Producing men: Work, manhood and capitalism in the early American republic

This study explores the relationship between work and male identity in the early American republic. Historians have long studied how powerful and articulate men helped mold the ideas that drove resistance to British authority and elaborated the tenets of democratic liberal thought. Over the last generation, scholars have also uncovered the workings of class and gender dynamics in the struggles that comprised the Revolution. But the relationship between ideology and social experience, and between the postures of elites and the claims of ordinary Americans remains unclear.;This study seeks to illuminate those dynamics. Specifically, it explores the thought and experience of four wealthy, well-connected white men who came of age during and after the Revolution. Situated in Northern port cities and their hinterlands, these men embraced a world of social and economic striving through which they forged new identities that bridged the worlds of colonial gentility and nineteenth-century democratic capitalism. Through investigations of the letters, journals and business activities of these "gentleman-capitalists," this study uncovers the fluidity of bourgeois male identity in the early republic.;The first section describes the growing respectability of various forms of work, and the changing role of work in shaping conceptions of virtuous and independent manhood in a market culture. It argues that, as part of their adjustment to the liberal thrusts of the Revolution, wealthy American men drew on the evolving rhetorical traditions of manual laborers. They borrowed from an emerging producerist ethic among ordinary Americans who were stepping forward to claim credit for the strength of the new nation. In the process, both powerful and nonelite groups helped to shape the worldview of a bourgeois, or middle, class that quickly rose to prominence in American culture.;The second section examines reactions to the changing ideologies of work by chronicling the adventures of gentleman-capitalists who aspired to European gentility but depended on commercial exchange for their prosperity. Though they formed an elite, they were not an aristocracy in the European sense, but a cornerstone of the American bourgeoisie, and thus a significant component of the culture which millions of Americans would come to embrace.