Beyond the Farm: National Ambitions in Rural New England

Beyond the Farm

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES

Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors

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

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

Beyond the Farm

National Ambitions in Rural New England

J. M. Opal

Copyright © 2008 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Opal, J. M.

Beyond the farm : national ambitions in rural New England / J. M. Opal.

p. cm.—(Early American studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN: 978–0-8122–2156-5

1. New England—History—1775–1865. 2. New England—Social conditions—18th century. 3. New England—Rural conditions—18th century. 4. Rural population—New England—18th century. 5. Ambition—Social aspects—New England—History—18th century. 6. Ambition—Social aspects—United States—History—18th century. 7. National characteristics, American—18th century. I. Title.

F8.O63 2008

974′.03—dc22          2007038308

Contents

Prologue: In Search of Ambition

Introduction: Ambition and the American Founding

1   Finding Independence

2   Creating Commerce

3   Opening Households

4   Exciting Emulation

5   Seeking Livelihoods

6   Pursuing Distinction

Epilogue: Worlds Gained and Lost

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Index

Prologue: In Search of Ambition

Ambition is central to the American self-concept. Besides freedom or possibly equality no word so powerfully evokes what we want to have, or think that we embody. It is noteworthy, then, that we typically couch ambition in gentler words like opportunity, individualism, or, in the favored way of Abraham Lincoln, the right to rise. Historians also rely on ambition to make sense of the nation and its peoples. All would agree that the United States has undergone profound changes since the formation of the republic, and most would assert that those changes converged in the decades after 1800, when the basic dynamics of an individualistic society took root. Somehow, ambition arrived with the modern, and with the nation. The installation of ambition as the one common good, writes the historian Andrew Delbanco, was the great transformation of nineteenth-century American life.¹

The difficulty lies in identifying when, how, and why ambition acquired its particular salience in the United States, while bearing in mind that it has always existed in various forms and all societies. In many accounts, ambition’s career roughly and implicitly follows that of liberalism: the public philosophy that openly approves of selfish and competing interests and that we properly associate with the growth of American capitalism and democracy. For scholars who stress the popular dimensions of market activity, and so portray capitalism and democracy as allies of a kind, ambition naturally took hold as free citizens cast off the colonial world of scarcity and ascription. The American Revolution, in this view, signifies the seminal event that released latent desires. If, on the other hand, we understand early Americans as primarily concerned with personal or household autonomy, and thus as wary of market entanglements and the political economy of capitalism, then ambition shades into a bourgeois imposition on ordinary people. Only as businessmen, lawyers, and like-minded statesmen contrived a commercial landscape did self-making corrode traditional relationships and slither into American life. Either way, in both narratives, ambition features more as an indication of grander processes than a subject in its own right.²

This makes sense, because ambition is difficult to trace in anything but an impressionistic way. Especially if we search for it in the past as we know it today—as an ambient force that compels people to ceaselessly achieve more, more, more—then ambition becomes a historical phantom, at once everywhere (self-interest is ubiquitous) and nowhere (so is self-denial). Like salt in the ocean, it seems to defy observation. How can we identify one period or culture as more ambitious than any other, much less account for why it became so? How can we devise a meaningful yardstick for this or any other intangible? In studying ambition, in short, we run the risk of leaving history altogether and entering the domain of philosophy or psychology, the inner realm of human consciousness that does not align with any known chronology.

In the hinterlands of eighteenth-century New England, for example, any number of people might qualify as ambitious in a general or ahistorical sense. Certainly the provincial merchants who fed goods to rural consumers while aping the lifestyles of the metropolitan elite were ambitious. In a superficially opposing way, the itinerant preachers who urged people to disdain the over-educated clergy and embrace the simple piety of lay exhorters (like themselves) reveal a similar tendency. Even farm parents who wanted their daughter to wed a future clergyman or their son to marry into a merchant’s home betray ambition of a sort. Yet the mere presence of any attribute does not reveal its contemporary meanings, nor capture its cultural significance. The obvious fact that some people always qualify as ambitious does not address how that trait operated in different times, places, and cultures. Throughout the English-speaking world of the 1700s, for example, ambition seemed rare, exotic, and dangerous. Derived from a Latin term for going around rather than sitting still, it conveyed a keen yearning for visibility in space and time: distinction or honor or fame. Ambition implied disdain for local need or modest gain and obsession with lasting recognition in the wide world. It also evoked sin, conspiracy, and evil itself.³

The eventual emergence of ambition into a national creed was of course a long and fitful process, full of continuities and adaptations, through which the prevailing values of a rural and household-based society gave way to those of an urban and individualized one. That much is clear. But the slow and uneven pace of cultural evolution can conceal rather sudden shifts in the cultural climate, after which certain ideas, conceits, and institutions gain traction while others give ground. The ensuing changes do not simply reveal and reflect the social and economic trajectories we now see; they also help to make those trends happen, and to frame how people remember and respond to them. To recognize this is not to impose simplicity on a kaleidoscopic world, nor to replace material explanations with purely ideological ones. It is, instead, to appreciate the interplay of ideas and circumstances, of aspirations and situations, within particular stages of history.

One of these cultural shifts began in the United States during the late 1780s, after the narrow victory of the Federal Constitution over more localized hopes for the new states. With the creation of the extended republic came a widespread effort to uproot households and communities from their provincial identities and align them with national judgments of self and success, value and virtue, public need and personal worth. While trying to turn a specific kind of ambition into an organizing principle of national life, this effort also took aim at alternate, more familiar, and typically more viable forms of aspiration for those living in a rural social order of laboring households and interdependent neighbors. More and less than a set of adaptations to market and commercial growth, the installation of ambition was a discernible project, a drawn-out campaign that entailed innovations in both the imaginative and discursive realm (how people thought and ideas operated) and the institutional and social terrain (how people were conditioned and resources deployed). It also occasioned a moral controversy that mostly ensued, not between social groups or political factions, but within communities, families, and individuals. This book offers a social history of that personal and cultural struggle—a story of restless sons and ambivalent fathers, resilient women and defeated men, bright-eyed reformers and hard-bitten neighbors.⁴

The restless sons were the focal points of the changes and conflicts at hand, because they, more than their sisters, stood to inherit both the local properties that brought independence and the national society that promised something more. For this reason, young men predominate in the pages that follow. But how to study them? Who to investigate and who to leave out? Any attempt to generalize about the young men of the early republic will tend to exaggerate the appeal and momentum of the project to promote ambition. It will also miss the inner struggles that ambitious striving brought (and still brings). A resort to biography, on the other hand, would lose the collective sway and texture of the larger effort in the details of a single life. By way of balance and compromise, then, I have crafted this history of ambition around six young men who found that passion to be compelling, inspiring, or necessary in their lives, and who therefore sought to transcend a social world and personal identity built on mere independence.

A thumbnail sketch of the six figures is in order:

Ephraim Abbot Born in 1779 to a middling farm family, or the kind that few people would have heard of outside its own township. He was the eldest son of Benjamin and Sarah Abbot, who raised nine children in Concord, New Hampshire. Apparently restless by nature, he acquired the ambitious message in adolescence and eagerly applied it once the usual options fell apart.

Silas Felton: Born to a wealthy farm family in Marlborough, Massachusetts, thirty miles west of Boston, in 1776. Another firstborn son with many relatives nearby to remind him of who he was. Constitutionally opposed to the tedium of farming, he eagerly absorbed the idea that he was made for bigger things and waged a running battle with a moral, material, and political world that he never physically left.

Charles Harding: Born in 1807 in the near-frontier town of Putney, Vermont, where his parents, Caleb and Elizabeth, found independence and little use for him. He was the baby of the family, and not a real man by local standards. A refugee to ambition, he embraced its most demanding and curiously self-denying lesson.

Thomas Burnside: Parentage unknown, but born in 1779 in Northumberland, New Hampshire, a tiny hamlet on the Canadian-American-Abenaki frontier. Neither prideful nor aspiring by nature or early education, he made his peace with an ambition prompted by grim necessity.

Edward Hitchcock: The youngest son of an unappreciated hatter and a well-born mother, he was born in 1793 in the Connecticut River Valley town of Deerfield, Massachusetts. Very bright and ambitious, he consumed the exciting new formulas for his future until a terrifying episode reminded him of prior obligations.

Daniel Mann: Also born in 1793, he grew up in Dedham, Massachusetts, ten miles southwest of Boston. The first son of educated but struggling parents, he learned ambition early and well and gave it a particularly commercial and speculative turn.

It is vital to see their passage beyond the farm as vexed and troubled (the way it was) rather than as natural and inevitable (the way it has come to seem). Leaving the status of the independent man, after all, meant departing from the gender and social roles set down by the household economy—even, or even especially, as markets developed—and from the religious and moral vernacular of local communities. It spun a tangle of tensions, fears, hopes, and resentments among family members, neighbors, siblings, and peers. It brought marginality of many kinds, and self-doubt, too. One of the primary tasks of the book is to recover the lived experience of ambition in a preindustrial past, to apprehend the practical and ethical difficulties of self-fashioning in a world of families and farms.

In part, the efforts and intentions of such people account for the cultural shift around ambition that took place during their lifetimes. After all, cultures change when substantial numbers of people encounter similar problems and deal with them in corresponding ways. But cultures also change through public prescription, through conscious efforts to mobilize and endorse certain feelings, beliefs, and stories. Such initiatives can lend a coherent voice to endemic grievances, linking together the motives for and practices of change. After the ratification of the Constitution and the creation of a newly national state in 1789, a wide range of reformers—pastors, teachers, businessmen, printers, and professionals—used a common set of words and strategies to challenge provincial mentalités and to promote ambitious ways of thinking and doing as positively public-spirited. To reveal the roots, expressions, and outcomes of these reforms as well as their importance to the main characters is the other burden of Beyond the Farm.

These efforts and themes were national, not regional, in scope and spirit. Indeed, the work of turning locals into citizens has preoccupied nation-states all over the globe during the past two centuries. But New England, of all places, offers a fruitful case study of the wider phenomenon because of two competing tendencies in its cultural anatomy: an unusual density of institutions and a history of social perfectionism, on the one hand, and a tradition of town autonomy and local self-rule, on the other. The first authorized the project to promote ambition, while the second qualified or opposed it. In centering this history on New England, then, I do not mean to revive one of the oldest (and most discredited) myths in American history, namely that the nation’s past can be read as the troubled unfolding of a Puritan errand. Rather, I seek to observe the rural communities of New England as an instructive piece of a larger whole and to frame my analysis broadly even as I study people, places, and ideas intensively.

In thinking about the young men at the core of this study, the obvious and pointed question is: How representative are they? I have two replies. First, although no person or group of people can fully represent a place and time, these little-known characters illustrate a wide range of ordinary backgrounds and important trends. Their households varied in size, wealth, political and religious belief, geographic isolation, and exposure to the ambitious message. They had different ranks and roles within their families and communities, all of which shared the rural setting that was home to at least nine out of ten Americans around 1800. And as the sketches above should suggest, they hardly conform to a single personality type, much less to a common sequence of life events. What they shared was their departure from local categories of self and success, their experience of moving beyond familiar roles to navigate the meanings and moralities of ambition.

Second, I have tried to consider their lives as comprehensive wholes, shaped not only by the cultural ferment under study but also by discrete situations, choices, and incidents. All historians rely on examples to make their points. When they employ people in this role, as is often and properly the case, those people too often become one-dimensional and out-of-context images that reflect what the author wants to see and hopes to show. On a given page, a certain person from the early national hinterlands might stand in for market-oriented profiteering or subsistence-oriented traditionalism, without leaving any further indication of who he was, what he believed, and how he lived. To some degree this is unavoidable. By studying a small cohort at successive life stages and in different social contexts, however, we might arrive at a more authentic portrait, one that draws several strands of analysis into a nuanced but synthetic story of personal and cultural change.

Of course, stories can be misleading, especially when they converge into a single narrative of national destiny. Such is the case with the nearly four hundred autobiographies written by early national Americans, particularly those published during the middle third of the nineteenth century. Charles Harding, Edward Hitchcock, and Ephraim Abbot wrote autobiographies during that period. Sure enough, these stories register the triumph of ambition and self-making in national culture, relating how things turned out rather than how they happened. Yet each man wrote his story for different reasons and audiences. Their other paper trails—letters, diaries, poems, tax and deed records, and, in Hitchcock’s case, the Sort of Autobiography of an ambitious father—belie the sense of destiny they had acquired. Moreover, Silas Felton and Thomas Burnside wrote their autobiographies during the early 1800s, when their futures and that of the United States were much more in doubt. These texts lack some of the confidence of their Victorian successors; they read more like progress reports than final audits. For his part, Daniel Mann relayed his story in a series of letters, which are best read alongside the diaries, publications, and private reflections of his mother, father, and siblings.⁵

While all of them loosely qualify as self-made, these characters left sources that offer a variety of analytical and temporal viewpoints. They also intended their stories to be truthful, and this, more than any other factor, separates autobiography from fiction. Therefore, I have tried to read what they wrote as roughly honest and profoundly incomplete accounts of what they were trying to be and do in the world, keeping in mind that their perspectives changed as they broke with the received life path. I seek to recover their lifeworlds by placing contemporary accounts and recoverable data in conversation with post-facto reflections and persistent caricatures, and to understand the stories they crafted by contextualizing decisions, decoding phrases, and comparing fortunes.⁶

Above all, I want to show what ambition came to mean to them, to their contemporaries, and to the nation at large. To do so, I proceed through time, from the mid-eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries, but also through life spans, beginning with their parents’ upbringing and working through their youth, early adulthood, and final reflections. The resulting balance between the social history of farm families, the cultural history of ambition, and the biographies of the main figures varies within each chapter as well as between them. In the early going, the protagonists are held back to lay the proper foundations and set the proverbial stage; at times, it may be difficult to recall who Silas Felton was, or where Thomas Burnside fits. I wish that thorough analysis would permit a cleaner storyline. But I also hope that the characters grow in color and authenticity as the pages turn, so that when they embark on lives full of soaring success and crushing failure, the wider career of ambition appears in a suitably personal light.

However grateful they may be, autobiographers cannot help but privilege their own efforts in their own stories. Historians have no such excuse, and while writing this book I have amassed a long list of benefactors. My primary teacher has been and remains Jane Kamensky, whose extraordinary intellect makes her generosity, candor, and wit all the more admirable. Put simply, Jane has the most creative mind that I have ever come across; better still, she is always willing to share it. She never failed to lend me her ear or reiterate her faith. For that, and above all for her friendship, I am truly thankful. I also owe a great deal to David Hackett Fischer, who brought me to Brandeis and believed in my efforts from the outset. David’s encyclopedic grasp of sources and methods, and the staggering scope of his knowledge of world history remains an inspiration for any scholar. Anthony Smith has been a close friend and a brilliant reviewer for many years. I could not have written Beyond the Farm without his counsel. Mary Beth Norton was my first mentor in history; she taught me to respect its complexity. Cathy Kelly, John L. Brooke, and James T. Kloppenberg went well out of their ways to train me as a scholar.

Benjamin Irvin, Eben Miller, Hilary Moss, Molly McCarthy, and Jessica Lepler made research an enjoyable errand, while Michael Willrich and David Engerman oversaw my work at critical moments. Kathleen Brown, Steven C. Bullock, Benjamin Carp, Liam Riordan, Toby L. Ditz, Joyce Appleby, Bob Herbert, Sarah Doyle, Christopher Clark, Joseph Kett, Alan Taylor, Dan Richter, John Murrin, Gordon Wood, Mary Kelly, Anya Jabour, and Tamara Plakins Thornton all deserve much of the credit and none of the blame for this book. At Penn, Robert Lockhart and Kathleen Brown bestowed all the expertise and encouragement a first author could demand. Their enthusiasm and support carried the book to completion.

At Amherst College, Daria D’Arienzo and the staff at Special Collections have helped me with two projects over six years, always with great knowledge and enthusiasm. I am also thankful that they enabled me to present part of the book at a crucial point in my revisions. At Memorial Libraries in Deerfield, Massachusetts, David Bosse and Martha Noblick have been generous with their expertise and wisdom since 2000. The American Antiquarian Society, the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation funded my research. At Colby, the George C. and Harriet F. Wiswell research fund helped me finish the book, as did colleagues and friends Jason Long, Elizabeth Leonard, Pete Moss, Daniel Contreras, David Lewis-Colman, Margaret McFadden, Rob Weisbrot, Erik Jensen, Paul Josephson, Peter Ditmanson, Raffael Scheck, James Webb, and Larissa Taylor. My student collaborators, Charlie Hale, Alison McArdle, Jabez Dewey, Jeronimo Maradiaga, Daren Swisher, Lena Barouh, and Lee Emmons helped in more ways than I can remember; they also reminded me of why I wanted to write the book. Jeffrey and Vyjayanthi Selinger kindly helped me through the final revision process, not least by listening to me complain about it.

It is to my family, though, that I owe my dearest thanks. My beautiful wife, Holly Buss, has shown me that benevolence is not just a fascinating concept but a viable one as well. She made the long journey through graduate school delightful as well as meaningful, and her gentle charm and dauntless spirit inspires me every day. My aunt, Mary Jane Weeks, and cousins Heather Pruskowski, Kelly Ryan, and Jessica Ryan embody all the virtues I admire. My big brother, Michael Oscar Opal, has been my hero since I was very young; my idolatry of him has changed in form but not in degree through time. I am lucky, then, that he is also a man of great wisdom, sympathy, and joy. Above all, my parents, Katherine Ann Opal and Steven Michael Opal, have shown me that love and care for others has no bounds except those we impose on ourselves. In their presence, cynicism seems like a foolish notion, a curious thing to be brushed aside and forgotten just as quickly. I think they already know how much I love them, but it bears repeating anyway.

Introduction:

Ambition and the American Founding

In 1862, Edward Hitchcock finished a history of his long-time employer, Amherst College, and asked a friend to review the book. Had he made too much of his own department’s importance, Hitchcock wanted to know. Had he been fair to the college’s present leadership? Did the autobiographical portion, a brief personal history that traced his life since his birth in 1793, reveal more of egotism than is pardonable in an old man whose early experiences have been quite peculiar? Certainly not, the reader assured him. The manuscript was a model of careful and impartial history. As for the personal history—it deserved a volume all its own. It seems to me, he told Hitchcock, "that, as there must be a Memoir of you after you are gone, (and may that time be far distant) it would be advisable for your biographer to interweave your narrative into his own work. That way, the biographer could brag on Hitchcock’s behalf. Such a volume would be a charming autobiography."¹

Hitchcock’s life was quite peculiar indeed, as were his intellect, talents, and personality. But his passage from rural obscurity to a social role that called for autobiographical witness also spotlights wider and deeper trends in early national New England, as well as a particular set of ideas and institutions that impelled, reflected, and lent meaning to those trends. So, too, do the records and self-appraisals of other young men who tried to transcend their surnames in post-Revolution America. They were responding not only to social factors and personal motives but also to a cultural endeavor that made ambition both relevant and inspiring to them. The roots of that effort reach back more than a century before Hitchcock sought pardon for memorializing himself.

Enlightenment and Society

When they considered ambition, eighteenth-century Americans drew from a wide range of classical, Christian, and monarchical traditions. But they also lived in an enlightened age that called all traditions into question. Their ideas of ambition and other passions, for example, often trace to the political economists of seventeenth-century England, who first identified that vast web of everyday behavior called society. In the seaports, at least, people now seemed to live within a single network of supply and demand, desire and competition. Private gaine, noted one with a fitting maritime metaphor, is the compass men generally saile by. The relative fluidity of the English social order encouraged people to try to match those just above them. When the poor saw others grow rich, wrote one economist in 1691, they were spurr’d up to imitate their Industry, to the benefit of all. Taken to its logical end, this train of thought turned customary morality on its head by converting personal vices like greed and envy into public blessings. As Bernard Mandeville summated in his 1723 essay, The Fable of the Bees, the great engines of prosperity were Self-Love and Emulation, not any feeling for the Publick Good.²

Although Mandeville drew furious denunciation from conservative quarters, his analysis relied on a conventional view of humanity. People were egoistic, selfish, and vain, he assumed; both the Protestant theologian John Calvin and the monarchical theorist Thomas Hobbes agreed. Only the shock troops of the Enlightenment ventured to refute these grim and durable premises. Broadly speaking, enlightened thinkers shared a renewed faith in humanity that issued from Newton’s discovery of natural laws, Locke’s insistence on natural rights, and a gradual improvement in living standards for the patrician and commercial elite. According to a diverse array of Scottish, English, and French philosophers, people were neither selfish brutes (as Hobbes decided), ungrateful sinners (as Calvin believed), nor greedy consumers (as Mandeville insisted). Rather, each person had an innate capacity for reason and sympathy, a native power or moral sense that made him worthy of praise and capable of improvement. The Fable helped to galvanize these beliefs. By defending human frailties for their economic utility, Mandeville had actually contributed to a new enthusiasm for the Excellencies of human nature.³

At the foundation of all enlightened thought was the gendered image of the human as an independent man within society. The Encyclopédistes, for example, defined Man as a feeling, reflecting, thinking being, who freely walks the earth, who lives in society, and who has his particular goodness and badness. This defense of people as they were—not only for their reason, but also for their passions—set enlightened thinkers apart from Christian moralists or monarchists. Passions, reflected Helvétius, are in the moral what motion is in the natural world. They were the prime movers of life, a notion made possible by the emergent image of God as a remote architect rather than an angry micro-manager. Rightly formed and balanced, the passions became the germ productive of genius, and the powerful spring that carries men to great actions. With his natural desire of power, of esteem, and of knowledge, man was made not for the savage and solitary state, but for living in society. Far from an amoral medium of commercial exchange, society signified all that was decent and improvable about people. It curbed the dark passions and fostered the noble ones.⁴

No passion required more careful handling than ambition. Everyone, it appeared, wanted material comforts and the approval of peers. Anyone could be compelled to work hard, to reveal honest industry in hope of gain. The word honest, in fact, implied obscurity—the lack of honor—as well as truthfulness. (To this day, we praise honest work as the kind that has to be done, preferably by someone else.) But ambition meant the desire for the grand intangibles to be found in wide expanses of space and time: fame, glory, distinction. An ambitious person required what those nearby could never give or understand. The passion rested on a radically theatrical view of the self, an acute concern with what the eighteenth century called the eyes of the world. Because most people were invisible beyond their locales, it followed that only the great could ever be ambitious; because women were supposed to shun the public eye, ambition carried a masculine as well as elite valence. The love of fame, David Hume mused in 1742, ruled with uncontrolled authority in all generous minds. Ambition for Thomas Reid could be manly, ingenious and suited to the dignity of human nature, while the lack of ambition could indicate low-bred greed or the effeminate wish for ease and comfort. Even as ambition and avarice became a common pairing in enlightened thought, then, the new emphasis on the passions arranged these motives into separate social and gender categories.⁵

Furious, uncontrolled, like thunder. In the eighteenth century, any words that evoked fear or wonder might describe ambition. Selfish in origin and toxic in effect, ambition drew far more condemnation than acclaim. One dictionary of theology called it a desire of excellency that was generally used in a bad sense, for an immoderate or illegal pursuit of power or honor. See PRAISE. Ambition also had a pronounced link to militarism. Throughout history, everyone knew, ambitious men like Caesar, Alexander, and Cromwell had begun wars in order to honor themselves. The collateral damage in blood and treasure never bothered them; indeed, the calamities of war satisfied their brutal compulsion to dominate others. If self-interest was, in Adam Smith’s view, a cool and prudent motive, ambition burned in the heart rather than the head. Characteristic though it was of noble minds, James Beattie decreed in the 1790s, ambition was almost impossible to restrain. Like a fire, it carried enormous power. Like a fire, it was a public hazard. By ignoring social duties and the decent opinion of others, ambition revealed the insatiable, ruthless self. Put simply: "the very word ambition conveys to us some idea of evil."⁶

Predictably, then, ambition gained ground in eighteenth-century thought and culture less by overt endorsement and more through the gradual progress of allied concepts. Emulation and enterprise did much of the cultural labor. For while ambition set its bearer in search of greatness or fame in general, these words evoked the pursuit of particular goals or persons. They set firewalls around ambition. Early economists had used emulation to describe the simple pursuit of material comforts or fashions—what we would call consumerism. But enlightened thinkers imbued the concept with a moral and social dimension. The 1778 Encyclopédie, for example, called it a noble and generous sentiment which fills us with admiration for the great actions of others, and strongly excites us to try to imitate and even to surpass them if we can win. The same theological dictionary that considered ambition immoderate or illegal labeled emulation a generous ardour and constructive urge kindled by the praiseworthy example of others. Emulation has a manifest tendency to improvement, Reid noted in 1788. Without it, life would stagnate. Far from dissolving social bonds, emulation redrew them in harmony with the social passions. And enterprise, or the willingness to launch uncertain adventures, supposedly enriched the entire society as mere greed never could.⁷

The same being who formed the religious System, formed also the commercial, declared Rev. Josiah Tucker (1713–1799), a British clergyman who spoke to and for a mercantile audience. The end goal of both was also the same: That private Interest should coincide with public, self with social, and the present with future Happiness. Tucker worried that self-love, that ruling Principle of human Nature, could threaten public good, and so warned of those who sought only the Gratification of their Ambition. Yet he also argued that emulation and enterprise brought moral as well as material progress. Tucker praised the densely settled towns that drew farmers to market and excited the[ir] Emulation. He wanted to arrange farm laborers side by side in the fields in hopes that each man would be spurred on every Moment by the Examples of others, by Self-interest, and by the Glory of Excelling. In modern terms, Tucker wanted to light a fire under people. He also wanted them to rub off local Prejudices, to observe other places and customs until they attained an enlarged and impartial View of Men and Things. Enlarged, impartial, generous: these enlightened replies to contracted and illiberal ways opened room for the fuller expression of individual talents.⁸

By the mid-eighteenth century, such principles had become commonplace in uncommon places—Masonic lodges, city coffeehouses, the social milieu of the educated and genteel. In metropolitan circles from London and Bristol to Boston and Philadelphia, the pleasures and promise of society were reflected in the daily experiences of exchange, refinement, and self-improvement. And yet, as the philosopher James Beattie noted, There are writers, who, viewing human nature in an unfavorable light, have thought fit to affirm, that emulation cannot be without envy, and that therefore it is dangerous to encourage it in schools or families. An understatement, to be sure. Beattie’s friends and colleagues aside, who didn’t view human nature in a somewhat unfavorable light during the 1700s? In vain did he point out that emulation wishes to raise itself without pulling down others, while envy, [one of] the most malignant vices that stain human nature, hated excellence itself. Such distinctions fell apart before the mutually supporting wisdom of monarchy and Christianity. The axiom of human weakness or depravity, and the corollary need for control by state and church, underlay prevailing mentalités and stymied hopes for a more enlightened society.⁹

So did the numerical dominance and presumed prejudices of the rural masses. Yeomen, tenants, day laborers—all of the rankings that mattered dearly to country dwellers—collapsed in urbane minds into categories like peasant, rustic, or bouzon, an adaptation of a provincial term for cow feces. Rural peoples seemed quite alike because they all lived in a little orbit around their soil, out of range and touch with the wider world. The situation of a great part of mankind, Reid argued in 1788, is such, that their thoughts and views must be confined within a very narrow sphere, and be very much engrossed by their private concerns. The rule applied across national boundaries. English tenants may have been industrious, but they were still confined in spirit. Voltaire called French provincials two-footed animals, whose ownership of the soil only tied them more pitifully to it. According to a Maryland