Beyond these immediate social and economic effects of the war, there were other, deeper, and more long-lasting forces that were greatly affected by the Revolution and its republican ideas. Despite a slackening of immigration and the loss of the loyalist émigrés, the population continued to grow. In fact, the 1780s saw the fastest rate of demographic growth of any decade in American history—a consequence of early marriages and high expectations for the future. After being delayed for several years in the late 1770s by intermittent warfare against the British and Indians, this swelling population resumed its roll westward. “The population of the country of Kentucky will amaze you,” wrote one migrant in 1785; “in June, 1779, the whole number of inhabitants amounted to 176 only, and they now exceed 30,000.” Within a decade Kentucky had become more populous than most of the colonies had been at the time of the Revolution. In fact, more western territory was occupied in the first post-Revolutionary generation than in the entire colonial period.
Of course, the dreams of white Americans for this trans-Appalachian West had little or no place for the tens of thousands of Indians who lived there. Although the Confederation Congress in 1787 promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, [and that] their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent,” the Northwest Ordinance itself took for granted that the destiny of the Northwest belonged to the white American settlers.
Although many whites admired the Indians for their freedom, the Anglo-American idea of liberty and independence was very different from that of the Indians. Where ordinary white American men conceived of freedom in terms of owning their own plot of cultivated agricultural land, Indian males saw liberty in terms of their ability to roam and hunt at will. Like many American gentry, the Indian warriors did not believe they should actually work tilling fields; they thus left manual labor to the women—to the shock of many whites. Indeed, so unnatural to European Americans was the idea of women farming that they had a hard time acknowledging that the Indians practiced any agriculture at all. Ultimately, this denial that the Indians actually cultivated the land became the white Americans’ justification for taking it from them. They expected the Indians to become farmers, that is, to become civilized, or to get out of the way of the settlers.
The achievement of American independence from Great Britain in 1783 was a disaster for the Indians. Many of the tribes in the Northwest and Southwest had allied with the British, and with the peace treaty they discovered that Great Britain had ceded sovereignty over their land to the United States. As one speaker from the Weas complained to their British ally upon learning of the treaty, “In endeavouring to assist you, it seems we have wrought our own ruin.” Because so many of the Indians had fought on the side of the British, Americans tended to regard as enemies even those Indians who had been their allies during the Revolution. By the 1780s many western Americans shared the expectation of the Indian fighter George Rogers Clark that all the Indians would eventually be wiped out.
Based as it was on an unequal and hierarchical society, the British crown could easily treat the Indians as subjects. But the new Republic of the United States did not have subjects, only equal citizens. Since white Americans could scarcely conceive of the Indians as citizens equal to themselves, they had to regard the Indian peoples as foreign nations. In the 1780s the Confederation government sought to assume control of Indian affairs and to establish peaceful relations with the Indians. Although the Confederation Congress repeatedly spoke of its desire to be just and fair with the Indians, it considered them as conquered nations. In several treaties between the Confederation government and some of the various nations or tribes in the mid-1780s, the United States attempted to establish more or less fixed boundary lines between whites and Indians in return for Indian cessions of rights to land. Believing that America owned the lands by right of conquest, the United States offered the Indians no compensation for the ceded lands.
But the Confederation government was weak. Not only did the states ignore the Confederation’s treaties and make their own agreements with the Indians, but white settlers and squatters acted without regard to any authority. The assumption of the congressional land ordinances of the 1780s that people would move west in a neat and orderly fashion was illusory. Instead, people shunned the high-priced land, violated Indian treaty rights, and moved irregularly, chaotically, and unevenly, jumping from place to place and leaving huge chunks of unsettled land and pockets of hemmed-in Indians behind them. By 1787 many of the Indians had repudiated the treaties some of their members had been compelled to sign and attempted to form loose confederations in order to resist the white advance. War and bloodshed inevitably followed.
Despite the presence of the Indians, the American population continued to grow and move in a spectacular manner, further weakening the traditional forms of social organization. Such a mobile population, one Kentuckian told Madison in 1792, “must make a very different mass from one which is composed of men born and raised on the same spot. . . . They see none about them to whom or to whose families they have been accustomed to think themselves inferior.” The ideology of republicanism intensified these developments. In a republic, declared a writer in 1787 in the American Museum (the most important of the several new American magazines created in the postwar years), “the idea of equality breathes through the whole and every individual feels ambitious, to be in a situation not inferior to his neighbour.”
This republican equality now became a rallying cry for people in the aspiring middling ranks who were now more openly resentful than before of those who had presumed to be their social superiors. The widespread protest against the Society of the Cincinnati expressed this resentment. In 1783, Revolutionary army officers, in order to commemorate and perpetuate their participation in the Revolutionary War, formed the hereditary Order of the Cincinnati, named after the legendary Roman republican leader Cincinnatus, who had retired from war to take up his plow. Although Washington had agreed to lead the organization, the Cincinnati aroused angry hostility. Old patriots such as Samuel Adams thought that the Order represented “as rapid a Stride towards an hereditary Military Nobility as was ever made in so short a time.” This sort of ferocious criticism forced the army officers to deny some of their pretensions and the Cincinnati soon became just another one of the many pressure groups emerging in a country that, as the governor of South Carolina said in 1784, had gone “society mad.”
Some fervent equality-minded citizens attacked distinctions of all kinds, including belonging to private social clubs and wearing imported finery. Gentlemen in some areas of the North found that the traditional marks of social authority—breeding, education, good manners—were becoming liabilities for political leadership. Ordinary citizens now claimed the right to the titles—Mr. and Mrs.—that had once belonged only to the gentry. In this new republican society no one wanted to be dependent on anyone else. In Philadelphia the proportion of white servants in the workforce, which at mid-century had constituted 40 to 50 percent, now declined precipitously; and by the end of the century indentured servitude had virtually disappeared. Foreign visitors were stunned by the unwillingness of American servants to address their masters and mistresses as superiors and by the servants’ refusal to admit that they were anything but “help.” For many Americans, living in a free country meant never having to tip one’s cap to anyone.
This growing egalitarianism did not mean that wealth was distributed more evenly in post-Revolutionary America. On the contrary: Wealth was far more unequally distributed after the Revolution than it had been before. Nevertheless, Americans felt more equal, and that was what mattered. After all, wealth as a means by which one person claimed superiority over another was more easily accepted than birth, breeding, family heritage, gentility, or even education, and it was the one most easily matched or overcome by exertion. Relationships were now more and more based on money rather than social position. Towns, for example, stopped assigning seats in their churches by age and status and began auctioning the pews off to the highest bidders. Wealthy men began to brag of their humble origins—something not commonly done before. When a South Carolina politician in 1784 was praised in the press for being a self-established man who “had no relations or friends, but what his money made for him,” a subtle but radical revolution in thinking had taken place. When Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography was posthumously published in the 1790s, the nineteenth-century celebration of the “self-made man” was born.
By the end of the eighteenth century the paternalism of the former monarchical society was in disarray. Apprentices were no longer dependents in the master’s family; rather, they became trainees within a business that was more and more conducted outside the household. Artisans did less “bespoke” or “order” work for particular patrons on whom they were personally dependent; instead, they increasingly produced for impersonal markets. Masters in the various crafts, instead of being patriarchs paternalistically tied to their journeymen, became employers paying their employees cash wages. As masters turned into employers and journeymen into employees, their interests became more distinct and conflicting than they had been before. In 1786 for the first time in American history, employees participated in a strike against their employers. In response, masters now resorted to the courts to enforce what had once been seen as a mutual and personal relationship.