Printed Page 248-224-218(cont.)

America’s History: Printed Page 248

America: A Concise History: Printed Page 224

America’s History: Value Edition: Printed Page 218

Chapter Timeline

Creating a Republican Culture

1790–1820

8

CHAPTER

IDENTIFY THE BIG IDEA

In eighteenth-century Europe, the leading principles were aristocracy, patriarchy, mercantilism, arranged marriages, legal privilege, and established churches. What principles would replace those societal rules in America’s new republican society?

By the 1820s, America’s white citizenry had embraced the republican political order. Their nation stood forth as a “promised land of civil liberty, and of institutions designed to liberate and exalt the human race,” declared a Kentucky judge. White Americans were indeed fortunate. They lived under a representative republican government, free from arbitrary taxation and from domination by an established church. The timing of the deaths of aging political leaders John Adams and Thomas Jefferson seemed to many Americans to confirm that God looked with favor on their experiment in self-government. What other than divine intervention could explain their nearly simultaneous deaths on July 4, 1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence?

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Mrs. Hugh McCurdy and Her Daughters This 1806 portrait of Grace Allison McCurdy and her daughters, Mary Jane and Letitia Grace, excludes her husband, the Baltimore merchant Hugh McCurdy, suggesting the increased cultural focus on mothers and children in the early republic. A few years earlier, the artist, Joshua Johnson (or Johnston, c. 1763–c. 1824), had painted a solo portrait of Letitia Grace. Here Johnson links Mrs. McCurdy and her elder daughter visually with a splash of vibrant red fruit near their laps, which probably also serves as a symbol of their fertility. Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., USA/Museum Purchase through the gifts of William Wilson Corcoran, Elizabeth Donner Norment, Francis Biddle, Erich Cohn, Hardinge Scholle and the William A. Clark Fund/The Bridgeman Art Library.

Inspired by their political freedom, many citizens sought to extend republican principles throughout their society. But what were those principles? For entrepreneurial-minded merchants, farmers, and political leaders, republicanism meant a dynamic market economy based on the private ownership of property and capital. However, they welcomed legislative policies that assisted private business and, they claimed, enhanced the “common wealth” of the society. Other Americans in the northern states championed democratic republican cultural values, such as equality in the family and in social relationships. In the southern states, sharply divided by class and race, politicians and pamphleteers endorsed aristocratic republicanism. It stressed liberty for whites rather than equality for all.

Yet another vision of American republicanism emerged from the Second Great Awakening, religious revivals that swept the nation between 1790 and 1850. As Alexis de Tocqueville reported in Democracy in America (1835), the Second Great Awakening gave “the Christian religion … a greater influence over the souls of men” than in any other country. Moreover, religious enthusiasm — what Methodist bishop McIlvaine praised as “the quickening of the people of God to a spirit and walk becoming the gospel” — prompted social reform on many fronts. For those who embraced the Awakening, the United States was both a great experiment in republican government and a Christian civilization destined to redeem the world — a moral mission that would inform American diplomacy in the centuries to come.