Gary B. Nash

The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800–1861

Americans have traditionally recognized social mobility as a valuable and characteristic feature of their society. Constant movement up and down the ladder of wealth and status, it is generally assumed, stems naturally from our healthy insistence on equality of opportunity, on careers “open to talent”. A corollary belief, embodied in a faith in such a system, is that an egalitarian society will necessarily produce the strongest and most stable institutions.

New Light on Richard Allen: The Early Years of Freedom

ICHARD Allen was one of the most gifted Americans of his generation. At a time when historians have been commemorating the two hundredth anniversary of the Constitution and the accomplishments of the white founding fathers, little attention is paid to this black founding father. Yet his role as a shaper of thought and a builder of institutions was matched by few of his white contemporaries, and what he accomplished was done in the face of obstacles that most of them did not have to overcome. At age twenty, only a few months released from slavery, he was preaching to mostly white audiences and converting many of his hearers to Methodism. At age twenty-seven, he was one of the founders of the Free African Society of Philadelphia, perhaps the first autonomous organization of free blacks in the United States. Before he was thirty-five he had become the spiritual leader of what would grow into Philadelphias largest congregation-Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Over a long lifetime he founded, presided over, or served as officer in a large number of other organizations designed to improve the condition of life and expand the sphere of liberty for Afro-Americans. Never receiving formal education, he became an accomplished and eloquent writer, penning and publishing sermons, tracts, addresses, and remonstrances; compiling a hymnal; and drafting articles of organization and governance for various organizations. He lived past his seventy-first birthday, dying in i83 i, and left a legacy that flourishes today. Almost all that is known about Richard Allens early years, especially the crucial few years after he obtained his freedom, comes from his autobiographical reflections, narrated to his son Richard Allen, Jr., when the senior Allen was an old man. The memoir was discovered by Daniel A. Payne in a trunk in the possession of Allens youngest daughter in i850, when Payne began research for the first history of the African MethodistEpiscopal Church.1 In the course of doing research on the formation of the free black community in Philadelphia, I have found documents that add to what is known about Allens early years of freedom and, at the same time, testify in most particulars to the accuracy of his memory when, late in life,

Also There at the Creation: Going beyond Gordon S. Wood

G_ ORDON S. Wood richly deserves the acclaim that has rewarded his efforts to paint a canvas of American political culture between I776 and I787. Woods book, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787, is enormously ambitious in attempting to go beyond a reconsideration of constitution making in the Revolutionary era to an analysis of the political culture at large. At the time of its publication it provided an exceptionally important challenge, by an intellectual historian, to the consensual interpretation of a seamless Revolution in which Americans, in all important respects, thought and acted alike. Wood forged into the vanguard of the changing field of intellectual history by treating ideas as part of a cultural system, not to be understood apart from the social context in which they originated. If that cultural system was in flux, and beset with internal tensions, then necessarily the political ideology of its social groups could not be uniform and static. To judge by his essay at the Wingspread Conference on New Directions in American Intellectual History in I977,1 Wood has moved farther in this direction, adopting an almost Mannheimian position on the rootedness of ideas in social circumstances. I would like to focus this commentary on the ways in which historical writing in the eighteen years since Creation of the American Republic was published indicates the limitations of Woods canvas, which for all its richness and subtlety seems incomplete, too homogeneous, too static, and too shallowly rooted in the soil of social experience. In particular, I shall argue that, while vastly enriching our understanding of political thought in this era, Wood hardly touched the political culture of the lower ranks and hence understated or ignored important political ideas that were not only a part of late eighteenth-century discourse but would have great importance when, handed down to the post-Revolutionary generation, they inspirited the struggles of laboring people in the era of early industrial-

Moral Visions and Material Ambitions: Philadelphia Struggles to Define the Republic, 1776-1836 (review)

the precepts of a diffused cultural power, in combination with Marxian theories of hegemony, as owners and elites emerge in control, even though their power is asserted in dialogue with that of workers and the less well-to-do. It is curious that, in a book on dress, Zakim only briefly addresses the topic of women’s dress—which, one could argue, operates dialogically with men’s clothing. He is unclear on the issue of whether or not what he calls ‘‘the Great Transformation’’ (218) in men’s dress operated to undermine patriarchy or to reinstate it, although this has been a major issue in women’s history for some time. (The phrase ‘‘the Great Renunciation’’ refers to the fact that with the advent of the Industrial Revolution, men gave up wearing bright colors and the ornamented dress that had been typical of male attire since the High Middle Ages and through most of the eighteenth century.) Zakim does conclude at one point in his analysis that the new market-driven economy was ‘‘fraternal in nature,’’ while he states that ‘‘the death of agrarian patriarchy’’ (exemplified in his opinion by the end of the popularity of homespun cloth) ‘‘amplified the significance of gender’’ (9). One final point in this book should be important to historians of fashion, who have accepted the term ‘‘the Great Renunciation’’ to describe the male adoption of the dark suit. Zakim is persuasive in his conclusion that this change was more revolutionary than conservative in nature. Thus his term ‘‘the Great Transformation’’ may better express the underlying dynamic of what happened, and he should consider publishing this insight in the journals read by fashion historians.