Developing an American Identity

In 1754 a planter in Virginia and a merchant in Boston had little in common except their king. Each called himself a British subject and an Englishman, and each thought of his colony, not "America," as his country; that year the colonial assemblies rejected Benjamin Franklin's Albany Plan for a common council. By 1800 the same men could watch a portrait of George Washington become a national icon, buy a schoolbook that spelled words the American way, and argue about the meaning of the Fourth of July. National identity had to be made, on purpose, by writers, painters, architects, ministers and printers, and it was laid on top of regional cultures that did not disappear.

Why Americans needed a culture of their own

Independence created a political problem with a cultural answer. The Revolution destroyed the one thing the thirteen colonies had shared, loyalty to the Crown, and the new republic had no king, no established national church, no ancient history and no army of its own that most citizens had seen. Leaders worried that a republic spread over a thousand miles would split along regional lines unless citizens felt attached to it. Republican theory (Topic 3.4) also said that a republic survives only if its citizens have virtue, meaning the willingness to put the public good ahead of private interest. So creating a culture that taught virtue and loyalty to the nation looked like a matter of survival, not decoration.

The materials for it came from shared experience. Men from every state had served in the Continental Army or sat in the Continental Congress. Washington, who resigned his command in 1783 instead of seizing power, became the model republican hero. Congress adopted the Great Seal in 1782 with an eagle and the motto E pluribus unum ("out of many, one"), and Philadelphia began celebrating the Fourth of July in 1777 with bells, cannon fire and toasts, a custom that spread through the 1780s and 1790s.

Print knit the country together. The Post Office Act of 1792 let newspapers travel through the mail for one cent within 100 miles, and the number of post offices grew from about 75 in 1789 to more than 900 by 1800. A farmer in Kentucky could now read the same congressional debates as a merchant in New York, a few weeks late.

National identity in art, literature and architecture

This is where national identity became visible. Artists and writers tried to show that Americans were a distinct people with their own heroes and their own story, while still borrowing most of their forms from Europe.

Painting. John Trumbull, who had served briefly as an aide to Washington in 1775, set out to paint the Revolution as a national epic. His Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker's Hill (1786) and The Declaration of Independence (begun in 1786, with a large version later hung in the Capitol rotunda) turned events from the war into scenes every citizen could recognize. Charles Willson Peale painted Washington again and again and opened a museum in Philadelphia in 1786 to display American portraits and American natural history together, as if the nation's founders and its animals were both proof of its greatness. Gilbert Stuart's 1796 portrait of Washington (the unfinished "Athenaeum" portrait) was copied so often that it became the standard image of the first president; it is the face on the one-dollar bill. Notice the continuity, though: Trumbull and Stuart trained in London, and Trumbull's teacher was the American-born Benjamin West, who spent his career there as history painter to George III.

Writing. Noah Webster argued that a free nation needed its own language as well as its own government. His speller (1783), the "blue-backed speller," taught generations of children to read and sold tens of millions of copies over the next century, and his later dictionaries (1806, 1828) fixed American spellings such as color and center. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a French-born settler in New York, described the American as "this new man," a European who had shed old prejudices in a land of cheap soil and light government. Americans also began writing fiction and drama about themselves. Royall Tyler's comedy The Contrast (1787) mocked a fashionable American who aped British manners and praised a plain, honest Continental Army veteran. William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789) is often called the first American novel, Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple (American edition 1794) became a bestseller, and Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland (1798) moved the gothic horror novel to rural Pennsylvania. Mason Locke Weems's Life of Washington (1800) gave children a moral hero; the cherry-tree story was added in a later edition (1806).

Architecture. Public buildings were built to look like ancient republics. Thomas Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol in 1785 as a copy of the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple in Nîmes, France. Charles Bulfinch's Massachusetts State House (finished in 1798) and the First Bank of the United States in Philadelphia (completed in 1797, with a marble front of classical columns) show the Federal style: symmetrical, restrained, built from Greek and Roman forms. The plan for the new capital on the Potomac, drawn by Pierre L'Enfant in 1791, laid out broad avenues radiating from the Capitol and the President's House, where the government moved in 1800. The classical choice was an argument in stone: Greece and Rome were the only famous republics, so their columns claimed the new nation as their heir and associated its government with virtue rather than with kings.

National institutions, regional cultures

A second kind of national culture grew inside churches. After independence, American denominations cut their ties to authorities in Britain. Methodists organized the Methodist Episcopal Church at a conference in Baltimore in 1784; Anglicans became the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1789; John Carroll became the first American Catholic bishop in 1789. Black Americans built their own institutions: Richard Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society in Philadelphia in 1787, and each opened a Black church there in 1794, while Gowan Pamphlet led a Black Baptist congregation in Williamsburg, Virginia, and Prince Hall's African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston received its charter in 1784.

These national forms grew alongside regional cultures that changed slowly:

The tension between nation and region shows in politics. In 1796 Washington's Farewell Address urged citizens to value "the name of American" above local loyalties and warned against parties built on "geographical discriminations, Northern and Southern, Atlantic and Western." He wrote that warning because the divisions were real: the Whiskey Rebellion (Topic 3.12) and the fights over Jay's Treaty (Topic 3.10) had just pitted West against East and North against South. Even the new rituals split. In the 1790s Federalists and Democratic-Republicans held rival Fourth of July dinners and toasted different heroes.

Who counted as an American

The new identity had borders. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship by naturalization to "free white persons" with two years' residence, and Crèvecoeur's melting of "all nations" meant only European nations. Enslaved people, about one in six Americans at the 1790 census, and American Indians were outside the national family that the paintings and novels described. Women were inside it in a limited role, as "republican mothers" who would raise virtuous sons (Topic 3.6).

People on the margins claimed the national ideals anyway. Benjamin Banneker, a free Black astronomer from Maryland, published almanacs from 1792 to 1797 and in 1791 sent Jefferson a letter pointing out that the Declaration's "all men are created equal" sat badly with slavery. Phillis Wheatley, whose Poems on Various Subjects (1773) was the first book of poetry published by an African American woman, had praised Washington in verse in 1775.

Historians weigh these developments differently. John Murrin called the Constitution "a roof without walls" (1987): Americans built national institutions first and developed a strong national identity only afterward, so in 1800 regional and state loyalties still mattered more to most people. David Waldstreicher (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 1997) argues that nationalism was created through parades, toasts and newspapers, and that from the start each party used those rituals to claim it alone was truly American. Gordon Wood (The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 1992) stresses change, arguing that the Revolution swept away colonial habits of deference and made American culture more egalitarian. For the exam, the safe and accurate claim is a mix: by 1800 a national culture clearly existed, but it was young, contested, mostly white and Protestant, and layered over strong regional ways of life.

Worked examples

Where students lose points

On the exam

This topic's skill is explaining a development, so questions ask why a cultural change happened or what it shows (a source like Crèvecoeur or the Farewell Address, then "which development does this reflect"). In long essays on Period 3, culture works as evidence for continuity and change: British forms persisted while American content and symbols changed. "Federal style" is architecture; don't confuse it with the Federalist Party.