Developing an American Identity

By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:

• Account for the cultural arguments through which Americans began distinguishing themselves from Britons after independence, including republican simplicity, language reform, and a self-consciously American visual culture.
• Explain how Noah Webster's American Spelling Book and other educational projects served the political work of building a separate national identity.
• Describe the doctrine of Republican Motherhood and account for how writers such as Judith Sargent Murray pressed against its limits.
• Identify the institutions that free Black communities built in the 1780s and 1790s, including the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and account for the identity claims those institutions advanced.
• Compare cultural and political adaptation across Cherokee, Iroquois, and other American Indian nations as the new United States pushed onto their lands.
• Trace the early outlines of regional identity (New England, mid-Atlantic, Upper South, Lower South, frontier West) and account for the role those regional differences would play in later periods.

The Treaty of Paris of 1783 ended the Revolutionary War and recognized the United States as an independent sovereign nation. It did not, however, tell anyone what an American sounded like, looked like, or believed. Through the 1780s and 1790s, citizens of the new republic worked through that question across a wide front of cultural projects (KC-3.2.III.ii). Out of those projects came the first sustained American claim that the new republic was not simply Britain without a king but a distinct people with a distinct destiny. The College Board CED frames the topic under ARC (American and Regional Culture), with the Continuity and Change reasoning process as the suggested entry point.

Republican simplicity was the period's foundational cultural argument. Writers such as Benjamin Rush, Mercy Otis Warren, and the young John Adams argued that a self-governing people had to look and behave differently from European aristocracy. Powdered wigs, gilded carriages, ornate court dress, hereditary titles, and elaborate forms of address were rejected as European corruptions. Plain speech, modest clothing, restrained manners, and earned (rather than inherited) social standing were promoted as marks of civic virtue. The argument carried into household practice, into church architecture, into the ceremonial style of the federal government (Washington pointedly refused titles such as His Highness), and into the political vocabulary of the 1790s, when accusations of aristocratic pretension became one of the most cutting weapons in early party politics.

Language reform was the most ambitious of the period's cultural projects. Noah Webster published the first part of A Grammatical Institute of the English Language in 1783, the year of the Treaty of Paris, and it became known as the American Spelling Book or, from the color of its binding, the Blue-Backed Speller. Webster argued that a sovereign nation needed a sovereign language, that American children should not learn to read from books printed for British readers, and that distinctive American spellings (color rather than colour, center rather than centre, plow rather than plough) would serve as everyday markers of national separation. The speller went on to sell roughly seventy million copies across the nineteenth century, and Webster's later American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) extended the project. Webster's claim that orthography carried political meaning was not unusual. Educators such as Benjamin Rush argued in the same years that public schools, taught in republican simplicity, were necessary to manufacture the virtuous citizens the republic required to survive.

Visual culture followed the same logic. American painters such as Charles Willson Peale and John Trumbull built their careers on heroic portraits of Washington, Franklin, and the Continental officer corps, and on history paintings of the Revolution that turned the war into a founding myth. Peale's portraits of Washington in military dress, painted across the 1770s and 1780s, fixed an image of the new nation's leader that was distinct from European royal portraiture. Trumbull's small-scale battle paintings (later expanded into the Capitol Rotunda murals) recorded the Revolution as a republican drama, with civilian-officers, not crowned commanders, at the center. American architecture moved in the same direction. Thomas Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol in Richmond (1785-1788) on the model of a Roman temple at Nimes, arguing that a republic should look back to the Roman Republic rather than to Britain's Georgian baroque. Federal-style townhouses in Philadelphia and Boston, the United States Capitol as designed by William Thornton, and the early plan for the city of Washington all tried to give the new republic a built environment that announced its distinctness (KC-3.2.III.D).

The religious landscape of the new republic transformed alongside its cultural one. The Revolution had broken the legal monopoly the Anglican Church had enjoyed in the southern colonies, and most states wrote disestablishment into their new constitutions. Virginia's Statute for Religious Freedom, drafted by Jefferson and pushed through the legislature by Madison in 1786, set the model the First Amendment would generalize. With establishment lifted, dissenter sects expanded rapidly. Methodist circuit riders and Baptist preachers brought evangelical Christianity to ordinary farmers, frontier settlers, free Black communities, and enslaved people, often in revival meetings that crossed lines of race and class that elite Anglican worship had carefully maintained. By 1800, Methodism and the Baptist sects had become the largest Protestant traditions in the country, and the religious landscape that the Second Great Awakening would inflame in Period 4 was already in place.

The new cultural arguments did not include everyone equally. Free Black communities, growing rapidly in the seaboard cities after Northern states began passing gradual emancipation laws in the 1780s, built their own institutions to claim a Black American identity that white republican culture refused to make room for. Richard Allen, a Methodist preacher in Philadelphia, led a group of Black worshippers out of the segregated St. George's Methodist Church in 1787 after they were ordered to move to a separate gallery during prayer. Allen and Absalom Jones founded the Free African Society that same year, and Allen organized the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal congregation that would, in 1816, formalize the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church as the first independent Black Protestant denomination in the United States. Benjamin Banneker, the free Black Maryland mathematician and almanac author, sent Thomas Jefferson a long letter in 1791 reminding the author of the Declaration of Independence that the natural-rights claim of 1776 either applied to all human beings or it did not apply at all. The Black institution-building of the 1780s and 1790s set the foundation for nineteenth-century abolitionism.

American Indian nations reckoned with the new republic on terms set by their own histories. The Cherokee in the southern Appalachians, the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) in upstate New York, the Shawnee and Miami in the Ohio Valley, and the Creek and Choctaw in the Lower South each navigated United States expansion through a different mix of diplomacy, military resistance, internal cultural reform, and adaptation. Cherokee leaders in the 1790s began the long process of building a written constitution, a syllabary for their language (formalized later by Sequoyah), and political institutions that defended sovereignty by adopting some forms of the surrounding republic. The Haudenosaunee Confederacy, fractured by the war (some nations had supported the British, others the Patriots), worked to rebuild an internal political order in territory the Treaty of Paris had assigned to the United States without their consent. The Northwest Indian Confederation, led by Little Turtle of the Miami and Blue Jacket of the Shawnee, fought a sustained war against United States expansion that ended only at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in 1794 and the Treaty of Greenville in 1795 (KC-3.3.I.A). American Indian nations were not passive subjects of the new American identity. They were the first peoples whose presence forced the new republic to define what its borders, citizens, and obligations would be.

Women in the new republic worked the same contradiction. The doctrine of Republican Motherhood gave middle-class and elite white women a civic justification for education and household authority by arguing that the republic depended on the virtue of its citizens, and that virtue was first instilled by mothers. The doctrine produced real expansion of female literacy, an early generation of female academies, and a body of political and historical writing by women that would have been unimaginable in colonial society. Mercy Otis Warren published her History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution in 1805, the first published history of the war by a woman. Judith Sargent Murray's 1790 essay On the Equality of the Sexes argued, two years before Mary Wollstonecraft, that women's apparent intellectual inferiority was a product of denied education rather than inherent capacity. Republican Motherhood at its widest, however, stopped at the household door. Married women still surrendered their property and legal personhood under coverture; women could not vote (with the brief exception of New Jersey from 1776 to 1807); and the political community remained, in formal terms, a community of free white men.

Underneath all of these national-identity arguments, distinct regional identities were already hardening (KC-3.2.III.ii). New England carried forward its Puritan-descended town meetings, its commercial seaboard cities, and an early concentration of textile and shipping capital. The mid-Atlantic states (Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey) developed as the most ethnically and religiously diverse region, anchored by Philadelphia and New York City and by an agricultural hinterland of family farms. The Upper South (Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina) remained dominated by tobacco and a planter elite, but with a growing free Black population and an emerging commitment to gradual emancipation that would reverse in the cotton boom of the next century. The Lower South (South Carolina, Georgia) doubled down on plantation slavery in rice and indigo, foreshadowing the cotton economy that the gin would unlock after 1793. The frontier West, beyond the Appalachians, formed a fifth region: settler, mobile, often violent, and politically distinct from the seaboard. The cultural unity that Webster, Peale, and Jefferson tried to produce was always in tension with regions whose economic and social interests pulled in five different directions.

The four sources below sample the cultural arguments of the post-Revolutionary period: a textbook engineered for nation-building, a portrait that fixed the republican leader's public image, an argumentative essay that pushed back on women's exclusion, and a flag broadside that published the new visual identity of the federal government.

1. (Continuity and Change) Account for the cultural elements that the new United States kept from its colonial British inheritance, and the elements that Americans deliberately worked to discard. Which set was more historically consequential by 1800?
2. (Causation) Webster argued that an independent nation needed an independent language. Account for the political reasoning behind that claim. Did the project succeed?
3. (Comparison) Compare the identity claims advanced in this period by Richard Allen and the Free African Society, by Judith Sargent Murray, and by the Cherokee leadership. What did each group share with the dominant white republican identity, and where did each push back against it?
4. (Continuity and Change) The doctrine of Republican Motherhood gave middle-class women new civic standing without giving them political rights. Defend a position on whether the doctrine should be read as a step forward, a substitute for actual rights, or both at once.
5. (Contextualization) By 1800, Americans had begun to identify themselves as New Englanders, Virginians, or backcountry settlers as much as Americans. Account for the regional differences that were already visible in the 1790s, and trace one of them forward to a Period 4 or Period 5 conflict.

Draft alignment — pending educator review. AP USH codes correspond to the official College Board Course and Exam Description (Effective Fall 2023, Version 1). Statements below are paraphrased in the CountryReports voice; refer to the College Board's published CED for verbatim wording.