Masks, Morals, and the Market: American Literature and Early Capitalist Culture, 1790-1820

Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Masks, Morals, and the Market: American Literature and Early Capitalist Culture, 1790-1820Author(s): Steven WattsSource: Journal of the Early Republic, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Summer, 1986), pp. 127-150Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3122555 .

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MASKS, MORALS, AND THE MARKET: AMERICAN LITERATURE

AND EARLY CAPITALIST

CULTURE, 1790-1820

Steven Watts

In recent years, our image of early national America has changed. The political subjects dominating an older historiography--the Foun-

ding Fathers' constitution-making, heroic maneuvers in foreign affairs, and formation of political parties-have begun to recede before

something that scholars are finding increasingly important: a historical shift of monumental proportions. In the hands of scholars like Gor- don Wood, Joyce Appleby, Joseph Ellis, Nancy Cott, and Paul Johnson, post-revolutionary America appears more and more a society in fundamental transition. Several trends have attracted particular notice. The erosion of traditional republicanism, rapid commercialization, the organized spread of evangelical "moral free agency," and the emergence of marketplace habits and morality have drawn attention to a profound reshaping of the revolutionary republic in the decades after independence. As Gordon Wood has perhaps best summed up, "By 1820 Americans . . . experienced a social and cultural transformation as great as any in American history."'1

Yet several problems persist in this process of scholarly reevalua- tion. First, the overall nature of this massive sea change so far has eluded precise definition. Advocates of modernization theory describe

Mr. Watts teaches at the University of Missouri in Columbia. I Gordon S. Wood, The Rising Glory of America, 1760-1820 (New York 1971),

1. See also Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill 1969); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York 1984); Joseph J. Ellis, After the Revolution: Profiles of Early American Culture (New York 1979); Nancy F. Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: "Woman's Sphere" in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven 1977); and Paul E. Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millen- nium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York 1978). JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC, 6 (Summcr 1986). ? 1986 Society for Historians of the Early Amcrican Republic.



128 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

a transition from "traditional" to "modern" structures and values; disciples of Alexis de Tocqueville gauge the emergence of individualism and democracy; empiricists gather the social facts and let them tell their own story of mobility and commercialization.2 Second, disagreements over both the nature and fate of eighteenth century republicanism hinder attempts at synthesis. Most scholars agree that

republican values of "virtue" (a willingness to put the public good before private gain), "civic humanism" (a belief that a republic en-

courages the fullest flowering of human potential), and "independence" (devotion to the economic and political integrity of the small producer) permeated the social and political life of revolutionary America. But serious questions remain concerning variations in republicanism pro- duced by social class and region, ideological transmutations wrought by both Federalists and Jeffersonians in the 1790s, and a subtle assumption of new ideological forms in the early 1800s.3 Thus, while our awareness of profound change in the early republic has grown acute, our understanding of it has remained rather fogged.

Perhaps unexpectedly, American literature of the period 1790-1820

proves useful for bringing interpretive coherence to this situation. It is no dirty little secret of American cultural history, of course, that belles-lettres in these years always have appeared rather anemic, if not actually moribund. As late as 1820 European critics would sneer, "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?'"4

Many Americans replied defensively, but few could offer a satisfac-

tory rejoinder. The hostility of a staid republican and Protestant culture, when combined with the tendency to ape English literary form and

style, subverted the hopes of the revolutionary generation that political revolution would foster a literary "golden age." Yet early national literature, when reexamined in light of recent historical research, pro-

2 Nancy Cott, for instance, has adopted the paradigm of modernization in Bonds

of Womanhood. John P. Diggins' recent book, The Lost Soul of American Politics: Virtue,

Self-Interest, and the Foundations of Liberalism (New York 1984), utilizes Tocqueville's interpretive insights. In the tradition of empiricism, Appleby has explored intellectual history in Capitalism and a New Social Order while Howard B. Rock, in his Artisans

of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York

1979), does likewise in the field of social and labor history. 3 See, for example, the scholarly disagreement over the meaning of post-

revolutionary republicanism that has surfaced among Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America

(Chapel Hill 1980); and Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca 1978).

4 Literary critic Sydney Smith offered this taunt in 1820 in the Edinburgh Review. It is quoted in Ellis, After the Revolution, x.



LITERATURE AND CULTURE 129

vides revealing glimpses of a larger social and cultural watershed. Read from the perspective of "the social history of ideas,"'5 literary texts of the period suggest what I have argued elsewhere: the decades from 1790 to 1820 saw the consolidation of liberal capitalism in the American republic. This massive development involved a series of interconnected shifts away from many premodern, precapitalist, republican traditions. In their place slowly emerged widespread commitments to a political culture of liberalism, an economy of entrepreneurial capitalism, a social structure rooted in achieved status and the perception of labor as a commodity, and a bourgeois ethic of possessive individualism and self- control.6 Equally important, however, this literature brings to the sur- face perhaps more clearly than many social and political documents the profound ambivalence, the unintended consequences, the sense of backing into the future that colored this complex process.

Some early national writers-Washington Irving, James K. Paulding, the New England "Augustans" -disclosed post-revolutionary social change through their sustained opposition to it. They took satirical swipes at the growing social ambition and unscrupulous character of their countrymen. They railed against the emerging national maxim of "get money" which "the infant is taught to lisp in its nurse's arms," and complained that "works of fancy or imagination" were ignored in favor of "the driest details of mercantile calculation."' Certain other writers, however, shone a more penetrating light on shifting American life during these decades by combining an appreciation of liberalizing social change with deep misgivings about the effects of shattered tradition. Among them stood Philip Freneau, the essayist and poet; "Par- son" Mason Locke Weems, popular moralist and biographer; the satirist and writer of serialized fiction, Hugh Henry Brackenridge; and Charles Brockden Brown, perhaps America's first real novelist.

5 By the "social history of ideas," I mean simply an attempt to relocate ideas, sentiments, and perceptions in their social and economic context. For a number of essays that explore this general approach to intellectual history, see John Higham and Paul K. Conkin, eds., New Directions in American Intellectual History (Baltimore 1979).

6 See Steven Watts, The Republic Reborn: War and the Making of Liberal America, 1790-1820 (Johns Hopkins University Press, forthcoming 1987). For a provocative interpretation of early national fiction that takes a different but parallel tack-it relies upon reader-response critical theory and a "history of texts" to analyze a process of cultural formation-see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 1986).

7 See Washington Irving and James K. Paulding, Salmagundi; or the Whim- Whams

of Lancelot Longstaff, Esq., ed. Bruce I. Granger and Martha Hartzog (Boston 1977), for a general satirical treatment of social ambition; Lewis P. Simpson, ed., The Federalist Literary Mind (Baton Rouge 1962), esp. 67-69; and Edwin H. Cady, ed., Literature of the Early Republic (New York 1969), 482.




Although they did not comprise an obvious literary group or school-in fact, they were rather diverse-these writers shared a sense of uncer-

tainty and an acute social sensitivity concerning the historical forces that were overturning a once-familiar world. Their differences were contained within a common anxiety over the transition from an eighteenth century republican to a nineteenth century liberal America.

Three broad issues, all of them raised by pressures of contem-

porary change, particularly preoccupied these literary figures. First, they nervously examined the materialism, ambition, and potential disruption set loose by growing market involvement in the republic from 1790 to 1820. Second, they betrayed in their writings the fear that disintegrating morality was rampant among a people becoming increasingly devoted to the main chance. Finally, in a fashion often more unconscious than deliberate, these authors apprehended that ambitious Americans' private character was in danger of becoming but a hollow, fractured shell hidden by a series of manipulative social

disguises. So if Freneau, Weems, Brackenridge, and Brown cannot stand in the first rank of the American literary pantheon, their writings do carry a different burden. They help disclose the changing social and cultural currents of their age-the market compulsions, shifting morals, psychological masks-that swept up Americans in the rapidly changing early republic and carried them into an uncertain future.

Attempts to gauge the nature of a swelling market society appeared nowhere more clearly than in Hugh Henry Brackenridge's massive and ungainly Modern Chivalry. This loosely bound collection of satirical and picaresque tales juxtaposed the rise of grasping materialism with the crumbling of traditional notions of deference, family, and com-

munity. Born in Scotland, Brackenridge had turned to journalism and

fiction-writing-along with various other careers-in the years after his schooling at Princeton. His "novel," first published in newspaper installments from 1793 to 1815, chronicled the travels and adventures of Captain Farrago, a genial republican of the American gentry, and his manservant Teague O'Regan, an Irishman with an eye for both

profit and trouble. Brackenridge maneuvered his characters across an American landscape characterized by social mobility, ambitious individuals on the make, and frequently brutal competition. The humorous modus operandi of the numerous episodes had the ambitious

Teague scrambling for prestige and money by pretending to careers for which he was totally unqualified. The distressed captain then rescued him from disaster, bemoaning all the while a society that would foster such unscrupulous success-seeking. Brackenridge generally upheld values of hard work, deference, virtue, and reason against the "preposterous




ambition," "popular phrenzy," and "love of money" represented by impatient Americans like Teague.8

Yet this disapproval of social trends after the revolution found a curious counterpart in the author's own life. Brackenridge himself stood as the epitome of the self-made man in the early republic. Like increasing numbers of citizens after the revolution, he moved through a variety of jobs in an attempt to find a secure niche in a whirling society of expanding opportunity. Considering one vocation before moving on to the next-teaching, the ministry, journalism, the writing of fiction, the legal profession, and finally a judgeship-and drifting about geographically, Brackenridge embodied many instincts of early national society. As he recalled of his westward migration to Pittsburgh: "When I left Philadelphia, almost twenty years ago, I saw no chance of being anything in that city, there were such great men before me . . . . I pushed my way to these woods where I thought I might emerge one day, and get forward myself in a congress or some other public body."9 So with characteristic ambivalence, Brackenridge struggled as a man on the make while simultaneously criticizing America's liberalizing social trends.

A darker view of the republic's emerging market society had appeared even earlier in the work of Philip Freneau. Also a student at Princeton in the 1770s, this young man initially made his mark as a man of letters in 1771 by co-authoring with Brackenridge an exuberant poem, "The Rising Glory of America." Freneau's optimism managed to sustain itself first in the American Revolution, then later in an enthusiasm for Jeffersonian politics. As a partisan for the Jeffer- sonian Republicans from the early 1790s through the 1810s, the poet and essayist consistently upheld the rights of the independent freeholder, the virtues of decentralized republican government, and the promise of the republic's geographic expansion to the West.'"

Yet Freneau gradually grew troubled by the post-revolutionary commercialization of American society, and a foreboding about "avarice" came to dominate the social dimension of his literary work. As he

' See Claude Milton Newlin, The Life and Writings of Hugh Henry Brackenridge (Princeton 1932), for biographical details. The opening chapters of Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry (New York, 1962 [1815]) establish the structure of the novel and the dynamic social tension between the captain and Teague.

9 The quotation appears in Newlin, Brackenridge, 57. 10 Standard works on Freneau's life include Lewis Leary, That Rascal Freneau:

A Study in Literary Failure (New Brunswick, N.J. 1941); Jacob Axelrad, Philip Freneau: Champion of Democracy (Austin 1967); and Philip M. Marsh, Philip Freneau. Poet and

Journalist (Minneapolis 1968).




commented in 1782 in the essay "The Advantages of Simple Living," a growing spirit of ambition seemed to be pushing citizens into frantic lives of profit-chasing. He mourned that the "simple husbandman" of the traditional republic was fading before "the idle, scheming citizen, who sits perpetually behind his counter, like a spider in the web, watching his commodities, and sedulously observing the steps of every passenger, hoping he may come in to purchase; since upon his casual visits depends his existence from day to day.""

As his career unfolded, Freneau's skepticism about market interac- tion often found a humorous voice. Writing several essays under the

pseudonym "Robert Slender," for instance, he offered half-satirical, half-serious pieces like "Rules and Directions How to Avoid Creditors, Sheriffs, Constables." He posed as the treasurer of a club where no man could be a member unless he "had at least four writs of debt out against him at once." Disparaging the collection schemes of creditors-"infernal harpies" and "our enemies," he liked to call them-Freneau formulated cunning rules of escape for debtors. These included using alleyways for walking at all times, always sending your wife or child to answer the door, and memorizing creditors' physical traits in order to scurry away from public confrontations. Freneau hit his stride as satirist, however, in 1792. Facetiously outlining a "Plan for a Nobility in the United States" to reward commercial charlatans, he suggested

The noble speculators of the lowest grade or rank, to be stiled "the order of the Leech." Their title to be "Their Fulnesses". . . . The noble speculator of the next rank, to be stiled "The Order of modern

Justice." The title, "Their Rapacities." The arms, "a pair of scales." The motto, "Cheating no felony." The noble speculators of the next rank, to be stiled "The order of the virtuous League." Their title, "Their Hucksterships". . . The noble speculators of the next rank, to be stiled "The order of Assumption," or, if thought more suitable, "The Order of the Golden Fleece." The title, "Their Pirate- ships". .. .12

Not all authors frowned on pursuing the main chance. The ir-

repressible "Parson" Mason Weems found cause for delight when

beholding the expanding market arena of the early American republic. Born in Maryland as the youngest of nineteen children, Weems married in 1795 and settled in Dumfries, Virginia. After an aborted career

" See the reprinting of this essay in Philip M. Marsh, ed., The Prose of Philip Freneau (New Brunswick, N.J. 1955), 58-60.

12 Ibid., 112-118.




as an Episcopal clergyman, he spent most of his adult life on the road as a bookseller. His career took a significant turn, however, with a middle-age decision to become an author himself. His first book, The Life of Washington, published in 1799 and reprinted numerous times throughout the nineteenth century, emerged as a patriotic and moralistic "success tract." The revolutionary hero striding out of its pages was preeminently a self-made man. As the author insisted early on, Washington "was not born with 'a silver spoon in his mouth,"' but had pursued his illustrious career with the belief that he had "no chance of ever rising in the world but by his own merit." The biography went on to credit the Founder's hard work, focused will power, and self-control for propelling him to the top of America's commercializing society. As the parson lectured his readers, a man like Washington of "honest industry . . . is not afraid to see any man on earth, but meets his creditor with a smiling countenance, and with the welcome music of gold and silver in his hand."'3

Weems's appreciation of burgeoning opportunity in the early republic also fueled his own career as author and booksalesman. In both endeavors he became a hard-nosed, shameless, innovative chaser of profit and social advancement. Writing to his publisher Mathew Carey in 1809, for instance, he demanded that old editions of The Life of Washington be cleared out and new ones distributed. "You have a great deal of money lying in the bones of old George if you will but exert yourself to extract it," he wrote rather impiously. As Weems shrewdly summed up, "Our country is made up of the small fry. Give me a seine of small meshes." With the right kind of books-"small, ie. quarter of a dollar" on "interesting subjects" with "fascinating frontpieces & showy bindings"-the entrepreneurial parson knew he could gain "a world of pence and popularity by it.'14

The literary work of Brackenridge and Freneau combined enthusiasm and dismay regarding the United States' emerging market society, while Weems savored the allure of opportunity. But the four major novels of Charles Brockden Brown- Wieland, or the Transforma- tion; Ormond, or the Secret Witness;, Arthur Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793; and Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep Walker-cast darker shadows than these other literary monuments of the early republic. Each of

13 On Weems's life, see Marcus Cunliffe's introductory essay to his edition of Mason L. Weems, The Life of Washington (Cambridge, Mass. 1962 [1800]) and Emily Ellsworth Ford Skeel, ed., Mason Locke Weems: His Works and Ways (3 vols., New York 1929). The quotations by Weems are from Cunliffe, ed., Life of Washington, 24, 204.

14 Skeel, ed., Weems: Works and Ways, I, 47, II, 397.




Brown's books framed morbid portraits of the social trauma created

by market growth and liberalizing change. Written in an explosion of creative energy from 1797 to 1800, Brown's tales unfolded against commercial backdrops tarnished by financial intrigue, avarice, in- debtedness, and embezzlement. In Arthur Mervyn, for example, the story's action revolved around young Arthur's difficulties with the business manipulations and swindling of his employer and patron, Welbeck. Constantia Dudley, the female protagonist of Ormond, tailored her actions to assure the survival of her father, a self-made man im-

poverished by the scam of a business partner. Edgar Huntly, after

learning of an acquaintance who had lost a significant amount of money through an unfortunate loan, offered a typical Brownian rumination on the growing American obsession with profit and success:

Is such the lot of those who wander from their rustic homes in search of fortune? Our countrymen are prone to enterprise, and are scattered over every sea and every land in pursuit of that wealth which will not screen them from disease and infirmity, which is missed much oftener than found, and which, when gained, by no means compensates them for the hardships and vicissitudes endured in the pursuit.

Brown affirmed this perception a couple of years later in an editorial

preface to The American Review and Literary Journal for the year 1801. The

people of the United States, he wrote, were "more distinguished than those of Europe as a people of business; and by an universal attention to the active and lucrative pursuits of life."'5

Brown also evinced a dark fascination with the growing importance of individualism in a society idealizing self-made success. He made Arthur Mervyn a classic representation of liberal man cutting organic social ties and setting off to seek fame and fortune. Having left the countryside for Philadelphia, and suffering from the recent

15 See Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or the Transformation: An American Tale

(Kent, Ohio 1977 [1798]); Ormond; or the Secret Witness (New York 1937 [1799]); Arthur

Mervyn, or Memoirs of the Year 1793 (New York 1962 [17991); and Edgar Huntly, or Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Port Washington, N.Y. 1963 [1799]). Quotations are from

Brown, Edgar Huntly, 147; Brown, "Preface," The American Review and Literary Journal for the Year 1801, an extract of which is in Robert E. Spiller, ed., American Literary Revolution, 1783-1837 (Garden City, N.Y. 1967), 32. Treatments of Brown's life and work include David Lee Clark, Charles Brockden Brown: Pioneer Voice of America (Durham, N.C. 1952); Harry R. Warfel, Charles Brockden Brown: American Gothic Novelist

(Gainesville, Fla. 1949); Alan Axelrod, Charles Brockden Brown: An American Tale (Austin 1983); and Norman S. Grabo, The Coincidental Art of Charles Brockden Brown (Chapel Hill 1981).




death of his parents, young Mervyn brooded upon his isolation from family and community:

I was now alone in the world, so far as the total want of kindred creates solitude. Not one of my blood, nor even of my name, were to be found in this quarter of the world .... I was destitute of all those benefits which flow from kindred, in relation to protection, advice or property. My inheritance was nothing.

This sketch of quiet desperation became more menacing in Brown's portrait of Ormond. Thrown back upon his own resources, this protagonist inflated into a nefarious superman concerned only with private gratifications. "Duty and virtue," Ormond contended, "require us to promote our own happiness and not the happiness of others. . . . A man may reasonably hope to accomplish his end, when he proposes nothing but his own good." The great danger for the republic, of course, was that American society was filling up with Ormond-like figures.16

What constituted the ethical basis for the private pursuit of social status? How did one balance personal gain with the public good? Upon what foundation of values could social cohension be established? Such moral quandaries had arisen when republican virtue and the community restrictions of traditional society began giving way before a market creed of individual opportunity and ambition in the post- revolutionary decades. Among the perplexed were writers of the early republic, many of whom wrestled with the shifting moral imperatives of a society increasingly driven by self-regarding individualism. Modern Chivalry, for instance, reflected this moral muddle as its characters- particularly Captain Farrago and Teague O'Regan-continually clashed over conflicting loyalties to the commonweal or personal advancement. Charles Brockden Brown, describing himself as "a moral painter," devoted much of his fiction to an exploration of the ambiguity, delu- sion, and irrationality of the individual's search for moral meaning. As one of his characters explained, human nature was "made up of changeable elements, and the principles of duty were not easily unfolded." Parson Weems, walking another literary road, strove mightily to install Washington as a paragon of moral restraint in a society where flux seemed the only rule. In particular, two topics focused the moral anxiety that permeated the literature of a changing society: religion and wealth.

16 Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 377, and Ormond, 93.




The influence of religion on American conduct in the early republic perplexed all of these authors. The gradual erosion of premodern social forms had weakened certain Protestant traditions-ministerial authority, selective standards of election, church support for social hierarchy- initially in the revivals of the mid-eighteenth century. In an even greater eruption of evangelical fervor in the late 1790s, the Second Great

Awakening gathered momentum. This vast religious movement

emerged in part as a crusade in behalf of "moral free agency" for a people cut loose from traditional, organic, social moorings. Yet by positing an ethic of "voluntarism," it also helped shape a "horizon- tal" social structure by linking responsible, self-controlled Protestant citizens. Overall, the Second Great Awakening appeared most clearly as an "organizing process," a cultural movement to reconnect the restless individuals shaped by an emerging market society. Ambivalent

responses to this social and religious maelstrom found a literary voice around the turn of the century. Its tone was tense and its timbre strained as writers tried to untangle the moral consequences attending liberal individualism.'7

Hugh Henry Brackenridge, for instance, sharply satirized

evangelical Protestantism as hysterical, shallow, and dangerous. A deist disturbed by the moral exuberance of the revivals and a social tradi- tionalist afraid of the passion of agitated converts, he created some of the most humorous passages in Modern Chivalry by skewering the Second Great Awakening. Teague, of course, found delight "par- ticipating in the tumult" of a camp meeting. After observing the pro- ceedings for a time, the Irishman began to shriek, stand on his head, walk on his hands, and curl up into a ball to roll down hills. For such spirited stunts he became a leading convert, earned the caresses of overwrought female evangelicals, and began to exhort the crowd

himself, all because, in Brackenridge's sarcastic words, "the more

extravagant the actions, the surer signs of being in the true faith." Charles Brockden Brown, however, typically focused on the potential for violence lurking in religious enthusiasm. In Wieland, young Theodore, influenced by his father's narrow Protestant fanaticism, in-

dulged in months of religious meditation and became convinced that he heard the voice of God. Responding to imagined messages from the Almighty, he murdered his wife and children in a deranged ritual of sacrifice. Brown's ultimate comment was a frightening one: lunacy

17 See Donald G. Mathews, "The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780-1830: An Hypothesis," American Quarterly, 21 (Spring 1969), 23-43; and

Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium.




could be lurking in the privatized, mystical religious morality called forth by an age of striving individualism.'8

Parson Weems, both in his writing and his professional life, per- sonified the volatile religious morality in the early republic that Brackenridge and Brown found so troubling. He had begun his career as an Episcopal minister, but split with this denomination because of a growing attraction to the more emotional doctrines and practices of Methodism. Leaving the ministry altogether in the 1790s, he abandoned all pretense to theological rigor. Weems became an amiable moralist-his didactic pamphlets included God's Revenge against Gam- bling, The Drunkard's Looking Glass, and The True Patriot-and smoothly spread the vapid message "God is love." This creed, he discovered, not only comforted but helped to sell books. Weems bragged to friends of unloading his book cargo at "preaching appointments" and speculated to one associate that if he gave his "whole undivided attention to [selling] the Bible I should in 5 years make a fortune for us both." Nor did religious qualms keep the parson from hawking Thomas Paine's blasphemous Age of Reason alongside religious tracts. When confronted with the contradiction, he held up a published reply to Paine, saying, "Behold the antidote. The bane and the antidote are both before you."19

While Weems tried to merge evangelical, sentimental Protestan- tism with the profit motive, Philip Freneau explored another alter- native created by transforming religious morality in the early republic. Freneau found moral refuge in doctrines of religious romanticism. In early life a deist who rejected Calvinist doctrine, the poet eventually became receptive to Swedenborgian mysticism and Unitarian philosophy. Ultimately he rejected all creeds in favor of the notion of God immanent in Nature. In "The Millennium," a poem of the late 1790s, Freneau advised "a ranting field orator" that "I fear, with superficial view / You contemplate dame nature's plan." In other poems like "On the Religion of Nature," he emphasized that "Religion, such as nature taught, / With all divine perfection suits; / Had all mankind this system sought / Sophists would cease their vain disputes." The poem "Belief and Unbelief"--it was sternly recommended to the "Serious Consideration of Creed Makers"--proclaimed Freneau's ultimate religious conclusion: the individual must retain the right to believe, or disbelieve, according to his own judgment and sensitivity.

18 See Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 608-609, and Brown, Wieland. 19 Skeel, ed., Weems: Works and Ways, III, 411-413, 418; Harold Kellock, Parson

Weems of the Cherry Tree . . . (New York 1928), 104-105.




As for himself, the poet received religious inspiration from con-

templating the "One Power of Love, that fills unbounded space," "the God of Nature," and "Ideas of the Almighty Mind." Thus Freneau stood as a transitional moral figure, rooted in his culture's Protestant past but bending toward a new sensibility of romantic individualism.20

While these writers saw religious morality becoming highly problematic in early national society, they found themselves even more disoriented by changing moral perceptions of work and wealth. As

J. E. Crowley has argued persuasively, the last half of the eighteenth century saw the clash of an older organic, social, moral valuation of work with an emerging economic and material perception. Subsequent ambiguity and uncertainty often surfaced in works of literature.

Brackenridge, for instance, struggled to uphold-in Modern Chivalry a

republican work ethic of moral growth against a liberal one of profit and advancement. "A government of liberty is the most delicate of all structures," he contended, "and there is no preserving it, if the love of money is encouraged." But Brackenridge also recognized the moral dilemma of advocating hard work, on the one hand, while con-

demning materialism and profit on the other. Take away the spring of ambition and distinction, he wrote, "and you increase indolence. I grant it. But it saves the heart. There may be less eminence; but there will be more goodness." Many of Brown's characters expressed similar disquietude over the moral meaning of labor. Arthur Mervyn, for example, was reluctant to take a commercial job as a clerk or copyist because "he could not part with the privilege of observing and think-

ing for himself." In the novel Ormond, Stephen Dudley became convinced as a young man that "a certain species of disgrace was annexed to every employment of which the only purpose was gain." Theodore Wieland believed similarly that "power and riches were chiefly to be dreaded on account of their tendency to deprave the possessor.'"21

Philip Freneau found little more comfort in surveying American

profit-seeking. As he proclaimed in 1797, the present should be called "the trading age," but the consequences of "an overgrown trade" were frightening: "It contributes extremely to the disproportion of for-

20 See Philip Freneau, A Collection of Poems on American Affairs and a Variety of Other Subjects Chiefly Moral and Political (Delmar, N.Y. 1976 [1815]), 32, 105, 119-121; and Lewis Leary, Soundings: Some Early American Writers (Athens, Ga. 1975), 151, 158.

21 See J.E. Crowley, The Sheba, Self: The Conceptualization of Economic Life in

Eighteenth-Century America (Baltimore 1974). The quotations are from Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 21-22, 696, 221-222, 480-481; and Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 9; Ormond, 6; Wieland, 38.




tunes; an inequality which flints population; which prompts men to make improper use of their riches, and consequently to abandon themselves to luxury." Freneau attacked these evils in poems like "The Projectors," where he demanded, "Base grasping souls, your pride repress; / Beyond your wants, must you possess?" As early as 1788, two essays came to the heart of Freneau's suspicions about commercial morality. "The Man in Business" described the prosperous commercial man as smart of demeanor, reeking of confidence, and walking fast "not caring whose heels or toes he treads upon." In contrast, "The Man out of Business" neglected his appearance, wandered aimlessly, and often talked about the "unparalleled poverty and rascality of the age." Yet the unemployed man also was animated by "humanity" and "humility" and "his heart bleeds within him if he sees but a dog ill used." Commercial prosperity, Freneau concluded, tended to create among Americans an immoral greed and callous disregard for other people."22

Parson Weems, however, throughout his writing career sought neither to chastise nor avoid wealth, but rather to construct a moral justification for it. He gradually arrived at a position in the early nineteenth century that melded philanthropy and profit, public uplift and private gain. As he explained in the pamphlet The True Patriot (1802),

Next to health of body and virtuous mind, wealth is one of the first of this world's goods. It is heaven's handmaid of blessings innumerable to ourselves, and of benefits innumerable to others. By wealth, a pru- dent man soars far above debts and duns . . . . By wealth, a good man takes up the orphan in his arms, wipes away his tears . . . and by pious instruction leads him safe to his God. Hence, among all sensi- ble people, who have had any true self love or social, gold has ever shone with most inviting lustre, and every exertion, that conscience could approve, has been made to obtain it.

Weems's motivation for writing The Life of Washington had arisen from similar moral maneuvering. Writing of his plans for the manuscript in 1800, he revealed both his benevolent intent-"to show that his [Washington's] unparrelled [sic] rise & elevation were owing to his Great Virtues"-and his ancillary hopes-that "we may sell it with great rapidity."23

22 Philip Freneau, "On Luxury and Commerce," New York Time Piece, Nov. 17, 1797; Freneau, "The Projectors," Poems Written between the Years 1768 & 1794 (Delmar, N.Y. 1976 [1795]), 224-225; Freneau, "The Man in Business," in Marsh, ed. Prose of Freneau, 111-112.

23 M[ason] L. Weems, The True Patriot; or an Oration on the Beauties and Beatitudes




These struggles to sort through problems of the market and morality set the stage for a final literary drama. In a half-conscious manner, early national writers laid bare some of the psychological consequences of the American transformation toward liberal capitalism. Philip Rieff has written instructively in this regard, "As cultures change, so do the modal types of personality that are their bearers." Thus the transformation of the post-revolutionary republic, being neither quick nor smooth, brought personal predicaments that often proved traumatic, as historians are beginning to discover. W. J. Rorabaugh, for exam-

ple, has calculated that "Americans between 1790 and 1830 drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than ever before or since" and describes this as a "veritable national binge" arising from wrenching historical changes. In a psychobiography, Michael Rogin has examined the "unintegrated personality" of Andrew Jackson and linked it to

dislocating social shifts in the national era. "The disintegrating family order liberated achieving individuals," he concludes. "But it also in- tensified loneliness, vengeful disappointment, and separation anxiety."24 In several striking ways, the disquieting private effects of consolidating liberal capitalism also came to light in the writing of Brown, Brackenridge, Freneau, and Weems.

Each was deeply troubled, first of all, by the difficulties of character formation in a fluid, liberalizing society. Freneau approached "character" as a pressing collective issue for Americans on the make, arguing that "avarice" had been especially destructive of the collective personal fiber of his countrymen since the revolution. He wrote

contemptuously of "our darling commerce, for which the national character has been so scandalously sacrificed" and complained that "the inor- dinate pursuit of commerce has rendered us effeminate and coward-

ly." Yet Freneau also dug deeper. The "love of lucre" among Americans seemed to be creating a society of manipulators whose

sincerity and forthrightness were highly suspect. With the typical man of commercial affairs, argued Freneau, if a stranger "answers to his ideas of a man in business, he smiles upon you as a bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh; if not, he bids you adieu, and walks off with as little ceremony as possible.""25

of a Republic (Philadelphia 1802), 24; Skeel, ed., Weems: Works and Ways, III, 249, 74, I, 8.

24 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic: Uses of Faith After Freud (New York

1966), 2; W.J. Rorabaugh, The Alcoholic Republic: An, American Tradition (New York

1979), ix, xi; Michael Paul Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjuga- tion of the American Indian (New York 1975), 15.

25. Philip Freneau (writing as "An Old Soldier"), "For the Aurora," Philadelphia




The analysis of character in the young republic became more privatized and precise in the work of Brown, Weems, and Brackenridge. With individual ambition emerging from the cocoon of community and family, with older moral certainties fading, and with success and profit becoming social ideals, fears of unscrupulous striving were becom-

ing widespread in early nineteenth century America. This dismay became manifest in the literary figure of the "confidence man." Brackenridge punctuated Modern Chivalry with biting sketches of money- making scams and unprincipled pursuers of the main chance. The case of the "Indian treaty-maker" provided one of the more humorous examples. A stranger approached Captain Farrago asking to rent the services of Teague for a few days. His purpose, it seemed, was to dress up immigrants as Indian chiefs, utilize their "unknown gibberish," and swindle the government out of several thousand dollars designated for Indian pacification. Teague, of course, was delighted to participate, and the stranger presented the scam as an easy one because, in his words, the government "knows no more of Indians than a cow does of Greek." Weems vented similar anxieties about "con men" in his virulent condemnation of gamblers. In God's Revenge Against Gambling (1810), he described gaming men as "intent to enrich themselves on others' spoils" and as subverters of the industrious, self-made ideal. More importantly, Weems accused these individuals of wrecking the structure of society by engaging in "a warfare most unnatural, even against the best and noblest part of your nature-your SOCIAL affections and sympathies with your kind.''26

Brown, even more than Weems and Brackenridge, grew absolute- ly obsessed with the "deceptions" and "appearances" of individual character in early republican society. The title page of Wieland, for example, carried a brief poem that opened with the stanza, "From Virtue's blissful paths away, the double-tongued are sure to stray." Characters with elaborate designs of deceit populated all of Brown's tales, such as Carwin the manipulative ventriloquist in Wieland, and Clithero, the mysterious stranger in Edgar Huntly. Brown's most exemplary "con men," however, were Thomas Craig and Welbeck. In Ormond, the bright young Craig became the employee, and eventually the partner and business manager, of Stephen Dudley in his commercial enterprise. Unbeknownst to the Dudley family, however,

Aurora, Mar. 22, 1809; Freneau, "The Man in Business," in Marsh, ed., Prose of Freneau, 111-112.

26 Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 55-57; Mason Locke Weems, God's Revenge against Gambling (Philadelphia 1822 [1810]), 12, 18, 25-26, 38-39.




he siphoned money away from the business over the course of several years and drove them into total poverty. Welbeck appeared equally sinister in Arthur Mervyn. He began a rise to social prominence by steal- ing a woman's inheritance, became involved in a complicated commercial swindle in Philadelphia, and finally impersonated a wealthy merchant to aid him in his scheme. Arthur, slowly growing suspicious of his employer's wealth and character, anxiously wondered "Who and what was Welbeck?" and agonized over whether he offered "the mask of misery and the structure of vice.""27

Pervasive disquietude over individual character eventually led these authors on a deeper journey into the realm of the passions. In various ways, they perceived that liberalizing change threatened to release libidinous instincts-luxurious indolence, sexual license, violent outbursts-among striving individuals. Weems expounded upon such misgivings in numerous tracts preaching the virtues of self-control: God's Revenge against Murder (1807), God's Revenge against Adultery (1820), The Drunkard's Looking Glass (1812). In the intriguingly titled Hymen's Recruiting Sergeant (1805), Weems even warned against the dangers of long bachelorhood. An acute fear of libido-driven, competing young men led him to recommend early marriage: "It preserves youth from the harlot's clutches . . . [and] from black eyes and broken heads." With such concerns, Weems felt compelled to picture George Washington's iron self-control as critical to his success. The Founding Father, the parson lectured, moved "first to triumph over himself, and then over the British." The biographer praised his "TRUE HEROIC VALOUR which combats malignant passions-conquers unreasonable self" and contrasted Washington with scoundrels "who have no com- mand over their passions."28

Brown addressed the problem of unrestrained passion less directly but more forcefully, lacing his tales with shocking episodes of violence and desire. Wieland and Edgar Huntly, for instance, committed savage acts of murder that they described in terms of "rapture," "elation," and "delight." Welback, in addition to being a killer in Arthur Mervyn, seduced and abandoned the daughter of a prominent southern family,

27 On Thomas Craig, see Brown, Ormond, 7-14, 81-82. For the presentation of Welbeck see Brown, Arthur Mervyn, 68, 84, 90; Arthur's reflection appears at 66.

28 See Mason L. Weems, Three Discourses: Hymen's Recruiting Sergeant, The Drunkard's

Looking Glass, God's Revenge against Adultery (New York 1929 [1805, 1809, 1820j). The

quotations are from Hymen's Recruiting Sergeant, 127, and Weems, Life of Washington, 4, 191. For a perceptive analysis of Americans' post-revolutionary struggle to repress libidinous passions, see Ronald T. Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in 19th-Century America (New York 1979).




and then took as his mistress a young woman whose inheritance he had stolen. The character Ormond exhibited a similar mixture of ag- gression and animal passion as he killed Thomas Craig, drove his love- sick mistress to suicide, and finally attempted to rape Constantia Dudley. In like fashion, Freneau spun bizarre and grotesque images of libidinous instincts set loose in a liberalizing society. In the 1780s he wrote "A Midnight Soliloquy in the Market House of Philadelphia." Describing the abandoned commercial center as a haven for "flesheaters," he termed it a "graveyeard" and "receptacle of death." Prompted by the approach of a drunk in the early morning hours, Freneau painted a gory picture of man as beast:

It is a man, or the resemblance of one .... He is just returning from a midnight debauch-his senses are stupefied-his reason has forsaken him-he talks nonsense, and utters wild incoherent sentences-Ah, like a swine wounded by a butcher's knife, down he falls into the midst of the loathsome fluids disgorged from his filthy stomach-he makes a feeble effort to rise, but finds it impossible-his face and nose are battered and bloody-and, trust me, a truer beast was never conveyed hither in a cart, nor cut into quarters, and impaled upon those iron hooks that were designed to support the weight.

From this repulsive portrait, the essayist derived a fiercely ironic conclusion: "The market house, like the grave, is a place of perfect equality." '29

Brackenridge, however, presented the most striking fictional image of licentious danger in a liberal society. Very early in Modern Chivalry, as Captain Farrago and Teague began their wanderings, they came upon a gathering of rural youngbloods who had organized a horse race. The young men first tried to con the captain into paying a fee and entering the old plough horse he was riding. He indignantly refused, and the race went on. It was hotly contested, and an in- conclusive finish set several of the owners clamoring for the winner's purse. With tempers flaring, the crowd erupted into a full-fledged brawl. The captain mounted his horse amidst the mayhem of fist-fighting and lectured the combatants on the pressing need for "principles of decorum and good breeding." He was ignored, of course, and then was knocked from his horse in the melee and punched in the head. Following this violent metaphor for the "race" of life in a market society, it seems no accident that Teague-Brackenridge's symbol for

29 See Brown, Wieland, 172, and Edgar Huntly, 156; Freneau, "A Midnight Soliloquy in the Market House of Philadelphia," in Marsh, ed., Prose of Freneau, 72-73.




overweaning ambition throughout the book-emerged as a creature of libidinous outrages. He assaulted a chambermaid at a rural village inn, for example, and then successfully blamed it on a completely un- nerved minister in the adjoining room. Brackenridge even shaped an explicit "animal" image when Teague, after being tarred and feathered, found himself hauled around the countryside by a pair of rural en-

trepreneurs and exhibited as "an uncommon creature" of the "Ouran

Outang" family, or possibly the missing link between "the brutal and the human species."o30

At the deepest and murkiest level of unconscious expression, these writers suggested a final broad psychological predicament in the early republic: a tendency toward the diffusion of personality structure, or the splintering of self, within the striving individual. Personal fragmentation, of course, would become an obsessive theme in much nineteenth and twentieth century discourse. Literary critics have explored the "divided self' that permeates much modern literature;31 sociologists have linked the "differentiation" of modern society with a dominant

personality type in which there is a fundamental "separation of the emotional from the abstract" ;32 ego psychologists have focused on the

problematic nature of "identity" formation for individuals facing a swirl of competing institutions and values.33 Max Horkeimer has suggested a persuasive historical explanation, arguing that the emergence of market capitalism has been linked with "the development of a kind of pluralistic personality structure, or . . . 'personae'. . . . Education, whether in the family, the school, or the outside world, seems to pro- vide the individual with a set of masks rather than with a coherent, integrated personality." In other words, the division of labor endemic to liberal capitalism shaped a parallel division of personality. Weems, Brackenridge, Brown, and Freneau in many ways disclosed the shadowy arrival of the "personae" in the early republic. Through their writings

30 Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 6-8, 308-317, 608-609, 30-34. 3' See, for example, Peter Conn, The Divided Mind: Ideology and Imagination in

America, 1898-1917 (Cambridge 1983); Masao Miyoshi, The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians (New York 1969); Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authen-

ticity (New York 1972); and D.H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature (New York 1978 [1923]), 88-90.

32 See Fred Weinstein and Gerald M. Platt, The Wish to be Free: Society, Psyche, and Value Change (Berkeley 1969), 18.

33 See Erik H. Erikson, Identity, Youth, and Crisis (New York 1968), and Peter L. Berger, Brigitte Berger, and Hansfried Kellner, The Homeless Mind: Modernization and Consciousness (New York 1974), 64-65.




and their lives moved masked images of inner incoherence, internalized tension and rage, and identity confusion.34

Thus Weems's Washington often appeared as a study in contradic- tory impulses. He prospered as a farmer-businessman but always stood ready to sacrifice all material possessions for the good of the republic. He moved to the summit of early national society as both a nonpareil of tightly bound passion, and a superb warrior. As for Weems himself, the masks came on and off so quickly that he must have spent much of his adult life dizzy. A tireless critic of gaming, he was not above working the crowds at horse races to hawk his books. A ceaseless ad- vocate of benevolence and piety, he felt no twinge of guilt when con- cocting a lottery scheme in Virginia for establishing a "charity school" with "the prizes payable in books," or when he connived to find a "lovely female likeness" to aid the sales of his funeral sermon, "The Lovely Wife, an Oration pronounc'd over the honor'd dust of a Sleeping Angel." The parson revealed the extreme malleability of the character in 'an 1810 letter proclaiming the great successes awaiting one who would "dash around with his books to the Courts; preach with the Preachers[,] reason with the Lawyers & Doctors, and render himself dear to the Leading Characters of Society." Sometimes Weems went even further. The title page of The Life of Washington described its author as "The Rector of Mount Vernon Parish." Weems never held the post because such a parish never existed.35

The writings of Freneau raised similar images of the fragmented self in a commercializing society. In "The Market Man" (1788), the essayist found remarkable "the very different countenance worn by the same person" when going to and returning from the Philadelphia produce market. On the way to the marketplace, the typical man appeared "dejected," "dull," and full of "melancholy." By contrast, returning with his hands full of purchased goods he walked in "triumph" as a man "of more consequence than he was fifteen minutes ago." The explanation, Freneau noted, seemed to be that the act of buying commodities allowed the buyer to show the public that he had an abundance of "the one thing needful": money. In another essay of the same year, the author observed that the typical "man in business" striding hurriedly around Philadelphia seemed "little better

34 Max Horkheimer, "The Lessons of Fascism," in Hadley Cantril, ed., Ten- sions That Cause Wars (Urbana, Ill. 1950), 230.

35 Skeel, ed., Weems: Works and Ways, II, 48, 174-175, III, 26. See Marcus Cunliffe's "Introduction," The Life of Washington, xxxi, on Weems's fabrication regarding Mount Vernon parish.




than a perambulating machine, till he comes to the scene of action, his counting house, or his law shop." Both the "market man" and the "man in business," the essayist suggested, indicated that the profit motive was shaping individuals that were fully alive only when in the act of purchase or pursuit. By the early 1800s, Freneau's warn- ings of splintered, masked individuals reached a crescendo in his satirical treatments of "The Bank Distemper!!" Posing as "Dr. Sangrado," he diagnosed this "species of derangement" as a mental condition apparent among bank advocates. This "mental malady" flared up among success-seekers when "a man, instead of apprehending he may fall, becomes anxious to go higher, until everything becomes so in- distinct below to his mind's eye . . . that he has no correct ideas, his head is full of notions-a man in this condition is mad." For Freneau, a growing American infatuation with the success ethic so constricted and compartmentalized the individual mind that a type of social schizophrenia threatened.36

Brackenridge's Modern Chivalry contained a more vivid subliminal report of profound private agitation in the early republic. The geographical journey of Captain Farrago and Teague often appeared but a cover for the novel's real journey: an anxious symbolic search for cohesive character and identity. Brackenridge consistently juxtaposed the wild Irishman's ambition, deceit, and sexual shenanigans with the captain's stern propriety, honest industry, and defense of stability and authority. The author stood uneasily between the two, as Ego between the Id and Superego. He made apparent his sympathy with Captain Farrago's views, but his association with the libidinous Teague was equally clear if less obvious. Brackenridge's own career was one of reaching ambition, and as he noted at one point of Teague's character, "I have not been able to do it justice, being but half an Irishman myself." The author further revealed his uncertainty by criticizing both the captain's stuffy restraint and Teague's wild indulgence. This psychological tension did not resolve itself in the novel as Teague never achieved legitimate success, the captain never overcame his stern but befuddled resentment, and an integration of their clashing instincts never occurred. Nor did the "personae" depicted in Modern Chivalry unify itself in Brackenridge's own private life. All accounts picture the Pennsylvania author as decidedly eccentric, and many contem-

36 Philip Freneau, "The Market Man," in Lewis Leary, ed., The Poems (1786) and Miscellaneous Works (1788) of Philip Freneau (Delmar, N.Y. 1975), 93-94. "The Bank Distemper" essay appeared in the Philadelphia Aurora, Jan. 18, 1809, Jan. 22, 28, Feb. 14, 1811, under the pseudonym "Dr. Sangrado."




poraries thought him downright mad. He acquired a reputation for outbursts of capricious violence, treated his only son with extreme harsh- ness, and remarried a completely untutored country girl on a whim after paying off her father. After becoming a judge, stories of unrestrained and self-defaming behavior abounded. Once, when out riding in a rainstorm, the passengers of a coach came across Brackenridge astride a horse wearing only his hat and boots. With the shocked observers staring, he reportedly explained, "Although I am a judge, I have but one suit, and the storm, you know, would spoil the clothes; but it couldn't spoil me.""37

Brown's novels echoed with the crashes of shattering identity. All of his tales, for instance, crawled with characters either contemplating or performing acts of suicide: Welbeck, Arthur's father, and the father of his fianc&e in Arthur Mervyn; Helena Cleves and Constantia in Ormond; Clithero and Edgar in Edgar Huntly. The ultimate destruction of self, however, attained its greatest emotional power in the story of Wieland. The book opened with the tale of Theodore and Clara's father, a man who could not reconcile his quest for religious purity with the con- tamination of the, everyday world. His psyche rubbed raw from the tension, he literally exploded and burned, in Brown's words, from "spontaneous combustion." Theodore, falling prey to the same obsessive pursuit of spiritual goodness, later went mad. With the appearance of Carwin-a mysterious, sinister, sensual ventriloquist- Theodore began to hear strange voices which pushed him over the brink and into an orgy of murder. After killing his wife and children, this tormented individual slit his own throat in front of his sister.38

The identify diffusion of the "personae" appeared most starkly, however, in Edgar Huntly. It surfaced first in Brown's recurrent deploy- ment of the image of "twins." Edgar slowly discovered, for instance, that the stranger Clithero had materialized as a dark and dangerous reflection of his own personality. The narrative further disclosed that Clithero's patroness, Mrs. Lorimer, was beset by her evil twin brother Arthur Wiatte, while the face of Edgar's murdered friend Waldergrave was mirrored hauntingly in the face of his sister Mary. But Edgar himself became the most striking representation of liberal man and the fractured self. Absorbed with the fate of the accused murderer Clithero, who had escaped into the forest, Edgar believed in the suspect's innocence and went on a rescue mission into the wilderness

"7 Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry, 405. On Brackenridge's personal instability, see Newlin, Life of Brackenridge, 277-278, and Ellis, After the Revolution, 90-91.

38 See Brown, Wieland, 12-19, 229-231.




that only can be described as a journey into the unconscious. Edgar awakened at the bottom of a cavernous pit not knowing how he had gotten there, and began a long, nightmarish series of experiences. Kill- ing and eating the raw flesh of an attacking panther, he was regenerated and became an instinctual creature himself. Chased by unknowing white settlers as a marauding Indian, he adopted the wiles of the savage. After brutally killing several attacking Indians, Edgar ended his libidinous journey with an act of striking sexual assertion. Looking at the final dead Indian at his feet, he "made prize of his tomahawk" and "Prompted by some freak of fancy, I stuck his musket in the ground, and left it standing upright in the middle of the road." Follow- ing this carnal victory, Edgar returned to civilization only to discover that Clithero was a murderous madman, and he himself a "sleep- walker" responsible for a number of deceptive actions. Thus, while Brown's other novels showed secondary characters misleading or con- fusing the protagonists, in Edgar Huntly the primary character con- fronts, deceives, and unhinges himself. As Edgar proclaimed at the end of the novel, in words that Brown could have applied generally to the fragmented individuals of the early republic, "How total is our blindness with regard to our own performances!"'39

Thus American literature of the early republic, speaking im- aginatively to the cultural and social sensibility of the age, revealed both external parameters and internal dynamics of liberalizing change. Yet the concerns expressed by writers like Freneau, Weems, Brackenridge, and Brown did not evaporate in 1820. To the contrary, anxiety over marketplace ambitions, the morality of status-chasing, and the masks of grasping individuals continued to haunt American culture throughout the nineteenth century.40 The strictures of Victorian culture, coming into increasing prominence by the 1830s, offered one attempt to resolve this tension. Its ideals--self-denial, domesticity, sentimental moralism, a secularized work ethic-tried to temper com- petitive assertion with internalized restraints. Victorian self-control achieved only partial success, however, as bourgeois Americans evaded, violated, and agonized over the inhibitions of this cultural ideal.4'

39 Brown, Edgar Huntly, 153-194. The quotation appears at 267. 40 See Marvin Meyers, The Jacksonian Persuasion: Politics and Belief(Stanford 1957),

and Fred Somkin, Unquiet Eagle: Memory and Desire in the Idea of American Freedom, 1815-1860 (Ithaca 1967).

41 See Daniel Walker Howe, ed., Victorian America (Philadelphia 1976); Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (New Haven 1982); and Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial

America, 1850-1920 (Chicago 1974).




Working-class men and women often rejected them outright.42 Ultimately, no American writer better summarized the lingering

dilemmas of early capitalist culture than Ralph Waldo Emerson in his address, "The American Scholar" (1837). Writing in the immediate aftermath of the social transformation of the early republic, the New Englander helped ignite the literary fireworks of the American Renaissance by sounding a clarion call for the "self-relying and the self-directing" among the American citizenry to seize cultural control of her society. Yet a perplexing ambivalence clouded his appeal. Noting with approval the "new importance given to the single person," Emer- son lauded "the active soul" and instructed that "In silence, in steadiness, in severe abstraction, let him hold by himself." The sage of Concord, however, refused to sanction the individual's pursuit of material self-interest. "The American Scholar" passionately condemned Americans' "vulgar prosperity that retrogrades ever to barbarism" and observed that "Public and private avarice makes the air we breathe thick and fat." In the same address Emerson also urged his countrymen to free themselves from society's hold and break down restric- tive barriers to achievement. "Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all," the author insisted. "Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier." Yet Emer- son acknowledged that American society-that which was producing ambitious individuals by 1820-was "one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about as so many walking monsters-a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.'43

So with Emerson, a powerful ambiguity became the heart of a cultural agenda: the achievement of personal liberation without material selfishness, solitude without fragmentation, integrity without desperate loneliness. Even more than his literary counterparts in the early republic, in this very goal he defined the persistent, ironic problem of America's liberalizing society in the nineteenth century. Striving individualism without loss of community, connectedness, and cohe- sion may have been highly desirable. Unfortunately, however, it was far from clear how to gain the former without suffering the consequences of the latter.

42 See Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium, and Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1789-1850 (New York 1984). 4 See Emerson's "The American Scholar" in Stephen E. Whicher, ed., Selec- tions from Ralph Waldo Emerson (Boston 1960), 73, 79, 68, 74, 73, 79, 64.



Lafayette's passage, viewed by defenders of American liberty An engraving by Moreau, 1825

Courtesy of the author



Masks, Morals, and the Market: American Literature and Early Capitalist Culture, 1790-1820

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