• The Democratization of Culture • The Northern Middle Class • The Plain
People of the North • A New Popular Culture • Family, Church, and Neigh-
borhood: The White South • Race • Citizenship
AMERICANS AFTER 1815 experienced wave after wave of social and cultural
change. Territorial expansion, the growth of the market, and the spread of
plantation slavery broke old social patterns. Americans in these years rein-
vented family life. They created American forms of popular literature and art.
They flocked to evangelical churches that expanded and remade American religious
life. They began, in short, to make a distinctively American culture.
The emerging American culture was more or less uniformly republican, capital-
ist, and Protestant. But different kinds of Americans made different cultures out of the revolutionary inheritance, market expansion, and revival religion. Southern
farmers and their northern cousins thought differently about fatherhood and the
proper way to make a family. Northeastern businessmen and southern planters
agreed that economic progress was indeed progress, but they differed radically on its moral implications. Slaveholders, factory hands, rich and poor farmers, and
middle-class women all heard the same Bible stories and learned different lessons.
The result, visible from the 1830s onward, was an American national culture that
was (and is) less an accepted body of rules than an ongoing conversation. This
chapter identifies the varying ways in which Americans thought about four of the
hot spots in that conversation: family life and personal identity, the Christian inheritance, the question of race, and the nature of republican citizenship.
THE DEMOCRATIZATION OF CULTURE
The weakening of traditional authority created spaces that Americans filled in their own ways. Important pillars of old cultures remained: the Bible and revolutionary ideas of liberty and equality were fundamental. But the transportation network that 342
The Democratization of Culture
343
CHRONOLOGY
1830
Charles Grandison Finney leads religious revival in Rochester
◆ Joseph Smith founds the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
1831
First minstrel show is presented
1843
William Miller’s Adventists expect the world to end
1845
George Lippard’s lurid novel Quaker City becomes a best seller
1849
Astor Place theater riot in New York City leaves 20 dead
1852
Harriet Beecher Stowe publishes Uncle Tom’s Cabin
carried wheat and cotton out of rural neighborhoods brought new things in: furni-
ture and ways of arranging it, new clothing styles, new forms of entertainment, new information, new aspirations. In part, Americans made new ways of thinking and
living as consumers of these cultural goods.
Among the items reaching Americans was information—newspapers, books,
magazines, business communications, personal letters, and travelers who carried
news. The information circulated among a public that was remarkably literate and
well informed. The literacy rate in the preindustrial United States was among the highest ever recorded. In 1790, approximately 85 percent of adult men in New
England and 60 percent of those in Pennsylvania and the Chesapeake could read
and write. The literacy rate among women was lower—about 45 percent in New
England—but on the rise. By 1820, all but the poorest white Americans, particu-
larly in the North, could read and write. The United States, more than perhaps
any other country, was a nation of readers.
A Revolution in
The rise of a reading public was accompanied by a print
revolution: enterprising men (and a few women) learned how
to make their livings by providing cheap Bibles and English
novels, almanacs, newspapers, and other printed matter. People were encouraged
to read by their republican governments. The states provided schools, and the
national government helped the flow of print in ways that were unprecedented.
The governments of Great Britain and the European powers tried to control the
circulation of information: they established few post offices, taxed newspapers,
monitored what was said in the newspapers and even in the mail, and prosecuted
people who said the wrong things in print. There were attempts to do such things
in America. The Stamp Tax of 1765 had included a tax on newspapers, and in
1798 Federalists had jailed editors with whom they disagreed. Americans defeated
both of these attempts. The First Amendment guaranteed freedom of the press, and
the U.S. government (with that brief Federalist exception) did not interfere with newspapers. Just the opposite: newspapers enjoyed discounted postal rates and circulated far beyond their points of publication. A law of 1792 allowed newspapers
to mail copies to each other without cost, and the editors of country weeklies cut national and international news from the New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia
papers, combined them with local advertising and legal notices, and provided their 344