This broadly embraced Protestant evangelicalism was heightened by the control these denominations exercised over American higher education. Almost all of the seventy-eight American colleges founded by 1840 were church-related, with clergymen serving on the boards and the faculties. Most possessed as president a prominent clergyman, who capped off the senior year of his students with a major course in moral philosophy, based on a handful of Protestant ethics textbooks (the runaway favorite being Francis Wayland’s Elements of Moral Science) that were used across the country. In this way, not only American religion but also the development of American ethics and philosophy were shaped by a common Protestant evangelicalism.11
Just as powerful a common bond as evangelical Christianity was the political ideology that Americans embraced in the Revolution. However much the structure of American politics was compromised and frustrated by state demands and state loyalties, Americans in all the states agreed that the states and the federal government alike were to be a republic and follow a republican form of government. Republicanism in the eighteenth century was the political fruit of the Enlightenment, that sea-change intellectual movement whose principal mission was to overthrow authority’s chokehold on European intellectual life and replace it with what was natural, as discovered by reason and experiment. The Enlightenment began in the 1600s when Newton and Galileo overturned the principles of physical science that had been based on Aristotle’s writings and replaced them with a new mechanical physics based on observable patterns of motion. By the 1700s, the philosophes of the Enlightenment had extended the reach of nature, reason, and experiment to the realms of politics and society, and proposed to overturn any form of political organization built on such nonrational factors as monarchy or aristocracy. Enlightenment thought was the principal impulse behind the American Declaration of Independence in 1776, and it had its gospel in the writings of Montesquieu, Cesare Beccaria, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, and above all John Locke, as well as in the classical examples of ancient Greece and Rome.12
But a more practical source of republicanism in America came simply from the governments the Americans had been compelled to improvise in their infancy as British colonies. The British government had taken a hands-off (and no-investment) stance toward the colonies founded in its name on the North American eastern seaboard, allowing the tasks of creation and maintenance to be left to corporate entrepreneurs (such as the Virginia Company) or to religious dissidents (such as the Quakers, Puritans, and Catholics) whom the British crown was only too happy to see disappear westward across the ocean. Not until much later did the British government awaken to (and begin demanding oversight of) the extraordinarily productive successes that three or four generations of this onetime riffraff had created for themselves in America. By 1750, the American colonies had developed in practice what looked for all the world like what Locke and his coadjutors had described on paper—little self-governing commonwealths. The Revolution was in large measure the response of the Americans to a British ultimatum to surrender that self-government.
Self-government meant that political sovereignty originated in the people, who possessed all the competence required for governing, and who should be free from having to cringe before aristocrats or beg their bread from wealthy landowners. Not that Americans ever felt that they needed to, since America possessed no domestic aristocracy to start with and, apart from the great manors of the Hudson River Valley and the plantations of the Virginia tidewater, no vast château-bred landlords. During the Revolution the Whigs proceeded to expel the Tory loyalists who had represented the wealthiest segment of the old colonial society. The new republic was able to begin its life with more than 90 percent of its citizens owning their own property and producing their own sustenance. In the Treaty of Paris the United States also acquired the wilderness beyond the Appalachians, where landowning could be thrown open to new generations; these lands would be organized as federal territories and eventually admitted to the Union as states.13
Every new territory wanted to move as swiftly as possible toward statehood, and to do that, they had to meet requirements for minimum numbers of voters. That, in turn, created pressure in the West to lower the eligibility requirements for voting because the more voters who could be counted, the faster a territory could advance to the privileges of statehood. For that reason, the United States would be a republic, but it would be driven to become a more and more democratic republic. Republics, after all, are simply governments that dispense with kings and aristocrats; the definition of who can be a citizen is what makes a republic more or less democratic. The classical republics of the ancient world were actually very narrow in their definitions of who could be a citizen. The American republic, by contrast, started off on a much more democratic footing than almost any other republic in history, and in its first half century of existence it became increasingly more so, to the point where Americans would use the terms democracy, republic, republican, and democratic almost as synonyms.
A common religion and a highly democratic republicanism were cultural tools that helped Americans transcend narrow state loyalties. But there were also forces at work that were just as likely to push in the other direction and increase rather than diminish the instability of the American union.
The most serious of these forces was economic. Enlightenment philosophes struggled to bring economics as much into conformity to the rule of nature and reason as physics and politics were, and the chief among these economists was the Scot Adam Smith. In An Inquiry into the
