magazine,” American Periodicals: A Journal of History, Criticism and Bibliography 20:1 (2010): 4–7. 84. “Art II—Free Trade,” Merchants Magazine and Commercial Review 4 (March 1, 1841): 227. 85. Walker-Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 593. 86. Douglas A. Irwin and Peter Temin, “The Antebellum Tariff on Cotton Textiles Revisited,” Journal of Economic History 61 (September 2001): 779–780. 87. See, for example, “Free Trade and Free Labor,” Workingman’s Advocate 1 (April 20, 1844); “Young America!” Young America 2 (August 30, 1845). 88. Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013), 287–292; and Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 440, 442. 89. “Fact vs. Theory,” Hudson River Chronicle (Sing-Sing, N.Y.), October 15, 1844. “Loco Foco” was a name used by opponents to describe the workingmen’s factions of the Democratic Party in New York. The group appropriated the term, however, and used it to describe themselves with pride. See Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 235. 90. “Free Trade,” Boston Cultivator, July 10, 1841 (emphasis added). 91. Yonatan Eyal, “Trade and Improvements: Young America and the Transformation of the Democratic Party,” Civil War History 51 (September 2005): 245–268. 92. On Kettell, see his obituary, “The Death of Thomas P. Kettell”; and “Book Notices: United States Economist and Dry Goods Reporter,” United States Democratic Review 32 (May 1853): 480. 93. “Foreign Dry Goods,” United States Economist 1 (May 1, 1852). The reference to Young America was surely deliberate given his association with the political movement of the same name. 94. “Why Change the Tariff?” United States Economist 1 (May 15, 1852). 95. Ibid. 96. Irwin and Temin, “Antebellum Tariff,” 780. 97. “Dry Goods at a Discount,” Harper’s Weekly, October 24, 1857. 98. “An Afternoon Among the Dry Goods,” Harper’s Weekly, October 31, 1857. 99. “Dry Goods at a Discount.” 100. Ibid. 101. Sven Beckert notes this in the context of labor and production but not consumption; see Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 71. 102. “Dear Woman,” Harper’s Weekly, January 3, 1857.

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103. See, for example, John Fanning Watson, Annals of Philadelphia and Pennsylvania in the Olden Time (Philadelphia: Leary, Stuart, 1909), 1:253. It is important to note that Watson was writing this text in 1842.

Chapter 6. Consumers at War 1. “Art. II.—Wealth and Poverty—Luxury and Economy,” DBR 30 (April 1861): 399. 2. New-York Tribune (New York), July 15, 1861, quoted in Edward K. Spann, Gotham at War: New York City, 1861–1865 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2002), 135. 3. The question of how and when the political economies of North and South diverged and the extent to which this caused the Civil War has generated a rich seam of scholarship. For work that has privileged a materialist explanation of the Civil War and in particular defined this divergence as a battle between capitalist and precapitalist societies, see Eugene Genovese, The Political Economy of Slavery: Studies in the Economy and Society of the Slave South (New York: Pantheon, 1967), 158–173. For work that focuses on a divergence of economic interests between these two societies while acknowledging that both economies were capitalist, see William W. Freehling, Prelude to Civil War: The Nullification Controversy in South Carolina, 1816–1836 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); James L. Huston, Calculating the Value of Union: Slavery, Property Rights and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Marc Egnall, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009); and Brian Schoen, The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics and the Global Origins of the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). For an emphasis on a more ideologically driven explanation, see Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Gender Relations, and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 4. On southern imperial ambitions, see Matthew Guterl, American Mediterranean: Southern Slaveholders in the Age of Emancipation (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013); Matthew Karp, “Arsenal of Empire: Southern Slaveholders and the U.S. Military in the 1850s,” Common-Place 12:4 (July 2012), http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-12/no-04/karp/ accessed March 15, 2014. 5. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 38–43; Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture and Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000). 6. On imagined economies, see John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 7. Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 280–282. On nullification, see Donald J. Ratcliffe, “The Nullification Crisis, Southern Discontents, and the American Political Process,” American Nineteenth Century History 1 (Summer 2000): 1–30. 8. Augusta, Ga., Commercial Convention of 1837 quoted in John McCardell, The Idea of a Southern Nation: Southern Nationalists and Southern Nationalism 1830–1860 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 97. 9. This outright rejection of the tariff was not universal. See Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, 2 vols. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 2: 881–891.

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10. See, for example, J. D. B. DeBow, “Direct Trade of Southern States with Europe, No. 1,” DBR 4 (October 1847): 208. 11. These included: Robert Hayne, Robert Barnwell Rhett, Matthew Fontaine Maury, James D. B. DeBow, and George McDuffie. See below and Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 91–114. 12. J. F. Kimball and Co., Eastern, Western, and Southern Business Directory. . . . To Which is Added a State Register of Ohio, Kentucky and Indiana, 1846, Second Annual Issue (Cincinnati: J. F. Kimball, 1846). 13. Although Kimball did not claim to be exhaustive, he certainly gathered enough information to be indicative. With the exception of Philadelphia and Cincinnati, every other American city listed in Kimball’s guide was notable for the paucity of offerings. See Kimball, Business Directory. 14. Kimball, Business Directory, 24. See also William Sommer, Cabinetmaker, in ibid., 25. 15. Kimball, Business Directory, 29–30. 16. Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty-Second Exhibition of American Manufactures, Held in the City of Philadelphia, from the 19th to the 30th of October, 1852 by the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania, for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts with the Address of the Hon. Judge Kelley (Philadelphia: R. W. Barnard, 1852), 13. 17. Sven Beckert, Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 22. 18. Ibid., 23. See also Genovese, Political Economy of Slavery, 160. 19. McCardell, Idea of a Southern Nation, 91–140; Johnson, River of Dark Dreams, 292. 20. Benjamin Blake Minor [Americus South, pseud.] “The Warehousing System,” SLM 11 (September 1845): 574. 21. The warehousing system released merchants from the obligation of laying out vast sums of cash to pay duties they would ultimately be able to reclaim as drawbacks on reexported goods, thus enabling cash-poor southern merchants to import and then export commodities through their own southern ports. 22. Matthew Fontaine Maury, [Harry Bluff, pseud.] “To the Memphis Convention,” SLM 11 (October 1845): 588–589; Matthew Fontaine Maury, “Maritime Interests of the South and West,” SLM 11 (November 1845): 653. 23. James Robb, “Department of Internal Improvements,” DBR 12 (May 1852): 550. 24. See, for example, J. H. Lumpkin, “The Industrial Regeneration of the South,” DBR 12 (January 1851): 50. See also, Matthew Fontaine Maury, “On Extending the Commerce of the South and West by Sea,” DBR 12 (April 1852): 381–399. 25. See Robert J. Walker, “Report of the Secretary of the Treasury on the Warehousing System, February 22, 1849,” in Reports of the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States (Washington: John C. Rives, 1851), 6:347–356. 26. Huston, Calculating the Value of Union, 163–178. 27. Glickman, Buying Power, 94–101. 28. William M. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City by a South Carolinian Who Had Nothing Else to Do (Charleston: J. J. McCarter, 1852), 80–83. 29. Ibid., 161, 173, 111–113. On the plight of seamstresses, see also Michael Zakim, Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men’s Dress in the American Republic, 1760–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 157–184; Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York 1789– 1860, 3rd ed. (1982; Urbana: Illini Books edition, University of Illinois Press, 1987), 134–136.

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30. Bobo, Glimpses of New-York City, 171. “Stewart” was A. T. Stewart, who owned a large dry goods emporium on Broadway, which Bobo found especially offensive for both its expensive prices and its extravagant stock. 31. Ted Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi: Consumers, Poverty and Culture, 1830–1998 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), 7–32; James Oakes, The Ruling Race: A History of American Slaveholders (New York: Knopf, 1982), 92–94; Lewis E. Atherton, The Southern Country Store 1800–1860 (1949; New York: Greenwood, 1968), 63–86. 32. Quote from Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 22. 33. Daniel R. Hundley, Social Relations in Our Southern States, ed. William J. Cooper (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979), 103. Southern middle-class men often spent time in the North; see Jonathan Daniel Wells, The Origins of the Southern Middle Class, 1800–1860 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 19–39. 34. Hundley, Social Relations, 104. 35. Ibid., 106. 36. Ibid., 114. 37. McDuffie quoted in J. D. B. DeBow, “Direct Trade of Southern States with Europe, No. 1,” 220. 38. Ibid., 221. 39. Ibid., 215. 40. Francis Lieber, “Free Trade and Other Things,” DBR 15 (July 1853): 54. See also W. W. Boyce, “Direct Taxation and Free Trade,” DBR 25 (July 1858): 19–20. 41. Proceedings of the Southern Commercial Convention Held in the City of New Orleans on the 8th, 9th, 10th, 12th, 13th and 15th of January 1855 (New Orleans’ Office of the Crescent, 70 Camp Street, 1855), 7. J. D. B. DeBow reported on McGimsey’s resolution. See “Southern Commercial Convention in New Orleans,” DBR 18 (June 1855): 752. 42. Glickman, Buying Power, 103–106. 43. A. Dudley Mann, “Southern Direct Trade with Europe,” DBR 24 (May 1858): 373. 44. Ibid. 45. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Heather Cox Richardson, The Greatest Nation of the Earth: Republican Economic Policies During the Civil War (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 19–23. 46. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, xvii–xx. On the role that Democrats played in shaping free-labor ideology, see pp. 150–152. 47. Women did not enjoy this right because their labor belonged to their fathers or their husbands. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996). 48. Francis Wayland, The Elements of Political Economy (New York: Leavitt, Lord, 1837), 7, quoted in Richardson, Greatest Nation, 21. 49. On Wayland’s influence, see Richardson, Greatest Nation, 19. For the seminal interpretation of the history of ideas about the ownership of labor and self, see C. B. McPherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 50. Wayland, Elements of Political Economy, 410, 413. 51. Horace Greeley, “Why I Am a Whig: Reply to an Inquiring Friend,” Whig Almanac, 1852, 24. Greeley’s views are a sound representation of many other Republican Whigs. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 26–38. 52. Greeley, “Why I Am a Whig,” 23.

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53. Ibid. 54. Chester Woolworth, New Store! And New Goods (Sandusky, Ohio, 1844), AAS. 55. Emory Dunreith Coffin had arrived in Spiceland, Indiana, later named Coffin’s Station in his honor, in 1849. Part of a family of abolitionist Quakers from North Carolina, he was the cousin of Levi Coffin, who was nicknamed the “President of the Underground Railroad.” LC, who was at the time involved in setting up a free-labor produce warehouse in Cincinnati, invited EDC to join him as a partner in the business of free-labor retail in 1849. I can find no evidence to suggest EDC did become a part of the free-labor produce movement. Instead, he seems to have avoided the more radical abolitionism of his brothers and cousin, choosing to run a profitable business separate from the antislavery politics of his family. See Levi Coffin to Emory Dunreith Coffin, March 11, 1849, Box 1, Folder 4, Levi Coffin Papers, Earlham College, Ind. See also Levi Coffin, The Reminiscences of Levi Coffin: The Reputed President of the Underground Railroad (Cincinnati: Robert Clarke, 1880), 265–296; Addison Coffin, Life and Travels of Addison Coffin, Written by Himself (Cleveland, Ohio: William G. Hubbard, 1897), 101, 118. 56. Emory Dunrieth Coffin, In the Field with a Terrible Array of Dry Goods (Philadelphia: Duross Brothers, 1859), LCP. Note that the spelling of Emory Dunrieth Coffin’s name on this broadside is incorrect; the correct spelling was Dunreith. This was likely a result of an error on the part of the Duross Brothers printing company. 57. James M. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 192. 58. Greeley, “Why I Am a Whig,” 23. 59. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 38–43; Susan Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2000). 60. McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds, 40. McCurry argues that this dynamic of seeing is best compared to the discourse of orientalism as used by Edward Said, where the discursive dichotomies of occident and orient divided the observers from the observed. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978); and Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 61. Arthur M. Schlesinger, “Introduction,” in Frederick Law Olmsted, The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveler’s Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States, rev. ed. (1861; New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953), xxi–xxvii. 62. Frederick Law Olmsted to Frederick J. Kingsbury, October 17, 1852, Frederick Law Olmsted Papers (Manuscript Division, Library of Congress), cited in Laura Wood Roper, “Frederick Law Olmsted in the ‘Literary Republic,’ ” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 39 (December 1952): 460. 63. Olmsted, Cotton Kingdom, 376. 64. Ibid. 65. David A. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 1800–1932, 2nd ed. (1984; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 58–61. See also David Jaffee, A New Nation of Goods: The Material Culture of Early America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 147–188. 66. It is curious that despite the fact that Olmsted describes two bedsteads in the room, he observes the family going to sleep on the floor. Even allowing for the fact that the family assigned one bed to Olmsted, this is clearly an oddity. It suggests Olmsted exaggerated the uncouth habits of the family in order to emphasize his broader point about the connections between furniture and civilization. On northern middle-class habits and domestic sensibilities,

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see Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780–1835 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New York: Norton, 1973). 67. This point has been well made by Daniel A. Cohen, “The Murder of Maria Bickford: Fashion, Passion, and the Birth of a Consumer Culture,” American Studies 31 (Fall 1990): 9. It is worth noting, however, that unlike the texts that Daniel Cohen cited that explored only the interiors, Olmsted, who was considering the political economy of the South as a whole, was careful to include exteriors also. 68. Wayland, Elements of Political Economy, 415, 420. 69. Espy used the same printers as Coffin had, which is probably why he had access to the copy. The printers, Duross Brothers in Philadelphia, may have circulated the earlier broadside as an example of what they could offer their clientele in the way of printing. 70. Stephen Barlow Espy, Another War Declared: Great Slaughter Anticipated (Philadelphia: Duross Brothers, 1861), LCP. In this poster the soldiers were actually in the uniform worn by American soldiers in the War of 1812, suggesting that Espy had ordered the poster so quickly that the printing firm, Duross Brothers, had not had time to cut an updated woodblock. 71. Isaac Henry Clay Royse, LL.B., History of the 115th Regiment Illinois Volunteer Infantry (Terre Haute, Ind.: Published by the author with the authority of the Regimental Association, 1900), 369. 72. P. and C. Templeton, Attention Union Men, Secession Has Produced a Wonderful Change in the Price of Goods (Philadelphia: Duross Brothers, 1861), LCP. See also G. W. Mouk, Attention Union Men (Philadelphia: Duross Brothers, 1861), LCP. 73. 5000 U.S. Volunteers Wanted to Assist in Carrying Off Part of These Goods: The National Union Store, Just Opened This Day . . . (Washington, D.C.: H. Polk, 1861), Library of Congress, http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/rbpehtml/, accessed March 23, 2009. See also McCan and Arter, The Union Must and Shall Be Preserved (Philadelphia: Duross Brothers, 1861), LCP. 74. Reinhard H. Luthin, “Abraham Lincoln and the Tariff,” American Historical Review 49 (July 1944): 611; F. W. Taussig, The Tariff History of the United States (1892; New York and London: Knickerbocker, 1923, 115–154. 75. Richardson, Greatest Nation, 104–117; J. Matthew Gallman, Mastering Wartime: A Social History of Philadelphia During the Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. 76. Act of March 2, 1861, ch. 68, 12 United States Statutes at Large, 178–198. 77. Richardson, Greatest Nation, 104, 108. 78. Ibid., 106. 79. Coy F. Cross, Justin Smith Morrill: Father of the Land-Grant Colleges (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999), 50. 80. Marc-William Palen, “The Civil War’s Forgotten Transatlantic Tariff Debate and the Confederacy’s Free Trade Diplomacy,” Journal of the Civil War Era 3 (March 2013): 35–61. 81. “Thurlow Weed and the Irrepressible Conflict Between Two Tariffs,” New York Herald, March 16, 1861. The Confederates took the rejection of the tariff extremely seriously, even including a clause in their constitution that prevented them from using import tariffs as a protective device and would have kept tariffs very low. See Richard Bensell, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 174; and Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Tariffs, Blockades and Inflation: The Economics of Civil War (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2004), 23. 82. “A Significant Item from the South,” New York Herald (New York), March 16, 1861.

No t e s t o Pa ge s 2 0 5– 210

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83. The Provisional Confederate Congress had agreed to adopt the existing U.S. tariff enacted in 1857 when it met in February 1861. As a result, between February 17 and May 1, 1861, the Confederacy collected duties amounting to 7,325,000 Confederate dollars, which amounted to 65 percent of their revenues during this period. See Roger L. Ransom, “Confederate Government Revenues and Expenditures, 1861–1864,” table Eh 194–215, in Historical Statistics of the United States, Earliest Times to the Present: Millennial Edition, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner, Michael R. Haines, Alan L. Olmstead, Richard Sutch, and Gavin Wright (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), http://hsus.cambridge.org/HSUSWeb/HSUSEntry Servlet, accessed October 9, 2013. 84. “The Advantageous Position of the Northwest,” New York Herald (New York), March 17, 1861. 85. Duff Green, Facts and Suggestions on the Subjects of Currency and Direct Trade, Addressed to the Chamber of Commerce of Macon, GA (Macon, Ga.: Printed for the Chamber of Commerce, 1861), electronic edition of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 17. 86. “Southern Wealth and Northern Profits,” Southern Cultivator 19 (June 1861): 180. The title of this piece (and its sentiment) was an homage to Thomas P. Kettell’s well-known book by the same title, Southern Wealth and Northern Profits as Exhibited in Statistical Facts and Official Figures (New York: George W. and John A. Wood, 1860). By 1860, Kettell’s free-trade philosophy and Democratic convictions had become a full-blown espousal of proslavery unionism. For more on Kettell’s earlier career, see Chapter 5. 87. “Suggestions for the Times,” Southern Cultivator 19 (June 1861): 181. See also “Producers vs. Consumers,” Southern Cultivator 19 (March 1861): 95. 88. Mary Elizabeth Massey with a new introduction by Barbara L. Bellows, Ersatz in the Confederacy: Shortages and Substitutes on the Southern Homefront (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993), 4–9. 89. J. McPherson, Battle Cry of Freedom, 308–312; Mark R. Wilson, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 23. 90. “Our Tariff,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 31, 1861. 91. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st Session (1861), 1189. 92. Ibid., 1187. 93. Ibid., 1188. 94. C. Edwards Lester, Glances at the Metropolis: A Hundred Illustrated Gems (New York: I. D. Guyer, 1854), 65, 89, 99. 95. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st Session (1861), 1194. 96. Congressional Globe, 36th Congress, 2nd Session (1861), 1187. 97. Congressional Globe, 37th Congress, 1st Session (1861), 255. 98. Ibid., 317. 99. “Let the Tariff of 1861 Alone,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 13, 1861. 100. The idea that the people’s will is represented by what the government taxes and what those taxes then fund is articulated best by Robin L. Einhorn, American Taxation, American Slavery (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 5. 101. John Joseph Wallis, “Federal Government Revenue, by Source: 1789–1939,”  table Ea588–593, in Historical Statistics of the United States, accessed February 19, 2009. 102. Phillip Shaw Paludan, A People’s Contest: The Union and Civil War 1861–1865 (1988; Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1996), 109. 103. Melinda Lawson, Patriot Fires: Forging a New American Nationalism in the Civil War North (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2002), 40–64; Steven Mihm, A Nation of

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Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007), 310–320; Paludan, A People’s Contest, 108–121. 104. Act of July 1, 1862, ch. 119, 12 United States Statutes at Large, 432–489. See also Robert Stanley, Dimensions of Law in the Service of Order: Origins of the Federal Income Tax, 1861–1913 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 25–33. Stanley points out that the decision to tax consumption through the tariff in 1861 and income in 1862 was a choice American politicians made so as to avoid taxing land, which was seen as taxing the poor. 105. Richardson, Greatest Nation, 116–117. On the effectiveness of this measure, see Bensell, Yankee Leviathan, 171. On the ways in which rich private citizens helped to finance the war, see Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 111–144. 106. “1866–1900: Reconstruction to the Spanish-American War,” in “Tax History Museum,” ed. Joseph J. Thorndike, www.tax.org/Museum/1866–1900.htm, accessed May 16, 2009. 107. Tariff and excise duties made up about 21 percent of the government’s federal revenues during the war. See Mihm, Nation of Counterfeiters, 320. 108. On living standards and relative prices, see Paludan, People’s Contest, 180. 109. Some historians have argued the Civil War was a moment of economic continuity; see, for example, J. Matthew Gallman, The North Fights the Civil War: The Home Front (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1994), 92–108. For accounts that stress more the great change that the war brought to people’s lives, see Paludan, People’s Contest; and Judith Giesberg, Army at Home: Women and the Civil War on the Northern Home Front (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). The argument that the Civil War did not cause industrialization in America is well established; see Walter Licht, Industrializing America: The Nineteenth Century, American Moment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 79–101; and Stanley L. Engerman and J. Matthew Gallman, “The Civil War Economy: A Modern View,” in On the Road to Total War: The American Civil War and the German Wars of Unification, 1861–1871, ed. Stig Förster and Jörg Nagler (Washington, D.C. and New York: German Historical Institute and Cambridge University Press, 1997), 217–249. This argument stands even taking into account the Union wartime mobilization; see Wilson, Business of Civil War. For local studies of the northern war experience, see Gallman, Mastering Wartime; Spann, Gotham at War, 45–55, 135–154; Ernest A. McKay, The Civil War and New York City (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1990), 95–103. 110. Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 875; J. Matthew Gallman, “Entrepreneurial Experiences in the Civil War: Evidence from Philadelphia,” in American Economic Development in Historical Perspective, ed. Thomas Weiss and Donald Schaefer (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994), 212. 111. “Leeches,” Harpers Weekly, January 25, 1862. 112. Wallace and Burrows, Gotham, 877–879. 113. “The Romance of a Poor Young Woman,” Harper’s Weekly, February 27, 1864. 114. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays on America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, with an introduction and notes by Isaac Kramnick (London: Penguin, 2003), 618. 115. Ibid., 538–539. 116. “The Russian Ball,” Harper’s Weekly, November 21, 1863. 117. To acknowledge this is not to call the Confederacy a premodern or precapitalist state. Indeed, as Richard Bensell has shown, the Confederacy mobilized an extremely modern bureaucratic apparatus to mobilize its war effort, and historians such as Brian Schoen, John Majewski, and Walter Johnson have all demonstrated the ways in which prewar southerners imagined themselves to be part of both a global capitalist marketplace.

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118. “What We Are Gaining by the War (cont.),” DBR 32 (March–April 1862): 331. 119. Ibid. See also “Suggestions for the Times,” Southern Cultivator 20 (July–August 1862): 142. 120. Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy, 12–31, 55–113. On the moral indignation and violence caused by shortages, see Stephanie McCurry, “Women Numerous and Armed: Gender and the Politics of Subsistence in the Civil War South,” in Wars Within a War: Controversy and Conflict over the American Civil War, ed. Joan Waugh and Gary W. Gallagher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 1–26. 121. John Beauchamp Jones, A Rebel War Clerk’s Diary at the Confederate States Capital (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1866), 1:343. 122. Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy, 13. Thornton and Ekelund called the blockade runners’ decision to bring in high-priced luxuries over wartime essentials the “Rhett Butler Effect”; see Thornton and Ekelund, Tariffs, Blockades and Inflation, xx. 123. “Brief Suggestions,” Southern Cultivator 21 (July–August 1863): 98; “What We Are Gaining by the War (cont.),” 333; “Pick Up Pins,” Southern Cultivator 20 (July–August 1862): 141. 124. Bensell, Yankee Leviathan, 179–80. 125. Massey, Ersatz in the Confederacy, 44, 12. 126. “Homespun,” Southern Cultivator 21 (July–August 1863): 105. 127. “Industry-Labor-Exemption,” Southern Cultivator 22 (January 1864): 11. 128. Jefferson Davis, “Address to the Senate and House of Representatives of the CSA, First Congress, 3rd Session, January 12, 1863,” in James D. Richardson, A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Confederacy (Nashville, Tenn.: United States Publishing Company, 1905), 1:296–297. 129. “Homespun,” 105. 130. Journal of the Confederate Congress, vol. 6, S. 183, February 6, 1864. 131. “No More Blockade Goods,” Southern Cultivator 22 (February 1864): 38. 132. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury, May 2, 1864, Treasury Department C.S.A. (Richmond, 1864), 13; and Jefferson Davis, “Message, Second Congress, 2nd Session, December 20, 1864,” in Richardson, Compilation of the Messages and Papers, 1:507.

Epilogue. The Citizen- Consumer and the State of the Nation 1. Anna K. Baker, September 5, 1876, Diary, 1874–1876, HSP. 2. Baker, November 14, 1876, Diary, HSP. 3. T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 62–114. 4. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Knopf, 2001), 22. 5. Robert Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 8, 9–37; Philip Scranton, Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 77. 6. Congress permitted all goods that were to be exhibited at the Centennial to enter the

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United States duty free. However, if the goods were sold during or immediately after the exhibition, the regular duties, in this case 30 percent ad valorem on chinaware, would apply. For the Tariff Act of 1875, see Act of March 3, 1875, ch. 136, 18, United States Statutes at Large, 469–470. On how the tariff applied to the exhibition, see the New York Times, October 5, 1874. 7. Franklin Institute, Report of the Twenty-Second Exhibition of American Manufactures, Held in the City of Philadelphia, from the 19th to the 30th of October, 1852 by the Franklin Institute of the State of Pennsylvania, for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts with the Address of the Hon. Judge Kelley (Philadelphia: R. W. Barnard, 1852), 14. 8. William D. Kelley, National Centennial Celebration and Exposition: Speech in the House of Representatives: January 16th 1871 (Washington, D.C.: Rivers and Bailey, 1871), 5. 9. Journal of the Proceedings of the United States Centennial Commission at Philadelphia, Seventh Session April 1876 (Philadelphia, 1876), 28. 10. American Architect cited in Bruno Giberti, Designing the Centennial: A History of the 1876 International Exhibition in Philadelphia (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), 188. 11. John Wanamaker, Joseph Herbert Appel, and Leigh Mitchell Hodges, The Golden Book of the Wanamaker Stores (Philadelphia, 1911), 43. See also Bruno Giberti, Designing the Centennial, 210. 12. Giberti, Designing the Centennial, 208, 210. 13. “Dry Goods,” Crotzer’s Centennial and Journal of the Exposition 4 (April 1876). 14. Phillip T. Sandhurst et al., The Great Centennial Exhibition, Critically Described and Illustrated (Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1876), 189. 15. Lawrence B. Glickman, A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 61–77. 16. Ibid., 132, 142. 17. Charles F. McGovern, Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890–1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 61. 18. Meg Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics: Economic Citizenship in Twentieth-Century America (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007), 95–128; Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), 229; Mike O’Connor, The Commercial Republic: America’s Enduring Debate over Democratic Capitalism (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2014), 135, 140, 149–150. 19. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics 109, 116–120. 20. Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 112–123. 21. Jacobs, Pocketbook Politics, 5. 22. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 140. 23. This is particularly true of histories concerned with suffrage rights; see, for example, Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2009); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: HarperCollins, 1988). Most historians of citizenship acknowledge that the inclusion of some continues to depend on the exclusion of others: see Barbara Younge Welke, Law and the Borders of Belonging in the Long Nineteenth Century United States (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010); and even less optimistic, Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997). 24. Cohen, Consumer’s Republic, 166–191, 360, 370–383.

Index

Adams, Abigail, 35 Adams, John, 20, 31 Adams, John Quincy, 129 advertisements, 23, 25, 27, 58, 62–66, 76, 95, 100–101, 149, 159–164, 169, 173, 181, 186, 195, 200–201, 206–207 advertising as a business, 149, 159–161, 172– 173, 178 African Americans as consumers, 5, 76–77, 164–165, (figure 13), 167–169, 226 Albany, 24, 26, 51, 160, 206 Almy and Allen, 127 American Institute, 102, 121, 124–130, 132, 134–135, 149, 173, 174, 221 American Revolution, 1, 3–4, 8, 11, 14, 17–18, 20, 24, 26, 31, 37, 47, 55, 62–63, 72, 77, 86, 113, 120, 126, 184, 214, 220, 226 Ames, Eleanor Huse, 152 Annapolis Convention (1786), 31, 39 Articles of Confederation, 16–17, 26, 29, 31, 40, 43–44 auctions: debate over federal tax on, 83, 87–89, 92–93, 99–100, 102–104, 110, 125; nature of sales, 23, 69, 76, 81–86, 88–91 (Figure 6), 93, 95 (Figure 7), 96–101, 105– 111, (Figure 8), 127, 171, 190; state and municipal regulation of, 83–84, 88–89, 98, 104 auctioneers, 2, 6–7, 9, 24, 69, 81–90, 94–111, 140, 186 Baker, Anna K., 219–222 Baldwin, Henry, 92–93, 98, 118, 120, 132 Ball, Black and Co, 172 Baltimore, 46, 64, 87, 99, 103, 116, 156, 171 Bayard, John, 23–24, 26 Bazin, John, 65–66 Betts, Kelleher and Betts, 173 Binny, Abraham, 122–123

Birdseye, Ellen Douglas, 152 blockade. See commercial restrictions Bobo, William, M., 171, 188–189 Boott and Farron, 66–67 Boston, 1–3, 8, 34–35, 64–67, 70, 87, 156, 163 (figure 11), 171, 195 Bowdoin, James, 34–35 Britain, 6, 8, 19, 23–30, 33, 39, 47, 53, 55, 57– 59, 61, 82, 120, 124, 126, 140, 176, 205, 219. britanniaware, 28, 140 British goods. See imports Broadway (New York City), 50, 107, 154–156, 158, 165, 171, 179, 181, 188–189 Brooks Brothers, 211 Buckley, James and Abel, 71 Calhoun, John C., 129 Canada, 60, 71 capitalism, capitalist, 2, 10–12, 53, 79, 139, 148, 180, 207, 213, 227, 232n.26, 232n.27, 233n.28, 244n.30 Carey, Mathew, 116, 121–122 carpets, 113, 133–134, 137, 151, 158, 173, 186, 198, 200, 207–208 Centennial Exhibition, 219–223 Chandler, Joseph R., 133 Charleston, 7, 25, 27–28, 50, 124, 139, 141, 147, 152, 187 Chase, Salmon P., 206, 209 citizen-consumer: African Americans as, 5, 77, 167–169, 226–227; and class identity, 5, 43, 52, 56, 82, 106, 145, 169, 212, 224; definition of, 2–5, 7–9, 11–12; men as, 2, 11, 43, 52, 55–57, 62–63, 77, 82, 94, 130, 140, 147, 209, 215–216, 218–220, 223, 225–226; women as, 5, 72, 77, 82, 145, 169, 176, 209, 212, 215– 216, 218–221, 223, 225–226; as used by the nation-state, 4, 9, 17, 55, 117–118, 227

276

In d e x

civic belonging, 11, 118, 226 Civil War, 2–3, 8, 12–13, 115, 184, 186, 210, 217, 220, 226 Clay, Edward W., 165, 166, (figure 13), 167 Clay, Henry, 116, 203 Clay, Henry Southworth, 157 clerks, 28, 51, 79, 86, 104, 156–158, 160, 168, 170–171, 215 clocks, 74, 108, 113, 122, 151, 198–199 clothing, ready-made, 57, 93, 171 Coffin, Emory Dunreith, 195–197, (figure 15), 200–201, 269n.55 commercial restrictions: as blockade, 60, 124, 205, 215–217; and committees of observation and inspection, 24; as Embargo Act (1807), 58; as Enemy Trade Act (1815), 60; as Non-Importation Act (1806) 55, 57–58, 71; as Non-Intercourse Act (1809) 59, 66 Confederacy, 181, 184, 201, 203–206, 214–217, 227 Congress: Confederation, 17, 30, 32–33; Confederate, 215, 217; Continental, 19, 24, 74; U.S., 4, 16–17, 39, 41–43, 55–59, 68, 87–88, 92, 99–100, 102–105, 112, 119–121, 125–126, 128, 203, 206–210, 221 Constitution, U.S., 3–4, 16, 39–40, 44–45, 98, 177 consumer boycotts, 3–4, 37, 220 Cooper, Susan Fenimore, 152 Coxe, Tench, 31, 63–64, 75 credit: credit agencies, 10, 157–158, 178; personal, 5, 27, 31, 33, 38, 85, 93, 102–103, 105, 119, 140, 153, 161, 189, 191–192, 226; public, 4, 32–34, 43 crockery, 18, 90, 151, 155, 195 Crowninshield, Jacob, 54 customs and customshouse, 1, 18, 40, 43, 48, 50, 60, 67–70, 74, 85, 92, 97, 209 Davis, Jefferson, 216–217 DeBow, J. D. B., 139, 205, 214 DeBow’s Review, 142, 181 debt: personal, 4, 25, 31, 33–35, 51–52, 84, 91, (figure 6), 158, 189, 195; public, 4, 15, 19, 32–34, 38–39, 43–44, 48, 56, 210 democracy, 2–3, 9, 12, 36, 103, 128, 138, 148, 150, 173–174, 177–180, 200, 207, 209, 213, 218, 224, 227 Democrats, 176–177, 193, 210 department stores, 156, 222 direct trade, 8, 140, 147, 185, 187, 204–205

domestic manufacturing, 53, 74–75, 102, 112, 124, 129, 132, 135, 203, 214 dry goods, 48, 50, 71, 84, 91, 94–95, 101, 107, 140, 152–153, 156, 170, 177, 179, 181, 189, 195, 197, 200–202, (Figure 15), (Figure 16), 203, 211 Duane, William, 58, 62–63, 72, 75, 122 Dun, R.G., 158 Embargo Act (1807). See commercial sanctions Enemy Trade Act (1815). See commercial sanctions Espy, S. Barlow, 200–201, (figure 16), 203 Essex Decision (1805), 54 Evans and Hassall, 211 farmers, 20, 28, 33, 43, 47, 53, 55, 70, 92, 99– 101, 126–127, 131, 146–147, 152, 176, 182, 185, 189–190. See also planters fashion, 9, 15–16, 18, 20, 27, 29, 38, 42, 48–50, 53, 63–64, 72–73, 85, 136, 144, 149, 152, 155, 157–158, 161, 165, 174, 189, 196, 203 federal government, 4, 16–17, 30, 39, 73, 92– 94, 104, 129–130, 150, 188, 211, 225 Federalists, 17, 39–40, 44, 46–49, 56, 61–62, 64, 66, 72, 74–75, 82 Fisher, Elwood, 142 Fletcher, Thomas, 112, 121, 123 Foster, George G., 154–155 France, 15, 19, 47, 53, 57, 59, 61, 136, 144 Franklin, Benjamin, 15–16, 18–20, (figure 1), (figure 2), 23, 26, 32, 41, 84, 117 Franklin Institute, 6, 112–113, 119, 121–128, 130–136, 142, 146, 149, 173–175, 178, 221 free labor, 181–182, 193–194, 196, 198, 200, 203–204, 217, 220 free trade, 7–8, 24, 26–30, 47, 60, 64, 116, 119, 128–131, 138, 147, 150–151, 173–179, 184, 191–192, 194, 196, 203, 204–205, 216, 220 frugality, 15, 17–18, 20, 23, 34, 37, 75, 83, 190, 195, 205, 214–215 Gallatin, Albert, 58–59, 73–74 Garnett, Muscoe Russell Hunter, 140–141 Gelston, David, 59, 124 Genin’s, J. N., 155, 188 glass and glassware, 28, 33, 42, 57, 65, 114, 123, 151 Greeley, Horace, 178, 194–196, 200 Green, Duff, 205–206

In d e x Gregg, Andrew, 54–55 Gregg, William, 140–147, 185, 205 Gregorie, James, 25–26 Guion, William H., 186 Hamilton, Alexander, 31 Hammond, James, 139 hardware, 51, 56, 65, (figure 3), 85, 140, 195 Hayne, Robert, 131, 175 Hiram Anderson Carpets, 173 Hoffman, Martin, 86–88 Holroyd, John Baker (Lord Sheffield) 28–29, 31, 39 homespun, 3–4, 16, 37, 62–64, 214, 220. See also spinning wheels Hundley, Daniel R., 189–190 Hunt, Freeman, 150, 154, 175–177 Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine, 154, 175 imagined economy, 10, 140, 185, 187, 193–194, 200 imports, 1, 4, 6, 15–16, 18, 29–32, 42, 48, 50– 53, 55, 61, 63, 65, 86, 95, 101–102, 120, 122, 174, 204, 216–217, 220 Ingersoll, Charles Jared, 132 Jackson, Andrew, 129 Jay, Peter, 86 Jefferson, Thomas, 20, 26, 29–30, 47, 53–54, 56–60, 63, 66–68, 73–74, 124, 210 Jeffersonian Republicans, 1, 6, 35, 46–48, 53–57, 60–63, 65–68, 72–75, 82, 88, 93, 120, 122, 126 jewelry, 42, 154, 172, 188, 201, 212, 215, 217 Johnson, James, 93 Jones, John Beauchamp, 215 Jones, Thomas P, 128 Keating, William H., 112, 123 Kelley, William D., 135–138, 186, 221–223 Kettell, Thomas P., 150, 177–178 Kimball, J.F., 186 laboring classes as consumers, 5, 17, 34, 44, 56, 93, 106, 123, 132, 145–146, 165, 168–169, 198–200, 209–211, 224 Lawrence, Roderick, 186 Leary and Co, 158 leather and leather goods, 36–38, 42, 57, 113– 114, 143 Lee, Richard, 30

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Leggett, Thomas H., 102–104 Lester, Charles E., 172–173, 178–179, 207–208 Lieber, Francis, 192 Lincoln, Abraham, 147, 194, 201, 203–204, 206 Lukens, Isaiah, 122 Lumpkin, Josiah, 144–146 luxury, 4, 6, 16, 18–21, 23–24, 32, 34–36, 39– 45, 48–53, 56–57, 61–62, 72, 74–76, 79, 82, 95, 114, 117, 130, 132–133, 136, 144, 148, 150, 173, 178–180, 204, 206–208, 210, 213–214, 217, 220, 227 Madison, James, 1–2, 30–32, 41, 47, 57, 59– 60, 66, 68, 125 Mandeville, Bernard, 20, 40–41, 43 Mann, Dudley A., 8, 192 manufacturers, 2, 6–7, 9, 55, 62, 70, 80, 84– 85, 92, 99–100, 102–103, 105, 112–114, 119, 121–122, 126–129, 137–138, 140–141, 144– 145, 147, 153, 174, 182, 185–186, 193, 195, 205, 211, 230n.6 Marcet, Jane Haldimand, 77–78 Mason, Professor C., 133, 137–138 Maury, Matthew Fontaine, 139, 187 McDuffie, George, 129, 190–192 McGimsey, Dr., 192 McMenomy, Robert, 86, 94 merchants, 2, 6–9, 17, 20, 23–31, 33–34, 47, 53–55, 58–60, 65, 67–73, 80–90, 92–95, 97– 107, 109–110, 120, 123–124, 127, 129, 139– 140, 142–143, 149–150, 153, 158, 160, 178, 181–182, 184–193, 204–205, 211, 230n.6 Merrick, Samuel V., 112, 122–123 middle class, 2, 9, 12, 137–138, 145, 153, 155, 165, 168, 170–173, 175, 177, 179, 182, 186, 196, 199, 212–213; as consumers, 117, 138, 146, 148, 150–151, 156, 159, 161, 164, 165, 168–173, 176, 221, 223–225 millinery, 42, 157, 170, 189 Minor, Benjamin Blake, 187 Monroe, James, 54 Montmollin, Frederick, 86 Morrill, Justin S, 203–204 Morris, Robert, 27 Myers, Mordecai, 86 Napoleonic Wars, 47, 53 nation-state, 4–5, 11–13, 19, 26, 31, 35, 39–40, 43, 55, 82, 219–220, 223–227 nationalists, 4, 17, 31–32, 36, 39

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Navigation Acts, 26, 30 negro cloth, 27, 113 New Orleans, 9, 139, 187, 192, 204 New York City, 7–9, 24, 27–28, 48–51, 55–56, 59, 64, 70–71, 81, 85–89, 91, 93–95, (figure 7), 97, 100–107, 121, 124, 133, 137, 139–142, 147, 152, 154–157, 165, 167, 171–172, 181, 185–190, 193, 195–196, 200, 204, 213 Nicholson, Joseph, 56 Niles, Hezekiah, 122; and Niles’ Weekly Register, 122 nonconsumption, 24, 47, 55, 62–63, 67, 73, 184, 193 Non-Importation Act (1806). See commercial sanctions Non-Intercourse Act (1809). See commercial sanctions nullification, 130, 139, 150, 175, 185, 191 Olmsted, Frederick Law, 198–200, 213 Orders-in-Council, 33, 58 Palmer, Volney B., 160–161 Panic of 1819, 91–92, 119 Panic of 1837, 176, 185 Panic of 1857, 159, (figure 10), 179, 195, 203 patriot-consumer, 4, 38, 40, 47, 52, 55, 62, 108, 133, 136, 145, 168, 171, 176, 215 peddlers, 101, 153–154 Perry, Benjamin, 146 Peters, Sarah, 135–136, 146 Peterson and Humphrey, 158 Philadelphia, 6–8, 20, 23–24, 27, 37–38, 44, 5–51, 58, 62, 64, 79, 84, 86–87, 89, 97, 100– 101, 103, 105–106, 112, 114, 120, 122–124, 135, 138, 142, 147, 152, 154, 156, 165, (figure 13), 167–168, 171, 195, 219, 222 Pitt, William, 27–28 planters, 6, 17, 28, 131, 139–140, 143–147, 150, 175, 182, 185, 187, 191–192, and slavery, 8, 76, 143–144, 191. See also farmers political economy, 2, 6–8, 10–12, 15–16, 20– 21, 26, 35–36, 39–40, 42, 44, 52–53, 60, 64–65, 67–68, 73, 75–78, 81, 83–84, 88, 90, 94, 104, 110–111, 113–121, 124, 128–129, 136– 139, 142, 145–148, 150–151, 177, 182, 184–185, 191, 193, 196, 200, 203, 206, 210–211, 214, 217–218, 220–223, 225. 233n.32 pottery, 28, 122–123 Poulson, John, 122 proslavery ideology, 8, 142, 150, 176, 181

protectionism: as ideology, 7, 55, 92, 95, 116– 118, 120, 122, 125–133, 139, 148, 174–175, 178, 184, 191, 195–196, 205–207, 208, 210, 220; and tariff debate, 102, 118–121, 126–127, 129, 175–176, 207 Raguet, Condy, 130–131, 175 Ramage, Adam, 112, 123 Ramage, Benjamin, 181–182 (figure 14) Randolph of Virginia, John, 56–57, 73–74, 76 Raymond, Daniel, 116–120, 126, 130, 132 Rease, W.H., (figure 12), 168 Republicans, 184, 193, 203–207, 210, 220, 223 republican ideology, 4, 18, 21–23, 32–33, 35– 36, 38, 41, 43, 45, 69, 75, 84, 90, 94, 98, 105, 110, 116, 133, 138, 148, 179 retailers, 2, 8–9, 33, 50, 58, 64–66 (figure 3), (figure 4), 69, 72–73, 84, 90, 94–95, 97–99, 101, 103–106, 149–153, 155–164, 170–174, 178–179, 181, 184, 186, 189, 195, (figure 15), (figure 16), 200–201, 203, 207, 211, 222 retailscapes, 162–163, (figure 12) 164, 168–169 Ronaldson, James, 112, 122–123 Sampson, Ezra, 75 Schenck, Peter H., 124–125 School of Design (Franklin Institute), 135–136 Sebor, Eliza, 48–49 Seixas, Solomon, 107 Seybert, Adam, 88 Shays’s Rebellion (1786), 34–36 shoddy, 99, 127, 211–214 shopping: at auction, 69, 84, 90, 94, 98–99, 171; by proxy, 5, 38; districts for, 48, 50–51, 154–155, 162, 171; rural shops and, 33, 90, 98, 101, 152, 164, 187, 195–196, (figure 15), (figure 16), 203; and shop interiors, 155– 156, 168; urban shops and, 48–51, 152, 154, 156–159, 162, 169, 186, 222; window, 51, 155, 168–169 silverware, 18, 140 slave owners, 25, 28, 75–76, 79, 128, 144, 148, 167, 196. See also planters slaves, 25, 37–38, 74, 76–77, 115, 125, 128, 139, 144, 167, 196, 198 slavery and slave trade, 8, 10, 12, 53, 125, 139– 140, 143–145, 147–148, 182, 185, 188–189, 192–194, 196, 198, 200 Smith, Adam, 43, 78, 115–116, 222 smuggling, 47, 60, 69–73 South Carolina Institute, 142–147

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spinning wheels, 37, 63, 184, 198, 215–217, 220. See also homespun states: difference between, 16, 26, 29–32, 39– 40, 42–43, 56, 129, 139, 143, 145–146, 170, 182, 199, 203–204, 216–217; and taxation, 17, 30, 32–33, 42–43, 84, 88–89, 104 Stewart, Alexander T., 156, 189

trimmings, 27, 51, 153 Trumbull, Maria and Harriet, 48–49, 51–52, 80, 153 Tuckerman and Rogers, 68

Tallmadge, James, 102, 125, 128–129 Tappan, Lewis, 99–100, 157–158 tariff: and auctions, 84, 92, 102; and citizenship, 4–5, 17, 118, 120, 127, 147, 206, 220, 223; and consumption, 5, 7–8, 18, 31, 44, 56, 93, 113, 115–117, 120, 126–127, 130, 134, 176, 178–179, 184, 194–195, 207, 209–210, 220 tariff debate: in 1820, 92–93, 114, 118–120; in individual states, 30; and sectional interest, 114, 127–128, 131, 138–140, 147, 176, 185– 187, 191, 193, 204 Tariff of 1789, 48, 52, 56, 73 Tariff of 1816, 74 Tariff of 1824, 113, 121, 125, 138 Tariff of 1842, 175–176 Tariff of 1857, 203 Tariff of Abominations (1828) 102, 129, 131, 150, 175 Tariff, “Black Whig” (1844), 177 Tariff, Compromise (1833), 129, 131 Tariff, Morrill, 203–204, 206–208 Tariff, Walker (1846), 138, 178, 187–188, 203 Tariff, War, 206, 208–209 Tiffany, Young and Ellis, 158, 188 Town, Charles, 86 Tracy, Albert H., 93

Vance, Zebulon, 216

Union (1861–1865), 3, 8–9, 181, 184, 193, 200– 201, 203–206, 209–212, 214, 216–218, 220

Wakeman, Thaddeus B., 124–125 Wanamaker, John, 222–223 War of 1812, 1, 48, 70, 72, 77, 81–82, 85, 101, 112–113, 119, 122–123, 125–126, 214, 227 warehousing system, 187–188 De Warville, Jean Pierre Brissot, 22 watches, 52, 74, 141. See also clocks Wayland, Francis, 193–194, 200 Webster, Daniel, 99 Weir, Silas, 87–88, 97 Wendell, Harmon, 51–52, 72, 79 West Indies, 28–29, 33, 54, 175 Wetmore, W.W., 94 Whigs, 175, 193, 203 White, Maunsel, 143 Williams, Nathan, 55–56 Williamson, Hugh, 42 women as consumers, 4–5, 37–38, 48–49, 51– 52, 63, 72, 78, 80, 82, 94, 107–108, 133–134, 136–138, 145, 151, 153–154, 165, (figure 13), 166–171, 176, 179, 184, (figure 15), 206, 209, 213–216, 219–222, 225–226 yeoman, 94–95, 105, 119, 124, 146 Young America, 8, 177

Acknowledgments

After many years now spent thinking about things that can be bought and sold, it is a great pleasure to finally turn my thoughts to the advice and encouragement that was freely given and all the support that came not as a result of obligation or entitlement, but instead from the interest, enthusiasm, and generosity of my fellow scholars, friends, and family. Without their help, this book would not have been possible. I have many teachers and mentors to thank, but none more than Stephanie McCurry and Kathy Peiss. Stephanie refused to allow me to write a project with “small questions.” Her analytical rigor and demands for conceptual clarity have improved every word of this book. The passion she brings to her own work taught me how to be a scholar, and with her great energy and humor she continues to help me to find my way in the profession. Her commitment to teaching extends beyond all that might be expected. Similarly, Kathy has taught me through example about the importance of deep thinking, challenging questions, and the social relevance of scholarship. Both inspired and sustained me as I strove to finish this book. At Northwestern University and the University of Pennsylvania I was the fortunate beneficiary of an astonishing amount of collective wisdom and expertise. My thanks to Dana Barron, T. H. Breen, Kathy Brown, Betsy Erkkila, Steve Hahn, Sarah Igo, Marion Kant, Bruce Kuklick, Ann Moyer, Daniel Richter, Rogers Smith, Jonathan Steinberg, Tom Sugrue, and Mike Zuckerman for their teaching. In particular, I am grateful to Roger Chartier and Walter Licht, who both helped me to frame the project and broadened its horizons. By offering close readings, insightful criticism, and constant camaraderie, my graduate school colleagues also helped me to flesh out this book. My especial thanks to Rene Luis Alvarez, Dan Amsterdam, Charlotte Cahill, David Davidson, Julie Davidow, Greg Downs, Jack Dwiggins, Kim Gallon, Rob Goldberg, Julia Gunn, Andrew Heath, John Kenney, Larissa Kopytoff, Will

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Kuby, Jessica Lautin, Drew Lipman, Nicole Maurantonio, Vanessa Mongey, Adrian O’Connor, Juan Ponce-Vazquez, Kyle Roberts, Brian Rouleau, Ethan Schrum, David Smith, Marygrace Tyrell, Sarah Van Beurden, and Robbie Wood. Matt Karp deserves especial mention for reading Chapter 6 with his usual perspicacity and care. Above all I am especially grateful to (and for) Sarah Manekin and Erin Park Cohn, for their intellect, their wisdom, their love, and much more. This project without them would have been unthinkable. I was also extremely lucky to receive advice from Cathy Matson. I have benefited from Cathy’s extraordinary depth of knowledge in countless ways. She has been both a mentor and a champion of my work. By inviting me to participate in the PEAES Conference of 2010 she also gave me the opportunity to spend a day considering the work of Martin Brückner, Jeffrey Cohen, Nancy Finlay, Gigi Barnhill, and Linzy Brekke-Aloise, an inspiring experience. At the American Antiquarian Society, I owe great thanks to Caroline Sloat, Joanne Chaison, Gigi Barnhill (again), Jackie Penny, Elizabeth Pope, Ann-Catherine Rapp, Kevin Underwood, Jonathan Gross, Margaretta Lovell, Steven Marini, Amy Hughes, and above all Paul Erickson, all of whom who enabled a thrilling period of research and fellowship for which I am extremely grateful. I don’t think driving any of us to the supermarket is in Paul’s job description—but he took me anyway. Archival research up and down the East Coast was made more enriching by the company of many talented individuals. Many thanks to Brooke Johnson, Marianna Rosett, Walter Friedman, Vanessa Broussard-Simons, Michael James Collins, Dael Norwood, Kelly Patterson, and Lyndsey Schakenbach for their generosity and the sharing of ideas. Closer to home, I was lucky enough to spend many months at the Library Company and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania. I am grateful to James Green, Connie King, Phil Lapsansky, Linda August, Sarah Weatherwax, and especially the wonderful Erika Piola and Nicole Joniec. A particular thank-you to Wendy Woloson and Brian Luskey, whose expertise and enthusiasm were invaluable. Through their invitation to join a panel on the “gaslit” histories of capitalism I was able to engage in a new dimension of my project, as well as learning from their own outstanding work in this field. Christine Desan, Louis Hyman, and Seth Rockman helped to extend this investigation at the Harvard Conference on the History of Capitalism in 2008 and challenged me to think more carefully about the conclusions I was drawing. This project was enhanced immeasurably by my time at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. My sincere gratitude to Dan Richter, Amy

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Baxter-Bellamy, and Alla Vilnyansky for that experience. To Ken Cohen, Michelle Currie, Jeff Edwards, Yvie Fabella, Simon Finger, Matt Garrett, Robb Haberman, Candice Harrison, Hunt Howell, Shona Johnston, Adam Jortner, Jeff Kaja, Laura Keenan-Spero, Cathy Kelly, Jessica Lepler, Michelle McDonald, Roderick McDonald, Lucia McMahon, Brian Murphy, Emily Pawley, Gautham Rao, Peter Reed, Patrick Spero, Christina Snyder, and Megan Walsh, thanks to you all for sharing lunches, numerous cups of tea, and postseminar glasses of wine while talking over ideas worked out and pages written. To Zara Anishanslin, a most particular thank-you. Her brilliance, wisdom, and wit and above all the offer of intellectual partnership were a gift that has sustained me throughout. She has read chapter after chapter and improved each draft beyond compare. What great fortune to have met you, Baroness. Moving back to England in 2009 was in many ways a leap into the unknown world of British academia. Helping me to find my way were my two undergraduate mentors, Tony Badger and Angus Gowland, who generously smoothed my path and welcomed me back. In joining the School of History at Queen Mary University of London I gained new colleagues and friends. Their ability to combine scholarship with thought-provoking and committed teaching has been both model and inspiration. In particular, I would like to thank James Ellison, Amanda Vickery, Daniel Wildmann, Daniel Peart, Mark White, Mark Glancy, and most of all Miri Rubin, all of whom have especially helped me arrive at the completion of this book. I am also grateful for the intellectual company of “my fellow Americanists” who live and work here—but whose scholarly passions are rooted in the history of the United States: in particular Bruce Baker, Uta Balbier, Jon Bell, Robert Cook, Tom Cutterham, Patrick Doyle, Max Edling, Richard Follett, Joel Isaac, Dan Matlin, Iwan Morgan, Kendrick Oliver, Lydia Plath, David Sim, Adam Smith, Peter Thompson, and Emily West. Finally, Ben Cranfield, though not an Americanist, has American connections. His ability to ask the smart questions made a big difference. No project can be undertaken without considerable financial support. In this regard I am grateful to all the institutions that have helped me to complete this work: Northwestern University, the University of Pennsylvania (particularly in the form of a fellowship from the Penn Program on Democracy, Citizenship, and Constitutionalism), the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, the American Antiquarian Society, the Baker Library at Harvard, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Program in Early American Economy and Society, the British Academy, and in the form of financial

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support as well as leave granted, Queen Mary University of London. All have enabled me to finish this project. I am also grateful to the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic and the Winterthur Portfolio for giving me permission to include material in this book that first appeared in part in their publications. From early on I was also extremely fortunate to find myself working with Penn Press. Peter Agree has provided me with invaluable advice on how to create a worthwhile and readable book. Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor read the entire manuscript. Her comments, offered with her characteristic analytical precision, helped me to develop further the key concepts of the argument. Noreen O’Connor-Abel and Kathleen Kageff have ushered this book into print with the utmost care. Above all Bob Lockhart has (extremely) patiently guided me through the process of publication. His unique combination of editorial skill and faith in the project have improved the book and sustained my efforts throughout. I struggle to sum up all the countless ways in which my family have made it possible for me to complete this work. This book is dedicated to my parents, Jonathan and Micky Cohen. Through the places they took me, the ideas they shared with me, and the questions they asked me, they gave me a love of learning that will stay with me all my life. They provided me with the confidence and courage to embark on hard projects, and perhaps most valuable of all in an endeavor like this, with their love and faith in me, they taught me how to stay the course. The other members of my family have also offered unfailing support. To Richard Cohen and Karin Fosgren Cohen, Gloria and Doug Lamb, Brian Mathisen, Ashley Mathisen, Angie Simon, Tasha and Simon Ruben, Di Stork, and Miri Sigler (yes!), thank you. I also thank my grandparents, Norman and Ruth Cohen and Lore Weingarten. Their own stories were the first histories I learned, and they each taught me in their own way why history was important. My grandfather, in particular, a self-taught intellectual, always nurtured my own efforts at being scholarly, and even though he did not live to see this book finished, he continues to be a source of inspiration. Erik Mathisen deserves a whole book of gratitude. His own brilliance and integrity as a scholar continues to be my model. He has read each word of this book and improved it, enhancing my every thought with his incredible breadth of knowledge and his astounding ability to see what really matters both intellectually and politically. He is my constant joy and my sustenance, my adventure and my reassurance. For you, our love, and the life we are making with Livi and Jacob, I am thankful beyond words.