On Becoming America

Picture Two: The Open Society

Our last essay titled “The Two Pictures: Or, On Becoming America” (subtitled “Picture One: The Closed Society”) was the first of a two-part essay contrasting pre-Founding with post-Founding American society. The purpose of this essay—the second picture—is to paint a portrait of the kind of society that issued from the Founding. To that end, we shall briefly examine the kind of government created by the Constitution, and then, more importantly, we shall visualize in words the kind of society created by the Constitution’s government.

The American Founding is the most important event in American history. Indeed, it may very well be the greatest moment in world history. It was that in vitro moment of conception when a free and independent people created for the first time in recorded history their own government, by their own design, by their own choice, and by their own hands. The Founding institutionalized the Revolution by creating the embryo of a new nation—the United States of America.

The Founders’ ambitious goal was to create a free government that would not succumb to the all-too-common temptation to transform itself over time into a despotism. America’s Founding Fathers sought to institutionalize the doctrine of man’s inalienable, individual rights into a functioning and just government. The United States was to be a nation governed not simply by men but by the rule of law. America was to be a constitutional republic, which John Adams and other Founders defined as “an empire of laws and not of men.”

Even the greatest man of the Greatest Generation was not above the law. In 1782, at the end of War of Independence, a group of disgruntled officers suggested to George Washington, that he overthrow Congress and declare himself King of America. True to his principles, Washington categorically rejected the suggestion. Instead of becoming America’s king, Washington preferred, in the tradition of the fifth century B.C. Roman statesman and General Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, to resign his position and return to Mount Vernon to live out the rest of his life as a private citizen and gentleman farmer. Even the other George was in awe. When informed by the American artist Benjamin West of Washington’s intentions, King George III reportedly observed of his late enemy: “If he does that, he will be the greatest man in the world.”

That the Americans would not have a king did not mean that they should not have a functioning government. In 1787, approximately 3.9 million Americans were without a true national government, which meant there was, in effect, no nation and no United States of America. Instead, there were thirteen separate state governments overseen by a frequently feckless pseudo-government that was largely powerless to provide its citizens with justice or national defense. Over the course of the next two years, America’s Founding Fathers designed and the people ratified a national constitution, and then they launched a federal government, the purpose of which was to create a free and just nation.

This new constitution did more than create a government different in form from those in Europe or anywhere else in the world. Implicit in the Founders’ Constitution was a social philosophy grounded in the idea that all individuals have inalienable rights that must be respected by the ruling power and that no one person or social order should rule to their own advantage. This meant that the government must be restrained in its power to do unjust things.

And thus was born the world’s first laissez-faire constitution and government. (For a fuller discussion of America’s laissez-faire constitution, see here.) Rather than coming to its climax, the American revolution was about to begin.

In the decades after the Founding, several generations of young men and women were liberated from the frozen cake of Old-World status restrictions, taxes and regulations of various kinds, and feudal dues and rents that existed in some states such as New York. The state and federal constitutions drafted by the Founding generation restrained the powers of government so that individuals might be free to pursue their highest aspirations and vision of happiness. The launching of America’s laissez-faire constitution created an unparalleled sphere of social and economic freedom.

A new kind of society emerged from the Revolutionary and Founding periods, one that demanded freedom and honored individual initiative. Rather than looking East to Europe’s past for guidance, this newly independent people turned to the trans-Appalachian West for future hope and direction. A new risk-taking spirit unlike anything before known in human history was about to be released from the iron-cage of tradition.

The most important consequence of the American Founding was the unshackling of the individual from the burden of various traditional government compulsions. Many of the economic restraints that had been imposed on colonial Americans by their provincial governments were soon to be repealed, and the various Navigation Acts passed by Parliament between 1660 and 1740 and then the legislation passed by British Parliament during the decade of the imperial crisis between 1765 and 1775 were a dead letter after the Treaty of Paris in 1783.

The men and women who came of age at the eighteenth-century fin-de-siècle and in the first six decades of the nineteenth century took the constitutional and political forms given to them by the revolutionary generation and put them into practice socially and economically. Their task was to work out the existential consequences and meaning of the American Founding, and our task is to examine how the American Revolution was a consequence of the American Founding.

The “Revolution of 1788”

The Founding of the United States of America represents that singular moment in time when something new is birthed, when the past, present, and future merge to create something transformative. The Founding was simultaneously the culmination of an philosophic-moral revolution best symbolized by the principles contained in the Declaration of Independence, the institutionalization of a constitutional-political revolution best symbolized by the framing and ratification of the Constitution, and the unleashing of a social revolution best symbolized by the creation of a laissez-faire economy.

This is the beginning of the United States and thus the beginning of America.

What, then, was created by the American Founding? The most obvious answer, of course, is the Constitution of the United States of America, which was the culminating achievement of the Founding. And what was the Constitution, and what did it do?

The American Constitution is a written document that established, defined, and limited the powers of the new national government. The Constitution and not the government it created was the supreme law of the land. In other words, the Constitution was above and superior to the government and the men who ran it. Only “We the people” and our representatives can change the Constitution. It cannot be changed by the government, though it is of course interpreted by the Supreme Court. Nothing like this had ever been done before in world history. The so-called British constitution was, by contrast, unwritten. It was a thousand-year-old amalgam of common and statutory law and the extant form of government as it existed at given time in history.

The American Constitution established in clear and explicit words a government with power “to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” The Constitution’s Preamble should remind us of the third self-evident truth of the Declaration of Independence, which says that just and legitimate governments are established to secure man’s inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That’s it! No other purpose is listed by the Founding Fathers. In other words, liberty and justice are the ends and purposes of America’s experiment in free government.

The overarching principle of the Founders’ laissez-faire Constitution is the limitation of power. America’s revolutionary Founders intuitively understood Lord Acton’s famous quip that “power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely” long before this nineteenth-century British peer uttered his immortal words. Built into the Constitution’s structural framework and procedural machinery was the doctrine of limited government. The legislative, executive, and judicial powers are all defined and limited in the Constitution, and then they are separated one from the other. America’s political institutions were also decentralized and divided between national, state, county, and city governments. Good government was defined by Thomas Jefferson “not by the consolidation, or concentration of powers, but by their distribution.” The Jeffersonian ideal of decentralization imploded political power right down to the individual:

Every State again is divided into counties . . . ; each county again into townships or wards, to manage minuter details; and every ward into farms to be governed each by its individual proprietor. Were we directed from Washington when to sow, and when to reap, we should soon want bread.

In addition to their various attempts to limit the powers of government at all levels, the Founders amended to their constitution a Bill of Rights, which put further limits on what the federal government could do. Many state constitutions also included a Bill of Rights. The powers of government are to be limited in order to give the American people the greatest sphere of liberty possible.

The “Revolution of 1800”

The “Revolution of 1800” launched by the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency of the United States ushered in a new age in politics in which government and society were largely separated into different spheres of activity. The goal was to reduce the size, extent, and power of the federal government to an absolute minimum. “Our country is too large to have all its affairs directed by a single government,” Jefferson told a correspondent in 1800. He feared that such a government and its employees “at such a distance, and from under the eye of their constituents, must, from the circumstance of distance, be unable to administer and overlook all the details necessary for the good government of the citizens, and the same circumstance, by rendering direction impossible to their constituents, will invite the public agents to corruption, plunder and waste.” Such a government, he continued, “would become the most corrupt government on the earth.” Jefferson’s principal aim was to protect the day-to-day lives of ordinary Americans from the various intrusions of the federal government. He wanted a national government with a light touch that could be barely seen or felt.

In his inaugural address on March 4, 1801, President Jefferson announced the philosophy of political liberalism that would guide his administration:

[A] wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, which shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government, and this is necessary to close the circle of our felicities.

Jefferson and his Republican supporters sought to shackle the illegitimate powers of government to prevent the condition of political giantism that is inherent in human nature and the lust for power over other people. They wanted ordinary Americans to have economic freedom from governmental interference at the same time they wanted a government that would not use its political powers to redistribute wealth and bestow economic favors on privileged groups. This meant a strict constructionist interpretation of the Constitution, and therewith a federal government characterized by simplicity and economy.

The Jefferson administration began to dismantle the Hamiltonian financial system that had centralized elements of the nation’s economy during the 1790s. The size of the civil service was reduced, taxes were cut, individuals were left free to work out their own destinies free of their social superiors, new forms of social cooperation were promoted through the creation of various voluntary associations, and the market was left free to allocate resources according to laws of supply and demand, competition, and the price mechanism. Jefferson and his followers deconstructed the Hamiltonian State and, in its place, established the world’s first ever Night Watchman state—or at least something approximating one.

Nine months after he delivered his First Inaugural Address, President Jefferson delivered his First Annual Message to Congress where he doubled down on his commitment to shrink the size of the federal government:

When we consider that this government is charged with the external and mutual relations only of these states; that the states themselves have principal care of our persons, our property, and our reputation, constituting the great field of human concerns, we may well doubt whether our organization is not too complicated, too expensive; whether offices and officers have not been multiplied unnecessarily, and sometimes injuriously to the service they were meant to promote. . . .

Considering the general tendency to multiply offices and dependencies and to increase expense to the ultimate term of burthen which the citizen can bear, it behooves us to avail ourselves of every occasion which presents itself for taking off the surcharge, that it never may be seen here that after leaving to labor the smallest portion of its earnings on which it can subsist, Government shall itself consume the whole residue of what it was instituted to guard.

Ideas have consequences, and the generation of 1800 put into practice the philosophy of 1776. The Jeffersonians introduced policies that liberated millions of people to work out the terms of their own lives with minimal government interference. In many ways, the “Revolution of 1800” was just as revolutionary as the “Revolution of 1776.” Whereas the “Revolution of 1776” was an intellectual, moral, and political revolution, the “Revolution of 1800” was a social and economic revolution.

After Jefferson’s two terms in office, his Republican successors would hold the reins of government lightly for almost another thirty years, and they mostly carried on the Jeffersonian vision of a limited government and a free society.

The Freedom Revolution

The world had never seen anything like what was happening in post-Founding America. An intellectual revolution caused a moral revolution, a moral revolution caused a political revolution, a political revolution caused a social revolution, and a social revolution caused an economic revolution. A new moral ideal and social type—the autonomous, inner-directed, independent, rational, self-made man, i.e., the rugged individualist—began to emerge in America’s open, fluid, and mobile society. The promise of American life held out to all men and women that they could be more (or less) than their inherited status. A new conception of morality, politics, and economics merged with the day-to-day lives of tens of thousands of ordinary Americans who were set free to pursue their dreams.

But what made all this possible? How and why did late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Americans burst out of the cocoon of custom and break away from the restraints of authority and habit associated with the old socio-economic order? How are we to understand the economic miracle that followed in the decades after the Founding of the United States? What were its deepest causes?

The shorthand answer to these questions can be summed up in one word: freedom. Not the Puritans’ freedom but a new understanding of freedom. The promise of American life in nineteenth-century America was to leave individuals free—including the millions of recently arrived immigrants in the nineteenth century—to produce and trade. (There was no welfare State in America waiting for tired and poor immigrants to claim unearned wealth. Instead, America promised to these recently arrived immigrants that they would be given freedom and opportunity and that’s it.) Many of the colonial and mercantilist restrictions on production and trade were lifted in the early republic, thereby liberating the innovative and entrepreneurial spirit of ordinary Americans. The American people prospered precisely because they were left to their own devices. They survived and then thrived through their own hard work, thrift, and enterprise.

But this answer is obviously too simplistic. The matter must be examined more deeply. We must explore what freedom is, what it’s for, why it is important, and what makes it possible. The revolution in production and trade that defined the nineteenth century was preceded by a moral, political, and legal revolution that paved the way for nineteenth-century Americans to harness nature’s energy to create previously unheard-of amounts of wealth and wellbeing.

After the break with Great Britain, a new moral, political, legal, and economic order began to take shape in America that was radically different from the old one and from any other known to man. The Declaration of Independence provided the moral foundation for America’s newly emerging liberal society, the Constitution raised its political scaffolding, and a market economy provided the muscular system providing American society with its dynamism and motion. But there were other legal and economic principles—what we might call the legal tendons and the economic ligaments—that fastened together the joints or pressure points of American society. Nineteenth-century Americans began to develop new ways to organize and institutionalize private property, the law of contracts, and commerce. (We shall examine the American development of property, contracts, and commerce in future essays.)

A new society was emerging in America unlike any other ever seen anywhere in the world.

The Movement Revolution

The first visible sign of America’s post-Founding social revolution was the movement of peoples. Without imperial control from London or even federal control from Washington, D.C., tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of Americans and recently arrived immigrants made their way westward from the coast in search of freedom and opportunity.

With unhindered freedom of movement, these new American trailblazers settled the remaining pockets of wilderness in the western parts of the eastern states, and then they just kept going over the Appalachian Mountains into the broad expanses of open land in Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and beyond. They moved west, southwest, and northwest. These rugged pioneers were motivated by breaking away from their past and starting life over again. They were building a new kind of civilization west of the Appalachian Trail. This was the motive force that energized and drove the whole system of change.

From the moment (mostly) English explorers, refugees, pilgrims, settlers, and pioneers landed at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Boston in the first thirty years of the seventeenth century, they began trekking westward. This ever-moving process of westward expansion exploded in the 1760s after the end of the French and Indian War and continued apace for the next 100 years or so. Despite the feeble efforts of British imperial officials to stem the tide of westward migration, land-hungry colonists kept pushing to the West.

In 1774, Lord Dunmore, Royal Governor of Virginia, wrote to his British supervisor, William Legge, 2^nd Earl of Dartmouth, and told him that it was virtually impossible to enforce the Proclamation of 1763, which forbad the westward migration of the colonists over the Appalachian Mountains. A significant part of the problem, Dunmore told Dartmouth, was that the colonists would not obey the authority of their local colonial governments nor the commands of Whitehall. The various governments of the center and peripheries were weak and largely absent. These colonial Americans, he told Dartmouth, were a restless and vagabonding people in search of land to start afresh:

They acquire no Attachment to Place. But wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness . . . [They are] impressed from their earliest infancy with Sentiments and habits, very different from those acquired by persons of a similar condition in England, they do not conceive that Government has any right to forbid their taking possession of a vast tract of Country, either uninhabited, or which serves only as a Shelter to a few Scattered Tribes of Indians.

After the end of the War of Independence, wave after wave of Americans and recent immigrants to America took off for the trans-Appalachian West. Furthermore, unlike any other time in American history, a generation of young people began to roam the American countryside looking for land and jobs. Mile after mile and year after year, the American frontier kept pushing toward the Mississippi and beyond.

In the years after 1800, the trans-Appalachian population exploded. Cheap land and cheap credit spurred thousands of ordinary Americans to become property owners on the frontier. Land sales west of the mountains soared as the federal government began opening land offices along the frontier. Government land offices could barely keep up with the demand. In 1800, private individuals purchased 67,751 acres of land from the federal government and only a year later 497,939 acres were sold. Jefferson’s dream of an agrarian nation of small landholding farmers was coming true.

The bottle of tradition had been uncorked and out sprang a new generation of risk-taking Americans who were looking to settle down or make a quick dollar and then move on. A demographic and therewith a social revolution was taking place the likes of which had never been seen anywhere before. American society would no longer be defined by prescribed status and social orders. Instead, after the Revolution and the Founding, the repressed energy of ordinary Americans was liberated as the old social, political, legal, and economic barriers began to wither away.

The Energy Revolution

Clearly, something had changed in the United States. A new and powerful form of human energy had been unleashed that would forever change the face of American society and then the rest of the world. The American Revolution unshackled the ambitious dreams of tens of thousands of young men and women who had been freed from the inertia and deadweight of late-feudal institutions and folkways. A generation of young men and women demanded and were given the freedom to dream, the freedom to innovate, and the freedom to produce and trade.

As was so often the case, it took visitors from abroad to see with fresh eyes what was really happening in America. By way of contrast with the decrepit institutions of their own countries, these Old-World tourists could see what even the American people could not see about themselves. Everything in America seemed to be in a state of flux; everything was moving and changing.

The Duc de La Rochefoucauld-Liancourt, the former president of the National Constituent Assembly who spent almost three years in exile in the United States between 1795 and 1797, was astonished to see so many Americans in a condition of perpetual motion. Unlike his countrymen who were attached to a particular plot of land and therefore in a state of suspended social animation, La Rochefoucauld found American society gyrating and its bustling people constantly on the move. America “is a country altogether in a state of progressive advancement,” he wrote: “What is to-day a fact with regard to its population, its management, its value, and trade, will no longer be so in six months to come; and still less in six months more.” America was fast becoming the land of opportunity and mobility at the same time that the bonds of social solidarity were coming apart and forming new social synapses.

A generation later, Michel Chevalier came to America from France in 1834 for a three-year visit to observe firsthand America’s manners and mores and its social, political, and economic institutions. What Chevalier saw on his tour was akin to a European tourist in Turkey seeing his first-ever performance of whirling dervishes. All was dizzying motion: 

If movement and the quick succession of sensations and ideas constitute life, here one lives a hundred fold more than elsewhere; all is here circulation, motion, and boiling agitation. Experiment follows experiment; enterprise succeeds to enterprise. Riches and poverty follow on each other’s traces, and each in turn occupies the place of the other. Whilst the great men of one day dethrone those of the past, they are already half overturned themselves by those of the morrow. Fortunes last for a season; reputations, during the twinkling of an eye. An irresistible current sweeps away everything, grinds everything to powder, and deposits it again under new forms.

At the very same time that Chevalier was traipsing around the United States, another European, Captain Frederick Marryat, an officer in the British navy and a budding novelist, witnessed the same hurried and breathless movement of ordinary Americans. “The Americans,” he noted, “are a restless, locomotive people: whether for business or pleasure, they are ever on the move in their country, and they move in masses.” Life in America was moving at a faster pace than could be reckoned by many Europeans. A new-model man and a new way of life was emerging in the United States that would forever change the way people thought about the nature and meaning of human wellbeing.

The Technological Revolution

Unhampered from colonial restrictions on manufacturing and spurred by the creation of the U.S. Patent Board in 1790 via Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the Constitution (“[The Congress shall have Power . . . ] To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries”), the post-Founding period saw a rapid rise in technological innovations and manufacturing that led to an explosion in wealth creation. America’s exuberantly youthful culture (the median age of the population was sixteen in 1815) was perpetually on the move and inventing, hundreds of new technologies or improving old ones, such as steamboats, steam engines, manufacturing mills powered by dammed and sluiced rivers and streams, trains and railroads, farm machineries (e.g., the cotton gin and manure forks), machine tools, sewing machines, and typewriters.

The new nation was on the verge of the greatest economic expansion in world history. As he contemplated the extraordinary technological advances made in antebellum America, the then famous but now forgotten antebellum clockmaker, Chauncey Jerome, explained in his autobiography that he could not “now believe that there will ever be in the same space of future time so many improvements and inventions as those of the past half-century—one of the most important in the history of the world.” Chauncey was right: the innovation genie was out of the bottle, and the American people were on the brink of unleashing a technological and industrial revolution that would change the world forever.

American innovators and their new technologies were also conquering space and time—figuratively at least. The Americans invented new machines less to save labor and more to save time. This restless people were in a hurry. Whereas Europeans walked; Americans sprinted. They wanted the speed of their productive powers to match the tempo of their imaginations. By challenging space and time existentially, the Americans were changing how men and women were perceiving and experiencing the world in which they lived. According to Tocqueville, the Americans, “who have not discovered a single general law of mechanics,” have nonetheless “introduced a new machine into navigation [i.e., the steamboat] that is changing the face of the world.” Not only could the steamboat move faster than any other water vehicles hitherto, but it could do something no other boat had done before: it could carry men and cargo upstream! That fact alone would change the nature of American economic production and trade.

Everything in nineteenth-century America was now moving faster through space than ever before. In the first few decades of the nineteenth century, thousands of miles of new turnpikes were cutting through the wilderness. Water transportation was also exploding. In 1818, for instance, there were twenty steamboats making their way up and down the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers and by 1829 there were two hundred. Between 1817 and 1826, the time to travel by steamboat from New Orleans to Louisville was cut from twenty-five to eight days. And then there was the construction of the Erie Canal, which, unlike the north-south flow of the Mississippi River system, allowed the movement of goods and commodities along an east-west corridor from the upper Mississippi to Albany, New York and then down the Hudson River to New York City. By the 1840s and 1850s, American businessmen laid down twenty-five thousand miles of rail, and twenty-two thousand miles of telegraph lines crisscrossed throughout the country by 1852.

Steamboats, stagecoaches, barges, trains, and the telegraph moved people, commodities, and information across broad expanses at speeds unknown to all human life hitherto. Space and time were collapsing, and new sources of human energy were being released. And all the new roads, canals, steamboats, trains, and telegraphs transformed one the world’s largest countries into a great unified, open market.

The Economic Revolution

As a result of the constitutional, political, demographic, cultural, and technological changes initiated by the Founding generation, agricultural and manufacturing production took off and commercial trade and shipping boomed. As Tocqueville put it, there was “no people on earth that has made as rapid progress as the Americans in commerce and industry,” and what struck the Frenchman the most about the American people was “not the extraordinary greatness of a few industrial enterprises,” but the “innumerable multitude of small enterprises.”

America’s economic revolution began with entrepreneurial, problem-solving, innovative, inventive, and productive individuals. The new American business ethos was captured by Mark Twain’s Hank Morgan in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889):

I am an American . . . a Yankee of Yankees—and practical; yes, and nearly barren of sentiment I suppose—or poetry, in other words. My father was a blacksmith, my uncle was a horse doctor; and was both, along at first. Then I went over to the great arms factory and learned my real trade; learned all there was to it; learned to make everything: guns, revolvers, cannon, boilers, engines, all sorts of labor-saving machinery. Why I could make it anything a body wanted—anything in the world, it didn’t make a difference what; and if there wasn’t any quick new-fangled way to make a thing, I could invent one.

Freed from British trade restrictions, American merchants were now able to send their ships anywhere in the world, including the California coast and west across the Pacific to Russia, and from there to the greater Orient, and then into the Indian Ocean. As Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, put it, the Americans’ new-found independence from Great Britain liberated their commercial spirit and “gave a new and powerful surge to their maritime genius.” Within a few years after the end of the war for independence, the Americans became the leading trading merchants in the world. Their success—i.e., their ability to “navigate at a lower price”—was due, according to Tocqueville, to “purely intellectual and moral qualities.” Unlike their European counterparts, American merchants were willing to take much greater risks at sea. They were intrepid to the verge of temerity, and, as the Frenchman noted, they put “a sort of heroism into their manner of doing commerce.”

Freedom promoted a new kind of risk-taking heroism, which resulted in almost immediate wealth creation. To get a sense of the economic transformation underway in the new nation, consider the contrasting visual experiences witnessed by two European visitors to America between 1796 and 1808. During his trip to the United States in the mid-1790s, the famed French diplomat, Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, was less than impressed with the state of life in America. This new country, he noted, is “but in her infancy with regard to manufactures” and “feeble efforts . . . have hitherto been made [to] furnish the country with manufactured articles of daily consumption.” Just over a decade later, in 1808, a former American Loyalist and now ex-Pat returning to Boston from England for a visit, described what he saw in these terms: “The great number of new and elegant buildings which have been erected in this town within the last ten years, strikes the eye with astonishment, and proves the rapid manner in which the people have been acquiring wealth.”

The American people were about to launch a boom economy the likes of which had never been seen before in world history. Urban populations doubled every decade after 1790, and American cities were constructing buildings that would soon compare favorably with those of their European counterparts. The U.S. standard of living was also growing by leaps and bounds with every passing generation during the nineteenth century. The real gross domestic product of the United States grew annually by an average of 3.7 percent between 1800 and 1850.

The twelve decades between 1790 and 1910 saw unparalleled economic growth and prosperity in the United States. The standard of living for most ordinary Americans improved continuously throughout the nineteenth century. This explosion of economic productivity was launched, in part, by three factors: first, a trebling of the nation’s land holdings via the Louisiana Purchase; second, a sixfold increase in population, which was the result of an astonishingly high birthrate (white women bore an average of seven children, and enslaved women typically bore nine children); and third, unparalleled immigration to the United States. On top of that, 58 percent of America’s population was under the age of twenty in 1820, which meant the country was full of young and energetic individuals who were bursting at the seams looking for their opportunity to make independent wealth for themselves. Between 1860 and 1920, four million American families started new farms.

But these are only the material causes that launched America’s economic revolution. There were other more important causes driving this burgeoning economic revolution. The formal cause that launched America’s economic revolution was the framing and ratification of America’s laissez-faire Constitution. The efficient cause was the seemingly limitless human energy unleashed by the laissez-faire Constitution. And the final cause of America’s economic revolution was, of course, freedom—the freedom to think, judge, move, innovate, act, produce, and trade. Everything followed from freedom.

Conclusion

By 1815, a quarter century after the Founding, the American character and its course forward were set stone. After almost two centuries, the last remnants of the European way of life were purged from American culture. The United States became America.

The people of the United States were no longer a pale reflection of their European cousins. They were a new people, with a new culture. A new-model man was spawned in America, who rose up to reconstitute and redefine what it meant to be a wise, good, and virtuous man. This new human type was governed directly in his day-to-day activities by the laws of realty, i.e., the laws of identity and causation. The survival and wellbeing of most Americans was dependent on their day-to-day employment of a reality-based moral code that required them to deal in a first-handed way with the requirements of living.

This is the great untold story of American history.

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***A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.