Counting Money: The US Dollar and American Nationhood, 1781–1820

Abstract

The success of the Founding Fathers in building a nation has for a long time attracted a sense of marvel. That admiration is well deserved. Political leaders in post-Revolutionary America understood that hard-won liberty could only flourish if there was a popular sense of common enterprise. They needed to create a cultural settlement that gave the idea of national civilization clear meaning. The new state would have to contrast sufficiently to the league of states that had combined to overthrow colonial rule, while still protecting local interests and sensitivities. It was an era that lent itself to imaginative statecraft and the Founding Fathers supplied it through their crafting of a national government and a national society. They appreciated that proper constitutional arrangements would not in themselves suffice to bind the common enterprise. The young republic needed to generate its own cultural and economic mechanisms that would serve to consolidate affinity to the nation. Recent studies on the formation of nationhood in the United States have identified some of these mechanisms in the shape of everyday experience in the forging of an identity that transcended the local community. For example, David Waldstreicher and Len Travers have pointed to the role of festivity and ritual in creation of a national consciousness. They have shown that celebration in the early republic served to reinforce the national implications of the American Revolution.