Page 166 - American Stories, A History of the United States

defended individual rights. But they also believed that a republic that compromised its
virtue could not preserve liberty and independence. 6.1
In 1776, Thomas Paine had reminded ordinary men and women that “the sun
never shined on a cause of greater worth. . . .’Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an
age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected, 6.2
even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.” During the 1780s Americans under-
stood their responsibility not only to each other, but also to history. They worried, how-
ever, that they might not meet the challenge. Individual states seemed intent on looking 6.3
out for local interests rather than the national welfare. Revolutionary leaders such as
George Washington and James Madison concluded that the United States needed a
strong central government to protect rights and property. Their quest for solutions 6.4
brought forth a new and enduring constitution.

Defining Republican Culture

6.1 What were the limits of equality in the “republican” society of the new
United States?
T oday, the term republican no longer possesses the evocative power it did
for most eighteenth-century Americans. For them, it defined not a political
party, but a political culture. Those Americans who read deeply in ancient
and renaissance history knew that most republics had failed, often within a
few years, replaced by tyrants who cared not at all what ordinary people thought about
the public good. To preserve their republic from such a fate, victorious revolutionaries
such as Samuel Adams recast fundamental political values. For them, republicanism republicanism Concept that
represented more than a form of government. It was a way of life, a core ideology, an ultimate political authority is
uncompromising commitment to maintain liberty and equality, while guarding against vested in the citizens of the nation.
the corruptions of power and self-interest.
White Americans emerged from the Revolution with an almost euphoric sense of
the nation’s destiny. This expansive outlook, encountered among so many ordinary
men and women, owed much to the spread of Protestant evangelicalism. However
skeptical Jefferson, Franklin, and other leaders may have been about revealed religion,
most Americans subscribed to an almost utopian vision of the country’s future. To this
new republic, God had promised progress and prosperity.
However, the celebration of liberty met with a mixed response. Some Americans—
often the very men who had resisted British tyranny—worried that the citizens of the
new nation were caught up in a wild, destructive scramble for material wealth. Demo-
cratic excesses seemed to threaten order and endanger property rights. Surely a repub-
lic could not survive unless its citizens showed greater self-control. For these people,
the state assemblies appeared to be the greatest source of instability. Popularly elected
representatives lacked what men of property defined as civic virtue, an ability to work
for the common good rather than their private interests.
Working out the tensions between order and liberty, between property and equal-
ity, generated an outpouring of political genius. At other times in American history,
persons of extraordinary talent have been drawn to theology, commerce, or science, but
during the 1780s, the country’s intellectual leaders—Thomas Jefferson, James Madison,
Alexander Hamilton, and John Adams, among others—focused on the problem of how
republicans ought to govern themselves.

Social and Political Reform
Following the war, Americans aggressively ferreted out and, with republican fervor,
denounced any traces of aristocratic pretense. As colonists, they had resented the claim
that English aristocrats were privileged simply because of noble birth. Even so com-
mitted a republican as George Washington had to be reminded that artificial status
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