Since the Revolutionaries believed that people were not born to be what they might become, they were confident that they had the ability, like no people in modern times, to remake themselves and the future as they saw fit. Dr. Benjamin Rush was very excited by the enthusiasm shown by Americans at a fete held in Philadelphia in July 1782 in honor of the birth of the heir to the French crown. He realized that Protestant Americans were now eagerly celebrating what they had been long taught to hate—the French Catholic monarchy. The fete, he said, “shows us in the clearest point of view that there are no prejudices so strong, no opinions so sacred, and no contradictions so palpable, that will not yield to the love of liberty.” Since free and republican America was “in a plastic state,” where “everything is new & yielding,” it “seems destined by heaven,” said Rush, “to exhibit to the world the perfection which the mind of man is capable of receiving from the combined operation of liberty, learning, and the gospel upon it.”
Americans in the years following their Revolution set about reforming their culture, in their strenuous efforts to bring their ideas and manners into accord with their new republican governments. Enlightened men could believe, as Samuel Stanhope Smith, soon to be president of Princeton, told James Madison shortly after independence, that new habitual principles, “the constant authoritative guardians of virtue,” could be created and nurtured by republican laws, and these principles, together with the power of the mind, could give people’s “ideas and motives a new direction.” By the repeated exertion of reason—by “recalling the lost images of virtue: contemplating them, and using them as motives of action, till they overcome those of vice again and again . . . until after repeated struggles, and many foils, they at length acquire the habitual superiority”—by such exertions it seemed possible for Americans to create a society of “habitual virtue.” From these premises flowed the Revolutionaries’ efforts at moral and social reformation, much of their republican iconography, and, perhaps most important, the republicans’ devotion, in Smith’s words, to “the great importance of an early virtuous education.”
Americans knew that tyranny was founded on ignorance. As the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 stated, “Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue diffused generally among the people . . . [are] necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties.” The consequence of this Revolutionary thinking was a torrent of speeches and writings on the importance of education that has rarely been matched in American history. America’s national obsession with education was born with the Revolution.
Although by 1776 there were only nine colleges in America, sixteen more were founded in the next twenty-five years. At the same time, many Revolutionary leaders drew up elaborate plans for establishing comprehensive publicly supported school systems. Although little immediately came of these plans, the republican ideal of the state’s fundamental responsibility to educate all of its citizens remained alive and was eventually realized in the common school movement of the early nineteenth century.
Formal schooling, of course, was only a part of what the Revolutionaries meant by education. Americans formed numerous scientific organizations and medical societies and flooded the country with all sorts of printed matter. Three quarters of all the books and pamphlets published in America between 1637 and 1800 appeared in the final thirty-five years of the eighteenth century. Between 1786 and 1795 twenty-eight learned and gentlemanly magazines were established, six more in these few years than in the entire colonial period. Since Americans sought to become a civilized and genteel people, they wanted advice manuals for everything—from how to write letters to friends to how to rise on one’s toes before a curtsy. Two thirds of all the American spelling books published in the eighteenth century were issued in the final seventeen years of the century between 1783 and 1800. By the early nineteenth century Noah Webster’s comprehensive speller, first published in 1783, had sold 3 million copies.
Although writing and spelling were important, they were not as important as reading. The few private libraries that had existed in the large cities in the colonial period were now supplemented by publicly supported libraries, which in turn sponsored increasing numbers of reading clubs, lectures, and debating societies. Although newspapers were relatively rare prior to the Revolution, they were soon being created at astonishing rates, which soon made the American people the greatest newspaper-reading public in the world.
Because Americans thought of themselves as peculiarly a people of sentiment and sensibility, they were eager to create charitable and humanitarian societies. Indeed, there were more such humanitarian societies formed in the decade following the Revolution than were created in the entire colonial period. These charitable societies treated the sick, aided the industrious poor, housed orphans, fed imprisoned debtors, built huts for shipwrecked sailors, and, in the case of the Massachusetts Humane Society, even attempted to resuscitate those suffering from “suspended animation,” that is, those such as drowning victims who appeared to be dead but actually were not.
Jefferson and other Revolutionary leaders drew up plans for liberalizing the harsh penal codes inherited from the colonial period. Pennsylvania led the way by abolishing the death penalty for all crimes except murder. Instead of, as in the past, publicly punishing criminals by such bodily penalties as whipping, mutilation, and execution, Pennsylvania began the experiment of confining criminals in solitary cells in penitentiaries that were designed to be schools of reformation. Other states soon followed with these new kinds of prisons. Nowhere else in the Western world were such penal reforms carried as far as they were in America.
Schools, benevolent associations, and penitentiaries—all these were important for reforming the society and making it more republican. But none of them could compare in significance with that most basic social institution, the family. By rejecting monarchy and the older paternalistic ties of government and asserting the rights and liberties of individuals, the Revolution inevitably affected relationships within the family. It abolished the older English patterns of inheritance and the aristocratic legal devices that had sought to maintain the stem line of the estate (entail) and to sacrifice the interests of younger children to the eldest son (primogeniture). Many of the states passed new inheritance laws that recognized greater equality among sons and daughters. Everywhere novelists and others writing in the post-Revolutionary years stressed the importance of raising children to become rational and independent citizens.
Although there was little legal change in the authority of husbands over their wives, the traditional relationship was now questioned in ways that it had not been earlier. The Revolution made Americans conscious of the claim for the equal rights of women as never before. Some women now objected to the word “obey” in the marriage vows because it turned the woman into her husband’s “slave.” Under pressure, even some of the older patriarchal laws began to change. The new republican states now recognized women’s rights to divorce and to make contracts and do business in the absence of their husbands. Women began asserting that rights belonged not just to men, and that if women had rights, they could no longer be thought of as inferior to men. In 1790, Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a prominent Massachusetts political figure, writing under the pseudonym “Constantia,” published an essay, “On the Equality of the Sexes.” Popular writings everywhere now set forth models of a perfect republican marriage. It was one based on love, not property, and on reason and mutual respect. And it was one in which wives had a major role in inculcating virtue in their husbands and children. These newly enhanced roles for wives and mothers now meant that women ought to be educated as well as men. Consequently during the two decades following the Revolution, numerous academies were founded solely for the advanced instruction of females, a development unmatched in other parts of the world. Even though women were almost everywhere denied the right to vote, some of the upper strata of women began to act as political agents in their own right, using their social skills and various unofficial social institutions to make connections, arrange deals, and help create a ruling class in America.