An "Uncommon Tranquility of Mind": Emotional Self-Control and the Construction of a Middle-Class Identity in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia

Abstract

Like many eighteenth-century Americans, Philadelphia Quaker Caleb Cresson kept a diary. According the common practice of the age, his diary was meant be read by others and, in Cresson's case, his children were the intended audience. Cresson said that he wanted give his sons some little account of our family, and my passage through the wilderness of this world. The diary, however, was much more than just a personal narrative or a literary representation of the Cresson family tree. Cresson also used this forum provide his children with a clear understanding of their place in the community, reminding them at one point that there was no basis for his sons to apprehend themselves above the middk class1 Throughout this piece of personal literature, Cresson delineated in specific detail the kinds of values, sensibilities, and behaviors that he considered appropriate for those who either aspired to, or defined themselves as part of, the class. In particular, like many of his nineteenth-century middle-class descendants, Cresson extolled the virtues of moderating one's passions as a means of maintaining one's spiritual, physical, and mental health, an ideal that will be the focus of this essay. In recent years, Stuart Blumin has become the most vocal champion of studies that focus on middle Americans as a class unto themselves.3 Relying on data from the city of Philadelphia, Blumin's tendency define class along somewhat arbitrary occupational lines led him the conclusion that a middle-class way of life was the product of antebellum urbanization and industrialization. It is Blumin's belief, an assumption that is implicit in the work of most scholars of American middle-class formation, that an identifiable class did not emerge in America until the nineteenth-century.4 Caleb Cresson's diary, along with the writings of many other eighteenth-century Philadelphians, challenges that assumption and provides us an entree into a world that deserves our historical attention/