The Politics of Material Culture in the Early American Republic, c. 1800-15

Abstract

This thesis argues that everyday artisans and manufacturers used material culture to create a distinguishable “American” national identity in the early republic. Although some historians have argued that this process of “Americanization” was completed during the American Revolution or in its immediate aftermath, Americans still grappled with competing visions of “Americanness” well into the nineteenth century. Between 1800 and 1815, one such functioning vision of the national character emerged – crafted and communicated through material culture – which would be consistently used to identify and express “Americanness” in the early republic. Through a case study of Philadelphia using a self-curated material archive of over 700 extant objects, it shows how Black and white silversmiths, schoolgirls, potters, printers, needleworkers, artists, and more used their crafts to establish an aesthetic material language of the United States – and to assert their place within it – during the national mourning of Washington, the election of 1800, the Embargo of 1807, the abolition of the slave trade, and the War of 1812. Using an amalgamation of aesthetic symbols (such as the American Eagle and the Star-Spangled Banner) to represent the United States together with a mixture of historical, mythical, and allegorical figures (like George Washington, Captain Lawrence, and Columbia) to communicate a series of national traits and values (which ranged from “industriousness” and moral virtue to civic duty and “republican motherhood”) across a range of domestic objects, these large- and small-scale manufacturers made the political rhetoric of “American” republicanism into a shared cultural aesthetic and paved the way for its consumption and domestication through the existing avid consumer culture into everyday lives and households. Although the national mythology that this tableau of objects produced was only one standard of the “Americanness” that was reimagined in this period – for a blend of complex political identities operated in the United States in this period – by the end of the War of 1812, its various and popular cultural symbols were increasingly used together to communicate an imagined and instantly-recognizable national identity that claimed to represent all Americans.