Sugar Masters Framing Essay

            A lot of historical work has been done trying show how wage labor can be equated to slavery.  Follett’s book The Sugar Masters interestingly takes on the inverse; it shows us slavery's resemblance to wage-labor.  Both of these lines of thought lead us to the conclusion that wage labor and slavery have as much if not more in common than they have apart.  In making this argument historians highlight individual instances where slaves may have had it better off than wage laborers.  Follett argues that the plight of the skilled slave receiving some compensation for his or her labor could be better than the plight of the wage-laborer because the skilled slave had a real prospect of improving his or her lot, “the proletarianization of workers that assured a downward trajectory in the white working experience operated in the reverse for skilled slaves who could translate their skills into upward advancement” (127).  With the assumption of unfreedom, any sliver of individual autonomy is an improvement, whereas the wage-laborer’s reality contradicts the façade of legal freedom. In Scraping By, Rockman advocates at times that in terms of material existence, the lives of slaves and other dependents (like people living in alms-houses) were easier than those working for wages they could not survive on.  That said, how should we define freedom in the context of the last two books we have read?  Is there really a difference between material freedom and legal freedom?  How do we employ the concept of freedom to better understand class?

 

            I would also like to talk about the relationship between culture and economy in Follett’s book.  He argues that the sugar masters, “effectively balanced their capitalist pretensions with a social ethic that celebrated their independent mastery of an economic, social, and racial world” (8)—that they balanced new economy with old culture.  In order to make this argument he often references times when capitalist thinking wins out over old southern culture, or visa versa—sometimes masters bought slaves based on what would be profitable in the long-run, other times based on sexualized southern notions of the ideal slave.  While I do not doubt the hybridity of culture and capitalism, I think that when Follett sets up his arguments in this manner, attributing actions and decisions to either culture or economy, he separates them as two discrete things: “profit-conscious capitalists…could not divorce themselves from their idealized notion of mastery or their perceived commitment to the slaves’ welfare” (183). Here Follett seems to be arguing that southern paternalism runs contradictory to rational capitalist thought and that it prevented the sugar masters from being good capitalists. Throughout the book I think he undermines the distinction between economy and culture by showing how the planters commercial, capitalist sensibilities developed within their culture not in competition with it.  I think that we should be wary of separating historical events into ones that are culturally determined or economically determined because it implies that these forces are entirely distinct rather than linked and dependent on one another.

 

            Lastly I would like to talk about the discussion of slave resistance within the text, particularly in relation to Walter Johnson’s comments in his essay On Agency.  Johnson comments that too often, humanity, agency and resistance are conflated in historians’ descriptions of slavery.  How would Johnson feel about Follett’s treatment of slave agency and resistance, particularly the collective cultural resistance described in the final chapter, and the economic resistance that in the end “accommodated the machine and their masters’ economic agenda”?   

Framing Essay for The Sugar Masters

Richard Follet’s The Sugar Masters discusses how slave owners in Louisiana maintained both paternalistic and self-interested attitudes in the way that they treated their slaves. Although the North viewed the South and its slavery regime as static and unprogressive, slave owners believed that they were acting in capitalistic ways. They felt as though their construction of the plantation created a system in which slaves had incentives to work hard and not disobey the rules. Slave owners used both carrots and sticks.

The Sugar Masters illuminates a group of actors who viewed themselves in a specific way and created a collective consciousness. Like the founding fathers who owned slaves, these slave owners may have believed in freedom, yet they were able to convince themselves that enslaving African Americans did not violate that belief. Do we think that these slave owners believed in both political and economic freedom and equality? Were they simply using slavery for economic gains or were they convinced that African Americans could not take care of themselves? Follett states “Southern slaveholders could damn their chattel as lazy beggars to be ‘licked liked blazes,’ watch their slaves perish in frightening numbers, and brutally exploit their bondswomens’ bodies, but they still believed themselves to be paternalists bound to their slaves by mutual obligations and reciprocal duties,” (152). I am not sure if I am convinced of this and hope to discuss this in class.

I found the discussion in the last chapter about the purchases slaves made particularly interesting. With the little money they had, they bought clothing and other decorative items. How did these visual purchases both create a class consciousness and also encourage divisions amongst slaves? We have seen throughout the semester various instances in which groups work to distance themselves from the lowest. Emma Christopher discussed how both black and white sailors tried to distinguish themselves from slaves. In The Anti-Slavery Debate, we saw how a rising middle class worked to differentiate themselves from the lower class. In these examples, and there are many others from this semester, how important is a visual distinction?

Finally, I think we should discuss how slaves exercised agency within this system. Whether is was women taking contraceptives, making negotiations with masters, or stealing and selling machine parts, slaves found certain ways to take control of small pieces of their lives. Are the slaves actions working to create a collective change? Also, in Scraping By, we saw how the poor would use almshouses to their own advantage. Does working with slave owners to improve an individual situation inhibit the possibility of a change in the system?

Sugar Masters Framing Essay

Throughout reading Sugar Masters I couldn’t help but think back to Rockman’s Scraping By from last week as I noticed how well these two works complement each other. Last week, Rockman showed that slavery was an integral part of Baltimore’s emerging wage labor system, and that slaves were both active and constrained members of the market economy. This week Follett extends the notion of hybridization to the sugar plantation, arguing that sugar masters, in their quest for profit, turned their plantations into factory-like operations. While in some ways this led masters to treat slaves like employees (for example, providing money for overtime work), masters continued to maintain their dominance (and ownership) of the bodies of both male and female slaves. The works are complementary because they each break down the dichotomy between the entrepreneurial values of the market and the supposedly anti-capitalist institution of slavery, and show instead how slavery was molded and reshaped (but not broken) in order to best serve the masters in an emerging capitalist economy.

I was especially struck by Follett’s descriptions of master-slave negotiations, and the ways in which these negotiations look strikingly similar to the master-laborer negotiations in emerging industrial factories of the north. Most notably, I was interested in his discussion of how masters used “overwork” and Christmas bonuses to deepen slaves’ dependence and inspire them to work harder, while the masters continued to benefit from what slaves produced “in their own time.” I couldn’t help but feel that Follett was implicitly asking the reader to make the jump to wage labor: isn’t overtime pay – a practice we demand from employers because it is “just” – simply a way for employers to make regularly underpaid workers more dependent on extra hours, more productive, and less likely to have time to “cause problems”? Follett’s history, like all of the authors we have read this semester, speaks not only to the past but to the present as well.

Still, I’m skeptical of a view that equates wage labor with slavery, and I would be interested to discuss in class how to define the differences and boundaries between these two methods of organizing labor. In other words, are the hybrid systems of early 19th century Baltimore and Louisiana simply a reflection of transition from one system to the other – masters trying to hold onto parts of the past as the world around them moves to capitalism? And if so, what are the most important aspects of the turn? Is wage labor simply a northern reproduction of slavery without the objectionable trading in human bodies? Or, as Follett and Rockman seem to suggest, if capitalism and slavery are actually mutually constitutive in some cases, how can we distinguish between the experience of the laborer and the experience of the slave? Follett seems to provide some hints in his continued reminders of the use of the whip, the attempts at human breeding, and other mechanisms of control which may not have been available to industrialist employers in the north. Are there others?

Finally, I was intrigued by Follett’s discussion of the “clock-driven labor regime” (108). He argues that because the success of sugar plantations relied so much on their productivity as a function of time, masters instituted shifts and divisions of labor. By tying their slaves’ work to the clock, masters asserted dominance not only over their slaves’ bodies but over their conception of time as well. I’m interested in how exactly this new sense of “time management,” which we are so tied to today, forms the basis for a capitalist system. Though none of our previous authors have relied explicitly on this concept, it seems to me that a notion of the value of time underlies the emerging capitalist market just as much as, say, the expansion of writing or the emergence of evangelical religion. And if so, how does a new conception of time intersect with the discussions about class and class identity we’ve been having? Do different classes adhere to different valuations of time? As capitalism grows, is there a kind of hegemonic imposition of the increased value of time? Can working and lower classes (not just in the US but all over the world) maintain differing conceptions of time in the era of globalization? These questions could form the basis for a fruitful discussion on how the transition to capitalism changed not only economic and social relationships, but philosophical and cultural constructions as well.

Framing Essay 4/12/09 for Scraping By

Kristina Kelleher

In and out of seminar in the last few weeks, we have focused a lot of our discussion around the idea of agency in historical writing. I found that Scraping By articulated the difficulties that the poor common laborers of early America faced without an over emphasis on proving or providing agency to these laborers. Personally, in many ways I found the consistent look at structures that continued to hold these laborers—black and white, free and slave, female and male—throughout the book painted a fuller picture of these laborers lives and the effects of the capitalist market system on them than other texts that focus more on providing agency for the subjects of research. I think this would be an interesting topic of discussion in seminar tomorrow so I will expound on it here further.

For example, Professor Rockman describes how in the 1770’s Maryland law made it illegal to import new slaves into the state but select people and groups were allowed resettle their slaves in the city, highlighting who had the ability to alter and avoid punishment under the law (pages 36-37.) He likewise describes how laborers were largely left off city directories (page 76.) Rockman also provides examples of how men could take advantage of women, particularly those whose sexual reputations were compromised (page 118.) Rockman also describes how white male day laborers were largely unable to secure employment in racially exclusive job sites, which evidence argues they would have preferred (page 56.) The same principle of uneven power dynamics is reinforced when he describes how the category of “free” being defined as all those who weren’t slaves and therefore could claim control over their own body, work and wages, made little sense when “married women could not own their own wages, free people of color could not testify against whites in court, and free white men forfeited wages they had already earned if they left a job prematurely” (page 242.) In my own eyes, power ought to be a central issue in any discussion of the early market economy, since free and equal power positions to enter into contracts is exactly what’s assumed by free market ideology.

Rockman does provide numerous examples of agency on behalf of common laborers, such as laborers selecting to enter the almshouse at given times—including being able to navigate the roadblocks set up for doing so, females repurchasing their year-long street grazing pigs (page 178), slave women negotiating hiring out agreements with their owners (page 124) and females taking advantage of the fact that they would not be imprisoned for debts not paid, to name a few. Yet, he also consistently reinforces what the power dynamics of the time (and perhaps today) really were. For example, he describes how a system of needing approval from a ward manager to enter the almshouse was instituted—as well as how some laborers were able to get around it (Pages 208 and 209.) It is not that I think providing agency for the poor is bad but rather I think it is important to recall how the power structures of the time and place were designed to, and often effectively did, take power and agency away from those without power, such as the common laborer. For example, I agree with Rockman’s argument when he writes that the presence of female prostitution might more aptly be seen as indicating poor women’s financial desperation than attesting to their agency (Page 129.)

On a different note, I also think we should discuss how the ideas of character and reputation (see discussion beginning on page 117 regarding women seeking domestic service jobs, for example) are seen in Scraping By, particularly in relation to what we’ve already talked and read about relating to the development of middle class ideas of respectability.

The Problem of Class and the Problem of Antislavery

The essays in this book offer a series of opinions and explanations for the simultaneous rise of antislavery and the development of capitalism. Beginning with David Brion Davis’s apparently expansive volume, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, John Ashworth and Thomas Haskell have written articles that critique Davis and offer new interpretations of this phenomenon, using evidence from both Britain and the United States. Over the course of the historians’ progression of articles in this book, arguments are refined and clarified. As Bender suggests in his introduction, this process suggests more common ground among its authors than their initial work might have suggested. I am unsure whether this phenomenon represents a process toward consensus, or rather a process of moving from rather grand theses toward more conservative—and less controvertible—arguments. Each author (particularly Davis and Haskell, who have the most dialogue with one another) would have us believe that he is merely refining and clarifying his point, while his colleague has entirely backed down.

 

There is certainly plenty of room for discussion about the relative merits of each author and each article published here. Bender, Ashworth, Davis, and Haskell have started the conversation for us, and done so with clear and well-researched arguments. This sets the stage for a conversation in class that brings in, as Lester suggested, our earlier readings and conversations.

 

Beyond simply using these articles as tools for our own understanding of class and antislavery, this book is useful in its explicit debate about the reality and nuance of class as a historical lens of analysis. Readings for this class until this book have examined class in varying degrees, but The Antislavery Debate provides an insight into the way class is weighed, considered, and debated as a tool of analysis. These authors also illustrate for us some of the problems of class, notably its many potential definitions. Haskell, who seemed at first to use the term “market” off-handedly and without definition, tries to defend this use in his third article, “Convention and Hegemonic Interest in the Debate over Antislavery.” By stating that “the market [has] multiple and contradictory effects that deny any sort of reconciliation,” (236), Haskell risks rendering the concept of the market too large to be meaningful. On the other hand, Ashworth’s focus on wage labor suggests an inexplicably narrow aspect of class and capitalism.

 

This book offers an important chance to observe the way historians choose to employ class, cognitive changes, and other factors in their analysis. In addition to its insight on the specific questions of class and its merit, I hope that this book will be a springboard for us in discussing the process of historical research, which could be a helpful context as we continue to develop our own research projects. Like these authors, we are responsible for choosing theoretical frameworks and evidence to employ, along with choosing more theoretical or data-based approaches. There is a transparency about this process for historians in The Antislavery Debate that I think can be a valuable tool in our own research and conversations. 

Capitalism, Abolitionism, Class Problems and Reflection

Thomas Bender’s The Antislavery Debate brings to the reader a complex, insightful historical debate by three scholars theorizing about not only the possible connections between abolitionism and capitalism but also the factors that propelled there to be a connection with abolitionism and capitalism. These three scholars, David Brion Davis, Thomas L. Haskell, and John Ashworth each argued there idea of a connection around one theme. In turn this theme ventured off into several layers of thought. For example, Davis saw the connection between capitalism and slavery as a form of class interest. Bender quotes, “[Davis] announced early in his book that the movement reflected the ideological needs of various groups and classes” (4). This segued into ideas such as “opposition to slavery cannot be divorced from the vast economic changes that were intensifying social conflicts and heightening class consciousness; in Britain, it was part of a larger ideology that ensured stability while acclimating society to political and social change” (171). In addition Davies also argued that “abolitionism bred a new sensitivity to social opposition, that it provided a model for the systematic indictment of social crime, and that it ultimately taught many Englishmen to recognize forms of systematic oppression that was closer to home” (172). One of his examples to justify his reasoning stressed reform causes. According to Davies, reform causes often serve opposing or contradictory functions as innovative doctrine is co-opted by different social groups. For example, when Wilberforce and his friends in Lord Liverpool’s cabinet feared that England was on the verge of revolution, another radical alien pointed to the connections between the oppression of West Indian slaves and the oppression of England’s poor. Iain McCalman has recently discovered that Robert Wedderburn, a Jamaican mulatto whose slave mother was born in Africa, edited a London periodical, Axe Laid to the Root, that called for a simultaneous revolution of West Indian chattel salves and English wage slaves. Working with Thomas Spence, Thomas Evans, and other London radicals, Wedderburn popularized a plebian antislavery rhetoric in the taverns and hayloft chapels of London’s underworld”(172).

On the other hand, Thomas Haskell’s central theme was that capitalism and abolitionism were tied more to the market and less to class interest. He justified his reasoning through the idea that for one to be humanitarian to another has to experience the disadvantages of another at some high degree before that same person can act to the benefit of the suffering. In respect to class interest, for Haskell, interest implies intention and unconscious intention at least to Haskell is erroneous. In addition, because Haskell believes that an agent needs a cause in order to act in the need of others, our interests are aligned in a cause and effect relationship that requires a recipe in order to plan out how to alleviate one’s suffering. In other words, part of Haskell’s justification that the market plays a larger role is the ambiguity when it comes to causation as well as the preconditions required to implement a cause into direction. As for the market, Haskell consolidates the legal theories of Atiyah and moral attitudes of Nietzsche to define the history contracts and how they linked to promises. Once this is set, Haskell established that the market gave two lessons to people who acted in that setting. “The first taught people to keep their promises; the second taught them to attend to the remote consequences of their actions. Those who learned these lessons well and who could take for granted the existence of many others imbued with the same lessons were the first to cross the threshold into a new moral universe, one in which the horizons of causal perception were sufficiently wide, and the techniques routinely employed in everyday tasks sufficiently complex and future oriented, that failing to go to the aid of a suffering stranger might become an unconscionable act”(141).

John Ashworth in contrast to both Davies and Haskell saw the connection between capitalism and abolitionism defined by wage labor instead of overwhelming class interest or marketplace values. While his argument was not as class heavy in terms of interests as Davies, he seemed to bring more of a discussion on class in terms of home than Haskell whose discussion of class was almost nonexistent. Within Ashworth’s theme of wage labor Ashworth compares abolitionism to classical republicanism in which wage labor was looked down in favor of labor which was owned by people. In other words classical republicanism favored people who worked to create their own means of production for themselves such as farmers, artisans and maybe merchants. And when wage labor came into being, at least at how Ashworth is framing it, individual morality and social order were redefined in the home, family, and in the individual conscience”(191). In turn, Ashworth further extends this to the idea that if waged labor became to be seen as part of the common good which advocated that self-interest was devastating to society, slavery then became as a prime example of self-interest and profit seeking for self. Ashworth states, “to allow the sale of labor power was to consent to the most dramatic and far-reaching spread of market-relations in society and create a need both for an area from which the market would be barred and for a morality to support the new society”(192). In essence Bender suggests the combining of their strongest points to help resolve the connections that can be made between capitalism and class.

For our own discussion, a careful revisit to Emma Christopher, Morgan, Heyrman, and Bouton could help to bring more insight into class conceptions of antislavery. For example, Christopher discusses agency and situational changes within the lives of the workers on the slave ship. Morgan dissects Virginia and digs at the relation between slavery and republican freedom which Ashworth discusses at great length. And finally, Heyrman brings in issues of religion with class to a lesser extent that could embellish Davies points about religion in relation to abolitionists, their causality and class interest in general. In other words, I am suggesting that we use our previous readings as case studies to bring a deeper analysis on if class in relation to market and interest can intertwine in a revealing way that brings to light new insights on the origins of causation among abolitionists and how much capitalism effects their ideologies.

The Concept of Class in Early America and its Historiography

Since we are a seminar that is directly addressing the "problem of class," perhaps it is most valuable to begin our discussion with Gienapp's assertion that class divisions in early America are a "myth" produced by the New Left and the "Politically Correct" academy. Gienapp writes through a critique of a particular class based historical analysis, Sellers' work on Jacksonian Politics, but he also implies a wider attack on the use of "class" in the study of history. Because much of Gienapp's work is directly concerned with Sellers, so we must infer how he objects to class based history in general. I propose that we begin by discussing Gienapp's critique so that we can situate our discussion of the other pieces in the historiography.

But in order to understand Gienapp, we might start by looking at his own historical situation. Gienapp spends a lot of time labeling Sellers as an historian "firmly rooted" in the academic climate of the 1960's. He contends that Sellers is part of a mislead "counterculture" and that he produces a "polemical and at times bizarre interpretation of Jacksonian America." (233) But while Gienapp is quick to dismiss Sellers 1991 work as a callback to a confused 1960's, he does not recognize that he is also writing in a deeply polemic time. Across academic disciplines, the end of the Cold War was taken as an intellectual victory for American Liberalism and the market system. Gienapp is correct then when he states that Sellers' work is out of place in 1991, but he takes the current political climate as reason to dismiss class as a means of analysis. As we have discussed in class, the impact of this intellectual climate on social history was to minimize class and elevate 'multicultural' categories like race, gender and ethnicity. This is important for us to recognize because contrary to his claims, Gienapp is himself taking the easy political road.

What is more, Gienapp's piece is written for a policy journal. Although this might seem irrelevant to the subject matter, I think that the study of "policy" requires an implicit endorsement of the American political system: if one wishes only to optimize political policy, then it is necessary to believe that the American political system is, at the very least, fixable. In fact, many places in the text, Gienapp suggests that class history is not compatible with the study of American Democracy (See his discussion on page 251). I think that this kind of analysis is confined by the very paradoxical promises made by the American system that we have hitherto studied in early American History.

If we wish to identify the impact of class on American history, then it is necessary to liberate ourselves from faith in the political system in this country. The culture of equality in American politics is predicated on the expansion of political rights to those who have frequently have not had political representation. But as we have seen so far in our studies, even as America represented an expansion of democratic politics to the many, that expansion takes place without an agreement of what democracy is, or what democratic representation means. I think that the conclusion to draw from Morgan and Bouton is that the expansion of democratic rights is not a political liberation of any kind, but rather a political distraction that occurs, never at great risk, as a means of quelling inherent conflicts that do not fit into easy classification according to liberal political philosophy. This is the intellectual landscape we work from when we analyze class in early America: as long as we maintain allegiance with the American system, our historiography is subject the to the history.

With this in mind, I think that we can move on to Johnson's call for a new mode of social history. Johnson makes one of his most important points when he notes that the current understanding of agency is dependent on the historical conditions in the western world.

[The definition of agency] is saturated with the categories of nineteenth-century liberalism, a set of terms which were themselves worked out in self-conscious philosophical opposition to the condition of slavery. To put this another way: the term "agency" smuggles a notion of the universality of a liberal notion of self hood, with its emphasis on independence and choice, right into the middle of a conversation about slavery against which that supposedly natural condition was originally defined...[ending] up with a more-or-less rational choice model of human being. (115)

This argument is essential because it shows how the category of analysis, in this case agency of the enslaved, is a product of the very historical subject that it is trying to define. Johnson is referring to the fact that western liberalism predicated on a ridged individualism that requires an endorsement of a certain psychological state as "rational" and everything else as irrational or even inhuman. Johnson contends that to a historian operating within the tradition of liberalism, which defines humanity in contrast to slavery, slavery is inhuman phenomenon. Johnson's contention is that while slavery is a terrible part of human history, it is an inseparable part of our humanity. As he shows, the institution of slavery actually "makes use" of humanity through psychological terror and abuse. (116) Johnson's is a crucial insight about the categories of enslaved and free and human and inhuman in early American history.

If we are to apply Johnson's article to our efforts as historians of class, then it is necessary to make an analogous insight about the role that class plays in the liberal model of the individual as a rational actor. In reformulating Johnson's argument of agency among the enslaved to an analysis of class, we arrive at essentially the reverse. According to the American liberal tradition, humanity and equality are defined by the participation in a democratic society and equal participation in the government. Slavery, the ultimate political unfreedom, is on this view the ultimate inhumanity.

But as a critical reading of Gienapp shows, the liberal understanding of humanity as participation in the American democratic system is incompatible with an analysis of class. It is not that class is incompatible with the American political system, but rather that the liberal understanding of American politics does not leave room for class. As long as individuals are guaranteed equal political rights, they fit the liberal definition of the human condition.

More to come as an afterwards....

Framing Essay- March 30th

Susan Beaty
Framing Essay- 3/29/09

This weeks readings featured an essay on agency in historical analysis by Walter Johnson and three pieces that focused on different aspects of the class formation in the Early Republic. While I feel that it is worth discussing the points raised by each of these essays separately, there are a few central themes that I would like to suggest for this week’s seminar.

As Stephen suggests in his framing essay, it might be useful to examine these readings through the lens of Johnson’s conclusions on agency. In this article, Johnson challenges the practice of “giving agency” to oppressed historical subjects, namely slaves, and calls for a new framework for historical analysis. He argues that there is a tendency in New Social History to conflate “humanity, agency, and resistance” by defining slaves as liberal historical subjects with free will, “discovering” the enslaved subject’s struggle to assert their own humanity, and equating acts of humanity with resistance to a system predicated on dehumanization. Johnson explains that this narrative produces narrow definitions of historical subjects and resistance that must be reconsidered; he insists that acts of humanity do not always amount to resistance, and that there are forms of resistance in between and beyond narrow conceptions of “everyday” and “revolutionary” action. Johnson’s central conclusion is that while “giving agency” was once a radical, politicized act of solidarity, it is now an obligatory and self-serving practice. Through, “some knowing laughter and a few ironic asides about the moral idiocy and contradictory philosophy of slaveholders,” historians align themselves with the historical “other,” in order to, “…make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous” (121). Johnson says that we must move away from “rhetorical and performative gestures,” which have, “very few costs and, for white scholars are least, more than a few benefits,” (120) and begin to formulate new frameworks for addressing present oppressions based in the past.

While I agree that Johnson provides an incredibly useful critique of current historiographical practices, I find it difficult to imagine the kind of historical writing that Johnson is calling for. For example, in this weeks’ readings, Osborn, Bushman, and Sellers (via Gienapp) examine the hegemonic power of the middling and upper classes in the 19th century through their discussions of medical discourses on alcoholism, the cultural mechanisms of gentility, and the expansion of capitalism in the antebellum U.S. Each author makes the same safe criticisms of the discriminatory (classist, racist, sexist) ideologies of the dominant groups that Johnson alludes to in his piece at no personal risk. Osborn shows us how the medical establishment upheld class norms through differentiated diagnoses of alcohol abuse, thus creating, “… a distinction between the hopeless depravity of impoverished drunkards and the troubling failure of middle class inebriates.” Bushman discusses the ways in which the middle and upper classes justified the creation of a U.S. aristocracy by constructing a mythical egalitarian gentility that attempted to reconcile genteel culture with republicanism, capitalism, and traditional middle class values. Sellers paints Jacksonian America as a time of class conflict between an oppressive capitalist class and a oppressed, pre-capitalist lower class, wherein the former forced an economic shift towards free market capitalism on the former. He demonizes the business classes that used the legal and political systems to shape U.S. capitalism, and, “attributes no redeeming qualities to middle-class Americans” that valued social mobility. Thus, each of these authors acknowledges the collective, historical “agency” of the ruling classes and in doing so and condemns their use of hegemonic power. What do we make of this? In what ways do each of these authors align themselves with historically disadvantaged groups, and how does the agency of lower class subjects inform their arguments? Are these authors making the same “rhetorical gestures” that Johnson discussed in his essay, or are their criticisms of oppressive groups constructive? Are all of these arguments safe and depoliticized or are these authors taking risk or being innovative in their conclusions? What would Johnson have to say about these three narratives, and how might he change them to be more productive?

Another discussion topic that I would like to explore is the conflict between elitism and egalitarianism during this period. Both Osborn and Bushman explore the need for the middle and upper classes to reconcile their choices, lifestyle, and at times their very existence, with the revolutionary myths of republicanism and equality. In Osborn’s essay he discusses how the advent of alcohol abuse in the 1810s forced Philadelphia’s medical establishment to explain alcoholism in terms of contemporary social and economic structures. Doctors asserted that there was a difference between the “intemperance” of the poor, based in their moral degradation and inferiority, and the medical disorders of the middle and upper classes that could be diagnosed and treated. By creating two, classed versions of alcohol abuse the medical complex accounted for poverty and economic failure while reinforced the power of the middle and upper classes, thus perpetuating the myth of equal opportunity. Similarly, in Bushman’s discussion of gentility in the 19th century, he explains how the emerging aristocracy struggled to reconcile an imported, European genteel culture with U.S. values. He argues that the expression of gentility was a means of creating class authority and asserting class identity and difference, and that the U.S. elite turned to emulation of European gentility because it was the only tool they had at their disposal. This created problems, as gentility stood at odds with radical republicanism and middle class values of industry and hard work, but the aristocracy solved this by constructing a myth of accessible gentility. As Bushman points out, gentility was originally a cultural revolution in that it made it possible to purchase power rather than just inherit it. The elite classes of the early republic built on this narrative and insisted on an accessible, democratic gentility, welcoming everyone into society, “but only on elite terms.” By examining the case of the black elite, who “bought into the culture of refinement” but were ultimately excluded from the refined gentry, Bushman proves that the aim of the elite was, “to separate themselves from the lower classes, not to assimilate them.” (439) Thus, both authors show how the ruling classes struggled to explain the hypocrisy inherent to the American social order. What other examples of this have we seen this semester? Drawing on Morgan and Bouton, what are the historical roots of this contradiction? Where can we see the legacy of this hypocrisy in contemporary U.S. culture?