In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. This book shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation. The book examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequalit ... More

In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen—the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite—worked hard to maintain their positions of power. This book shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped the ideologies and institutions of the fledgling nation. The book examines how, facing pressure from populist movements as well as the threat of foreign empires, these gentlemen argued among themselves to find new ways of justifying economic and political inequality in a republican society. At the heart of their ideology was a regime of property and contract rights derived from the norms of international commerce and eighteenth-century jurisprudence. But these gentlemen were not concerned with property alone. They also sought personal prestige and cultural preeminence. The book describes how, painting the egalitarian freedom of the republic's “lower sort” as dangerous licentiousness, they constructed a vision of proper social order around their own fantasies of power and justice. In pamphlets, speeches, letters, and poetry, they argued that the survival of the republican experiment in the United States depended on the leadership of worthy gentlemen and the obedience of everyone else. The book demonstrates how these elites, far from giving up their attachment to gentility and privilege, recast the new republic in their own image.