Luxurious Citizens: The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

By Joanna Cohen

After the Revolution, Americans abandoned the political economy of self-denial and sacrifice that had secured their independence. In its place, they created one that empowered the modern citizen-consumer. This profound transformation was the uncoordinated and self-serving work of merchants, manufacturers, advertisers, auctioneers, politicians, and consumers themselves, who collectively created the nation's modern consumer economy: one that encouraged individuals to indulge their desires for the sake of the public good and cast the freedom to consume as a triumph of democracy. In Luxurious Citizens, Joanna Cohen traces the remarkable ways in which Americans tied consumer desire to the national interest between the end of the Revolution and the Civil War.

Illuminating the links between political culture, private wants, and imagined economies, Cohen offers a new understanding of the relationship between citizens and the nation-state in nineteenth-century America. By charting the contest over economic rights and obligations in the United States, Luxurious Citizens argues that while many less powerful Americans helped to create the citizen-consumer it was during the Civil War that the Union government made use of this figure, by placing the responsibility for the nation's economic strength and stability on the shoulders of the people. Union victory thus enshrined a new civic duty in American life, one founded on the freedom to buy as you pleased. Reinterpreting the history of the tariff, slavery, and the coming of the Civil War through an examination of everyday acts of consumption and commerce, Cohen reveals the important ways in which nineteenth-century Americans transformed their individual desires for goods into an index of civic worth and fixed unbridled consumption at the heart of modern America's political economy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Jan 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9780812293777

Book preview

Luxurious Citizens

AMERICA IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Series editors: Brian DeLay, Steven Hahn, Amy Dru Stanley

America in the Nineteenth Century proposes a rigorous rethinking of this most formative period in U.S. history. Books in the series will be wide-ranging and eclectic, with an interest in politics at all levels, culture and capitalism, race and slavery, law, gender, and the environment, and regional and transnational history. The series aims to expand the scope of nineteenth-century historiography by bringing classic questions into dialogue with innovative perspectives, approaches, and methodologies.

LUXURIOUS CITIZENS

The Politics of Consumption in Nineteenth-Century America

JOANNA COHEN

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2017 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-4892-0

To my parents: Jonathan and Micky Cohen

and to Erik Mathisen

Contents

Introduction. Imagining the Citizen-Consumer

Chapter 1. Dilemmas of Abundance

Chapter 2. The Marketplace of Retribution

Chapter 3. The Perils of the Public Auction

Chapter 4. Of Tariffs and Taste

Chapter 5. They Now Advertise Liberally

Chapter 6. Consumers at War

Epilogue. The Citizen-Consumer and the State of the Nation

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Imagining the Citizen-Consumer

A freezing twilight had descended on Boston as a mob of citizens gathered at the customshouse to protest their rights as consumers. The city had been at war for two long years, but Boston’s inhabitants had been enduring the effects of confronting British might for longer than that. With communal bonds stretched thin by the demands of war, tensions were running high. Surrounding the home of the customs officer, George Johnson, a seething crush of people threatened to tar and feather the frightened man who cowered within. It would not have been the first time that a Boston crowd had meted out such rough justice to a customs official.¹ Boston commissioner John Malcolm had been brutally attacked in this way in January 1774, as a punishment for his loyalist beliefs and support of British commerce. But the crowd under Johnson’s window was not trying to boycott British goods; this was not a Revolutionary protest. In fact the year was 1814, and the angry crowd, far from demanding that British imports be kept out of their community, were clamoring for a confiscated hoard of consumer goods to be let in.

These goods were smuggled wares. Johnson had confiscated them because, as imports, they violated the Republican government’s wartime restrictions on commerce. Such restrictions were part of the arsenal of weapons that the Republicans were using to fight the British during the War of 1812—a conflict often dubbed then and now the second war of independence.² Yet the crowd who railed against George Johnson seemed to be displaying very little of the patriotism that had characterized the Revolutionary fight. Instead, the commercial sanctions that President Madison had designed as punishment for the British had simply created internal division and disaster within the city that had once spearheaded America’s consumer protests in the name of liberty. The attack on George Johnson deployed the same political theater of the Revolution, but the plot had twisted in a strange and unexpected way.

Why had Johnson’s seizure of broadcloths, silks, stockinets, shawls, cambrics and files created such collective fury?³ These were not foodstuffs, and despite the war, this was not a starving community. Nor was this riot solely an expression of partisan politics. Rather, this episode reveals the extent to which Americans fought over, demanded, and ultimately defined their rights and obligations as consumers in the new United States. They challenged the right of the U.S. government to command them as consumers, refusing to deny their desires for comforts and luxuries in the name of civic duty. Instead, this crowd articulated a vision of citizenship that put consumer liberties at its center and did so in a powerful and startling fashion. Although Johnson escaped that night, his plight taught Madison and his supporters a valuable lesson on the limits of loyalty to be expected from citizen-consumers in the early Republic.

The crowd at Boston did not make these claims alone, nor did all American citizens universally support their claim. From the end of the War of Independence to the end of the Civil War, merchants and auctioneers, artisans and entrepreneurs, civic boosters and textile manufacturers, advertisers and retailers, politicians and journalists, domestic economists and political economists, all joined that Boston rabble in its effort to define the rights and the responsibilities of the consumer as citizen. This task was no small challenge. Americans quickly recognized that the work of nation-building was in many ways an economic undertaking. If civic virtue was to be of any service to the project of constructing a powerful nation, it would have to encompass citizens’ economic behavior. Yet individuals’ interests and the national interest were not always complementary, and Americans struggled to reconcile their own personal desires with the demands of the nation. At a moment when the concept of American citizenship was itself a protean and contingent creation, these disputes stretched the meaning of citizenship to new limits.⁴ At stake in these debates was a vision of what it would mean, in economic terms, to belong to the American nation as a citizen of the new Republic.⁵ It was a debate that would transform the political economy of nineteenth-century America and enable middle-class Americans in particular to harness the nation-state to a capitalist marketplace.⁶ If we are to understand how Americans created a modern capitalist democracy, we must examine the ways in which American consumers imagined their role as citizens of the United States.

This book explores how Americans created the modern citizen-consumer. It was a process that was slow and uneven, and the many men and women who helped to create this crucial figure did not intend to define any such person. Rather, between the birth of the United States as an officially recognized nation in 1783 and its rebirth as a new republic in 1865, the citizen-consumer emerged through a history of blunders and misconceptions, self-serving projects, and disappointed expectations. Above all, the citizen-consumer took shape as a result of the exigencies of war. Yet these uncoordinated efforts resulted in an idea that has remained entrenched at the heart of American politics and culture well into the twenty-first century. It is the idea that American citizens are free to consume without being asked to restrict their choice or alter their desires, that indulging in the world of goods is a positive civic good. It is the certainty that the liberty to consume has defined the meaning of American democracy and fueled the success of the modern American nation. It is the conviction that these same freedoms and rights should spread across the globe.⁷

Such an ascendance was neither inevitable nor expected at the start of America’s national history. The satisfaction of individual desires was not an inalienable right that the nation’s founders wrote into the Constitution. Instead, the lessons of the American Revolution had taught colonists that their desires, while powerful, ought to serve a purpose other than their own gratification. The consumer protests of the 1760s—the boycotts of British goods, the weaving of homespun cloth, the committees of inspection and observation, and the drama of the Boston Tea Party—had all served as proof that the colonists’ habits as shoppers should be made to serve a greater public interest and that consumer self-sacrifice was the key to independence.⁸

For the Americans who had fought for independence, the Revolution had offered no confirmation that individual desires were the key to citizenship; instead the Americans’ successful rebellion had highlighted the power of communal economic obligation and the importance of putting the needs of the nation ahead of personal consumer inclination.⁹ Yet slowly and fitfully, Americans overturned the assumption that consumer demands would come second to those of the nation and the nation’s producers. Instead, the certainty emerged that their desires could take precedence and, moreover, that such a precedence might even best serve the American nation. When the Union went to war to preserve the Republic, they put their belief in the virtue of unbridled consumption to the test. Their victory confirmed their faith; in the crucible of war, northern citizens forged consumption into a civic virtue. In the short space of time between the Revolution and the Civil War, the relationship between consumption and citizenship had changed beyond recognition. It is the transformation of this relationship between consumer interest and national interest that is the story of this book.

Remembering the power of boycotts and homespun in the wake of the Revolution meant that Americans embedded powerful tales of consumer obligation into their narratives of good citizenship. In the 1780s, elite Americans held on fast to the idea that the consumption of luxury imports should be harnessed to the service of the emerging nation, that men and women alike should be patriot-consumers. Indeed, eighteenth-century traditions of political thought underpinned such assumptions. The republican emphasis on the privileging of the public good over private ambition complemented the liberal assertion that self-interest would be reined in through the natural force of man’s moral and religious compass.¹⁰ The political elite of the new Republic assumed that consumer habits would remain subject to these powerful expressions of civic virtue. Saddled with debts, both personal and national, Americans concluded that they could not afford to buy imported goods. Instead, citizens encouraged each other to buy American-made goods and reject imported luxuries that led to the dreaded state of dependence, both economically and politically.¹¹ Where consumer desires clashed with the best interests of the new Republic, such desires would be subdued, dismissed, and denied.

Yet even as aspirations for political and economic independence were expressed and debated, the failure of the first generation of American citizens to rein in their consumption for the sake of the nation was already apparent. As the politics of personal responsibility faltered, and the bonds of union strained to contain the diverging economic acts of individuals as well as individual states, nationalists turned to a new language of political action, that is, legislated obligation. The newly created Constitution, forged in part as a response to the economic crisis the United States was facing in the 1780s, allowed the federal government to harness the act of consuming imports to the national cause and coffers. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution removed the power of taxing imports and exports from the individual states and gave it instead to Congress. The power to lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises transformed the fiscal might of the United States.¹² In their urgent attempts to save the new nation from poor credit and bad debts, the first national Congress transformed the consumption of foreign goods into a matter of national citizenship. Payment of these tariff duties would be an obligation owed to the federal government and not the individual states. Through their efforts to find ways to fund the nation, the framers of the Constitution transformed the patriot-consumer into a citizen-consumer. Whereas the patriot-consumer had been asked only to sacrifice on the part of the nation, the citizen-consumer was promised something in return. Patriot-consumers were defined by their obligation alone: their duty had been tied to self-sacrifice and withdrawal from the marketplace. But the emerging rhetoric that surrounded the debates over the tariff demonstrated a different vision of citizenship: one where the consumer’s duty as a citizen was now linked to making a purchase; there was gain as well as loss.

This transition had both gender and class implications when it came to imagining a hierarchy of citizenship.¹³ While all citizens, rich or poor, male or female, white or black could choose not to buy for the sake of the nation, the same was not true for citizens seeking to purchase goods. While race and class limited men’s access to the marketplace and thus helped to define their actions as citizen-consumers, it was women in particular who were implicated in this shift. While many did make purchases, either directly or by proxy, far fewer did so on their own account. Married women relied on their husbands for access to credit, and if that was withdrawn, then their ability to consume was drastically curtailed.

These legal realities of economic life for women meant that their role as citizen-consumers was not identical to that of men. Although women were important in their capacity as decision makers, it was ultimately most often men who purchased the goods themselves. It was men who were paying into the national coffers, not women. Few Americans would have disputed women’s identity as consumers in the late eighteenth century; however, their utility to the state was far less well established. Indeed, the government’s decision to establish the tariff as the primary mechanism through which consumption would be made useful to the state meant that from the outset, male consumers realized their civic obligations in full, whereas women performed their duty in a far more mediated way. The discourse surrounding gendered consumption patterns, which highlighted differences of habit and temperament when it came to shopping, amplified this civic distinction.¹⁴ Nonetheless, Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries acknowledged that in the case of consumer-citizenship, men and women would share many privileges and duties, although women would be expected to perform more obligations and claim far fewer rights. In this respect, consumption was different from discussions pertaining to suffrage, petitioning, and property. The result was an intermediate form of consumer-citizenship for women.¹⁵

The expectation that citizens would acquiesce to consumer obligation—that white men and women would stifle their desires, alter their demands, and change their purchases to suit the interests of the nation—persisted into the nineteenth century. It was an obligation that would be tested time and again and would always be found wanting. The return of war between America and Britain presented one such opportunity to try the limits of consumers’ civic duty. Between 1806 and 1815, Republicans asked citizens to give up luxury British imports for the sake of the nation and exist only on necessities that could be manufactured in America. It was hardly a radical request for Americans, who had won their independence through similar acts of material retrenchment. The scale of the public’s rejection was enormous. Our visionary politicians, when they talk of the necessaries of life, go back to antediluvian ages, scoffed one editorialist for the United States Gazette at the height of the restrictions in 1807. But, he continued, no patriotism however fervid, no distress however pressing, can now bring civilized man to this state of nature.¹⁶ Such backward-looking political economy was not acceptable to a nation who hoped to be the beacon of global progress. By the end of the war Americans had concluded that while they may have a duty to pay taxes on their consumption, they could not be denied the chance to consume the foreign goods they desired.¹⁷

By 1815, America’s politicians recognized that their fellow citizens—white men and women both—would not be prohibited from purchasing luxury imports outright. But although the rights and responsibilities of the consumer as citizen had not been fully established, in the wake of the war, the conversation over consumption was partially drowned out by debates over political economy that placed three competing interests—the farmer, the merchant, and the manufacturer—at the center of a national discussion. Throughout the 1820s and 1830s, writers, journalists, politicians, merchants, planters, and entrepreneurs increasingly emphasized that it was balancing the needs of this trinity of competing interests, all rooted in production, that required attention. If this inchoate group did reckon with the actions and habits of consumers, it was to make them serve the needs of these producers, helping to create the three-part balancing act that was the political economy of the early Republic.¹⁸

Yet it was in the interstices of political debate and commercial activity that this same group of men and women inadvertently fashioned a consumer that would do more than solely serve the interests of others. The auction house became fertile ground for the creation of this new consumer. So too did the urban institutes that promoted American manufacturing, such as the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia. Within the walls of these institutions, auctioneers and merchants, as well as manufacturers and civic boosters, sought to promote a model of consumption that would serve their needs and their vision of a national political economy. Attempting to make the best case they could, each of these groups employed a language of rights and obligation to bolster its cause.

Among the first of these groups were auctioneers. These men favored unrestricted trade and by extension an unrestricted consumer. Speed, excitement, a quick turnover, and no refunds suited their mode of trade. In their effort to maintain this advantage, they claimed citizens had a right to buy whatever and however they pleased, even if it led to personal ruin in the end. Merchants, who resented the market share that auctioneers had claimed, looked to undermine their competitors by attacking this vision of an unprotected and vulnerable consumer. The government, they argued, had an obligation to protect the American citizen from the ravages of uncontrolled trade. Their failure to make this case in the 1820s cemented a new right pertaining to consumer-citizenship into place. As one auctioneer put it, "in this free and happy republic, every man has a right to be ruined in his own way."¹⁹ Buying whatever one pleased was simply one of those ways.

Merchants were not the only group seeking to control the consumer in the 1820s. The urban champions of American manufacturing also sought to use the habits of consumers to promote their own interest. In the North, these boosters lobbied hard for high tariffs. They hoped not only to protect America’s new industries but also to educate the consumer. If men and women could learn to prefer American goods in the interest of promoting national interest, then the need for a tariff would gradually disappear. But by the 1830s the limitations of this mode of legislated obligation became clear. A tariff would not trump the tastes of the nation’s consumers and destroy their desires for foreign goods. In fact, as became abundantly clear in New York, in Philadelphia, and later on in Charleston, consumers would not alter their tastes to suit either a regional or a national interest, no matter how urgent. This realization led the commercial communities of the East Coast to acknowledge a newfound respect for the consumer. By the end of the 1840s, auctioneers, merchants, and manufacturers conceded that consumers were citizens who could buy what they pleased, free from condescending restrictions in the name of protection and liberated from serving the needs of America’s manufacturing sector.

By the middle of the nineteenth century the doctrines of free trade had begun to transform the commercial politics of the Atlantic world, and these same ideas also helped to redefine the idea of the citizen-consumer in the United States.²⁰ But the tenets of laissez-faire liberalism were refracted through a variety of lenses in America that gave shape to two distinctly regional visions of the citizen-consumer. In the North, the free-trade truism prevailed that consumer demand drove the engine of commerce and should thus not be restricted. Such ideology suited the emergence of a vibrant and increasingly competitive retail culture in the cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. Free-trade advocates were swift to highlight that such power ought to command new respect. The right to consume cheap goods quickly became part of the American free-trade lexicon. It was the advocates of free trade, especially those connected with the Young America movement, who argued that such a right constituted a new commercial egalitarianism that was a unique expression of America’s political system.²¹ The broad distribution of material comfort reflected the success of the Republic’s grand democratic experiment.

Such contentions were less important to planters and proslavery ideologues. To these men, free trade offered an opportunity to reinforce the political economy of slavery through a more liberal and direct trade with Europe and especially Britain. Without free trade, southern communities remained too reliant on northern merchants for their imported goods. Proslavery writers such as A. Dudley Mann were quick to argue that goods that arrived via New York were a liability for the slaveholders’ empire. Let it be seen that Southerners are in earnest, Mann thundered to the audience of a Virginia convention in 1858; that patriotism has duties to perform in trade intercourse … and all the articles required for consumption from abroad will thenceforth come directly to their homes relieved from intermediate agencies and at vastly diminished rate. This was, he argued the only way to end the power of the overpowering and overshadowing fiscal fort of Wall Street.²² As war loomed, proslavery men reverted back to the rhetoric of retrenchment and restriction in the hope that it would allow them to achieve their goal of a free-trade empire for slavery.

The outbreak of Civil War returned Americans to old questions about the way consumers should serve the nation. Nearly eighty years after the Revolution, the old narratives of obligation returned to shape the southern response to the chaos and turmoil of war. The Confederate government demanded that its consumers serve the cause of slavery by sacrificing their desires on the altar of southern nationhood. The failures of this project illuminated once and for all that such a model of citizenship would not stand. By contrast the Union government amalgamated two apparently opposing visions of political economy to create a consumer whose shopping could serve the nation. Combining the structures of federal tariff law to raise revenue with the rhetoric of free trade, it liberated consumers to purchase as they pleased. The Union government converted the purchase of foreign luxuries and domestic comforts, of necessities and superfluities, of baubles, trinkets, furniture, and fashions into a civic virtue. It marked the apotheosis of the citizen-consumer. Such a transformation may have liberated consumer desire—but it did nothing to create economic equality. The triumph of the Union cemented the idea that every citizen is entitled to purchase freely, yet it did nothing to ensure that such aspirations might be matched by an equal ability. The citizen-consumer was thus both fact and fiction. Consumer-driven revenues would serve the national interest, but the idea of a consumer democracy was a fantasy and has remained so.

This book is a cultural history of economic ideas and how those ideas have defined political categories. One of my central operating assumptions is that economic ideas and the debates surrounding them were not the sole province of an intellectual elite. They took shape not just in the minds of a few rarefied political economists, but also in the less tutored imaginations of men and women from a variety of stations. Examining the varied institutions and publications in which these ideas took shape thus becomes a means of examining the transformation of individuals’ economic notions into a collective culture of consumer democracy.²³ Merchants and auctioneers, artisans and entrepreneurs, civic boosters and textile manufacturers, advertisers and retailers, politicians and journalists, domestic economists and political economists, in short, an emerging middle-class, from New York to New Orleans, all played a part in creating the economic dimensions of what it meant to be a good citizen in the nineteenth-century United States.

Like other bonds of national belonging, the economy is also an act of collective imagination.²⁴ Combining the commodities produced, goods bought and sold, transactions recorded, property evaluated, and labor contracted out, auctioned off, and sweated over into a coherent understanding of how a nation attains and distributes its wealth required more than intellect; the national economy demanded faith in something intangible. Indeed, I would argue that people understand the relationship between an individual economic act (such as purchasing a good) and its place in the national economy in a manner that is similar to the placing of a symbol within a cultural system of belief. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz explained about religious symbols, They connect the reality of life with a metaphysic.²⁵ Individual economic acts are thus given meaning through their place in the larger cultural system of economic belief, and conversely that system of belief is reinforced through individuals’ decisions to see their separate economic acts as a part of that larger whole. Through such faith in an imagined economy, individuals made meaning out of all the constituent parts of a country’s political economy.

That we are able to understand the power of the imagination in creating our economic worlds must be attributed to the work of scholars who have redefined the study of capitalism in recent decades. The debate over whether American capitalism was embedded by means of a liberal consensus into the nation’s founding structures or whether market society was imposed onto a republican society dominated scholarship for much of the second half of the twentieth century.²⁶ A second debate also loomed large: the question of whether the slave societies of the antebellum South were inherently capitalist or in but not of the larger economic system of the United States.²⁷ Moving past these debates over the roots of capitalism in the United States, a new generation of scholars has focused instead on the creation of American capitalism as a series of culturally mediated processes. Such processes, they argue, do not simply alter an individual’s relation to the modes of production but produce people themselves in new ways. Examining capitalism from this viewpoint, it is possible to see a cultural system emerge, one that marks worth through the market and that conflates property and people in slave societies and free societies, although not in the same way. It is a system that converts work into profit and measures success through financial gain. Capitalism, at its core, transforms values, financial and ethical alike.²⁸

Surprisingly, the history of consumption has not yet benefitted from this new perspective. Perhaps this is because earlier histories of consumer culture were primarily interested in the ways in which consumption enabled the formation of identities such as class, race, gender and sexuality. Through the 1980s and 1990s, scholars examined how these identities meshed with agency, as groups struggled for power in battles fought on the terrain of culture.²⁹ These were not narratives that grappled with the economy, despite their engagement with consumption.³⁰ Yet many of the scholars who have returned to the study of capitalism have done so precisely to bring the economy back in.³¹ Attempting to move past a history of identity politics, that seemed at once too subjective and fractured, this new cohort of historians sought to unravel the making and meaning of capitalism by exploring its processes and mechanisms. They explained how capitalism worked as a structure, even as they historicized and denaturalized it as a system. These concerns help to explain why consumption got lost. As these historians revealed what happened in the private counting rooms, trading pits and credit agencies of America they looked to the back of the shop, not the front. Yet as this book makes clear, the history of consumption in America is more than identity politics; it also encompasses how Americans harnessed the identity of the consumer to the project of building the nation-state.

Capitalism helped to transform personhood in the nineteenth century. Building on this insight, I argue that we must take seriously the ways in which men and women imagined the civic demands of a nation’s economy. To do so is to understand how these expectations can reconfigure citizens’ understanding of their relationship to the nation-state and command a complex set of beliefs, agendas, and practices, all without reference to a constitution. The term that best describes that relationship is civic belonging. While never formalized into a set of legal rights or obligations, the notion of civic belonging encompasses a powerful underlying logic that is shaped by a nation’s political economy, its commercial life, and its cultural practices.³² Civic belonging defines what an individual might expect to gain from citizenship and in return can alter what individuals believe their country can ask them to do in the service of their nation. By examining capitalism as a structuring element of civic belonging, a widened horizon of historical possibilities emerges. There was nothing inevitable about the ascendance of the citizen-consumer. Instead, we are able to see how many different individuals yoked the government to their economic interests, creating a multilateral and sometimes messy relationship between the state and its economy, as well as between themselves and the nation.³³

Over the first half of the nineteenth century Americans transformed the relationship between the consumer and the nation-state in ways that would redefine the meaning of both consumption and citizenship. Yet historians have not fully explored the transformation of the consumer’s identity in the first half of the nineteenth century.³⁴ Even those historians who have thought productively about how consumer culture transformed political culture in the eighteenth century have failed to address fully the legacies of a Revolution that fused self-denial with both religious and civic virtue.³⁵ The post-Revolutionary generation inherited a complex set of ideas, expectations, and practices regarding the nature of their consumption and citizenship. Because of this, Americans did not face the challenge of creating a new nation-state as either modern liberal subjects or liberated consumers. Such identities would have to be painstakingly created over the course of eight decades and yoked together through trial and error.

Nor have many historians of consumer culture examined the process through which consumer and citizen were fused together in the nineteenth century. Instead scholars move from explaining the impact of the consumer revolution in the eighteenth century to the birth of consumer culture in the twentieth century. In doing this, we have skipped over the crucial formative period in between.³⁶ Despite the scholarly attention America’s world of goods has received in the last thirty years, the part that the everyday consumption of goods has played in reconfiguring American understandings of citizenship in the nineteenth century has been largely overlooked.³⁷ In the nineteenth century the purchase of new luxuries went from being a political liability and a moral failing to a symbol of middle-class virtue, both personal and civic. And it was in the same century that politicians dismantled the restraints and obligations that they had once laid on consumers. While the eighteenth-century language of American citizenship had emphasized the public good over private interest, by the end of the Civil War, personal desires and individual demands were said to serve the body politic. Self-satisfaction was both necessary and desirable, and to that end it ultimately became state sponsored and nationally sanctioned. It was something Americans could take pride in as citizens.

The struggle to find a place for the consumer within in the nation’s political economy added meaning to some of the central tenets of the modern nation: democracy, equality, and freedom—all this long before the mass consumer culture of the twentieth century took shape. It is crucial to understanding the creation of these foundations of America’s political economy and political culture. This story matters to everyone because this consumer-inflected vision of democracy, equality, and freedom has been peddled by Americans around the globe. And just as in their own country, where the gap between what is promised and what is possible has been a source of constant tension and disappointment, so too have these tensions and disappointments spread across the world. Moreover, the fiction of consumer-citizenship, in particular the idea that everyone might aspire to (and by dint of hard work, one day achieve) the richness of consumer comforts, has constantly obscured the iniquities of capitalism, despite the many critiques of that fiction that exist. Woven into the fabric of the nation’s greatest triumphs—over secession and slavery—the fiction of the citizen-consumer is dearly cherished in American society and seemingly impossible to dislodge.

The nineteenth-century notions of economic rights and obligations that were forged in war and peace over the first century of the country’s existence are embedded into modern conceptions of civic virtue and vice in the United States. In particular, the contests over consumption and citizenship have left a legacy of expectations that continue to shape Americans’ relationship to the nation-state and indeed the way in which the nation-state perceives their worth as citizens. By the end of the Civil War it was possible to think of a citizen’s consumption as either an asset or a liability to the nation as a whole. At the start of the twenty-first century, the echoes of such a forensic accounting still resonate.

Chapter 1

Dilemmas of Abundance

Over the course of his lifetime, Benjamin Franklin spent a lot of time thinking about America’s consumption of foreign goods. On the whole he was ambivalent, seeing both the problems as well as the utility of such purchases.¹ But as the Revolution gathered speed, and Americans went to war, Franklin began to despair of his compatriots’ good sense. Is it impossible for us to become wiser, when by Simple Economy and avoiding unnecessary Expences we might more than defray the Charges of the War? he asked Samuel Cooper in 1779. We import fashions, Luxuries and Trifles. Such trade may enrich the Traders, but never the Country.² He was less diplomatic with his own daughter. Berating her for sending off to France for linen when she could have spun it herself and chastising her for requesting "long black pins, and lace, and feathers, he scolded her: the war may make our frugality necessary; and as I am always preaching that doctrine, I cannot in conscience or in decency encourage the contrary, by my example, in furnishing my children with foolish modes and luxuries." Finishing as only a father could, he jovially informed her that if she wanted feathers for fashion, she could pull them from the tail of an American cockerel.³

Throughout the war, Franklin’s certainty that no good could come of foreign imports seemed unassailable. But in the wake of the Revolution, his convictions faltered. On the one hand, he could see that foreign imports continued to threaten the vitality of the nation’s political economy. Displays of private extravagance in the face of public indebtedness would, he argued, give Confidence to Enemies and Diffidence to Friends.⁴ Any failure to pay national debts, both foreign and domestic, because of overspending on foreign goods would simply invite speculation that America was economically untrustworthy and politically vulnerable. But Franklin also acknowledged that luxurious goods could suffuse the Republic with an energy borne of consumer desire, an energy that would enable Americans to work toward the creation of a flourishing new nation.⁵ The question, as Franklin understood it, was whether Americans’ desires for foreign luxuries could play any part in the making of America’s new political economy.⁶ Carefully handled, he thought, these desires might be directed toward the pursuit of national prosperity. Mismanaged, these same desires for luxuries had the capacity to undermine America’s international reputation and even dissolve the fragile bond of union that held the new Republic together.

Franklin was not alone among American elites to recognize that the consumption of imported luxury goods posed a real dilemma for the new nation. Between the fragile peace accords of 1783 and the first congressional session under the new Constitution in 1789, the consumption of foreign luxuries, especially those bought from the British, became a particular problem. No longer entitled to the commercial privileges they had enjoyed as a colony, Americans, rich and poor, struggled with the consequences of living and trading outside the Empire’s protective embrace. Such exclusion not only