Market Revolution

American Manhood before the Market Revolution

Prior to the market revolution, American society was governed more by the natural rhythms of the environment than by the commercial forces of market exchange. Colonial and early national U.S. society consisted of small inland communities and seaboard towns; even such cities as New York, Boston, and [Page 283]Philadelphia were small by European standards. With the exception of transatlantic commerce, trade remained local and the cost of transport made commercial transactions over longer distances prohibitively expensive. The relative social and economic isolation of colonial and early national American communities affected perceptions of social relations and definitions of gender and manliness.

The fundamental unit of colonial society and the basis for its concepts of manhood was the household, whose male head linked it to social and governmental structures. The responsibilities of the male household head were grounded in notions of duty, obligation, and deference, and his identity was bound up in social relations governed by these principles. Generally, men as well as women accepted their submission to their male superiors in a social order considered as God-given. Although men were regarded as driven by passions such as a desire for power, fame, and wealth, they were expected to govern and control themselves in accordance with social hierarchies and obligations.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as American men began to embrace the opportunities offered by transatlantic markets and an expanding commercial capitalism, new notions of male identity emerged that were rooted more in self-assertion, financial risk-taking, and rational individualism than in social duty and obligation. Many men found this to be a difficult transition. For instance, the Puritan businessman Robert Keayne (1595–1656) took great pains to justify business practices that had frequently been criticized and prove that he had fulfilled his obligations to the community through his philanthropic giving. But Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography (written between 1771 and 1789), which discussed his rise to wealth and fame in the commercial seaport city of Philadelphia, suggests that Americans had come to embrace an ideal of a gain-oriented, rational masculinity by the late eighteenth century.

The republican and democratic political philosophy that informed the American Revolution and the new nation's government reflected emerging ideas about self-assertion and competition, and thus reinforced these new notions of manhood. In particular, James Madison's “Tenth Federalist,” one of eighty-five essays written in support of the Constitution, promoted the idea that individualistic and pluralistic competition in an open marketplace would generate a well-balanced community. Republican ideology also assumed that the ideal male citizen would balance selfinterest with concern for the needs of the community and the common good, but its suggestion that the pursuit of selfinterest was legitimate when balanced by civic obligation provided crucial momentum and justification for articulations of manliness based on personal gain.

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