readers with cheap sources of information that were remarkably uniform through-
out the North and West and much of the South. In effect, then, government directly and knowingly subsidized the rise of a democratic and national reading public.
Newspapers were the most widely distributed form of print in the new republic.
In 1790, 106 newspapers were being published in the United States. In 1835, 1,258
were in publication, 90 of which were dailies. In the latter year, the number of
newspapers per capita in the United States was two to three times greater than in Great Britain. Though only about one household in 10 subscribed to a newspaper,
the democratic public knew what was in them, for the papers were passed from
hand to hand, read aloud in groups, and made available at taverns and public
houses. Timothy Dwight, Federalist president of Yale College, hated newspapers
and associated them with gambling, tavern haunting, drinking, and democracy.
Improvements in distribution and printing technology encouraged other forms
of popular literature as well. The emerging evangelical crusade made innovative
use of print. Sunday school tracts, temperance pamphlets, and other religious
materials were printed in New York and distributed efficiently and cheaply
through the mails, while the American Bible Society devised a realistic plan to
provide every household in America with a free Bible. Newspapers were men’s
reading, but the religious tracts tended to find their way into the hands of women.
Women also were the principal readers of novels, a new form of reading matter
that Thomas Jefferson and other authorities denounced as frivolous and aberrant.
Novels were seen as dangerous not only because they contained questionable sub-
ject matter but also because girls and women read them silently and in private.
Printed matter provided information and opinion for the men who exercised
power and conducted the public life of democracy, but it could also provide sus-
tenance for the spirits and imaginations of Americans who were excluded from
power and the public.
The increase in literacy and in printed matter accelerated both the market and
democratic individualism. Books and newspapers were scarce in the 18th century,
and most Americans had experienced the written word only as it was read aloud
by fathers, ministers, or teachers. After 1790, private, silent reading of new kinds of texts became common. No longer were adult male authorities the sole interpreters of the world for families and neighborhoods. The new print culture en-
couraged Americans to read, think, and interpret information for themselves.
THE NORTHERN MIDDLE CLASS
“The most valuable class in any community,” declared the poet-journalist Walt
Whitman in 1858, “is the middle class.” At that time, the term middle class (and
the social group that it described) had been in use no more than 30 or 40 years. The Market Revolution had created new towns and cities and transformed the old ones,
and it had turned the rural North into a landscape of family-owned commercial
farms. Those who claimed the title “middle class” were largely the new kinds of
proprietors made in that transformation—city and country merchants, master
craftsmen who had turned themselves into manufacturers, and the mass of market-
oriented farmers. They lived at the centers of the new marketing and communica-
tions networks, and they developed a self-conscious middle-class identity that was remarkably uniform throughout the North.
The Northern Middle Class
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A New Middle
New England played a disproportionate role in the making
Class
of middle-class culture. New England was the first center of
factory production, and southern New England farms were
thoroughly commercialized by the 1830s. Yankee migrants dominated the com-
mercial heartland of western New York and the northern regions of the Northwest.
Even in the seaport cities (New York’s Pearl Street wholesale houses are a prime
example), businessmen from New England were often at the center of economic
innovation. This Yankee middle class invented cultural forms that became the core of an emerging business civilization. Liberty for them meant self-ownership and the freedom of action and ambition. Equality meant equality of opportunity. They
upheld the autonomous and morally accountable individual against the claims of
traditional neighborhoods and traditional families. They devised an intensely private, mother-centered domestic life. Most of all they adhered to a reformed Yankee Protestantism whose moral imperatives became the foundation of American
middle-class culture.
The Evangelical
In November 1830, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney
Base
preached in Rochester, New York. Most in his audience
were transplanted New Englanders, the heirs of what was
left of Yankee Calvinism. In their ministers’ weekly sermons and in the set prayers their children memorized, they reaffirmed the old Puritan beliefs in providence and original sin. The earthly social order (the fixed relations of power and submission between men and women, rich and poor, children and parents, and so on) was
necessary because humankind was innately sinful and prone to selfishness and dis-
order. Christians must obey the rules governing their station in life; attempts to rearrange society were both sinful and doomed to failure.
Yet while they reaffirmed those conservative Puritan beliefs in church, the men
and women in Finney’s audience routinely ignored them in their daily lives. Market expansion was clearly the result of human effort. Just as clearly, it added up to
“improvement.” And as middle-class Christians improved the material and social
worlds, the doctrines of human inability and natural depravity, along with faith in divine providence, made less sense.
To such an audience, Charles Finney preached the organizing principle of
northern middle-class evangelicalism: “God,” he insisted, “has made man a moral
free agent.” Neither the social order, the troubles of this world, nor the spiritual state of individuals was divinely ordained. People would make themselves and the
world better by choosing right over wrong—though they would choose right only
after submitting their rebellious wills to the will of God. It was a religion that valued individual holiness over a permanent and sacred social order. It made the spiritual nature of individuals a matter of prayer, submission, and choice. Thus it gave Christians the means—through the spread of revivals—to bring on the thousand-year reign of Christianity that they believed would precede the Second Coming of
Christ. As Charles Finney told his Rochester audience, “If [Christians] were united all over the world the Millennium might be brought about in three months.”
Yankee evangelists had been moving toward Finney’s formulation since the
turn of the 19th century. Like Finney, they borrowed revival techniques from the
Methodists (week-long meetings, meetings in which women prayed in public, an
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