Liberty is Innovation: Sources of Energy and Enterprise

Abstract

American society in the decades of the early republic was dynamic, expanding in new directions, and filled with anxiety. In the post-revolutionary decades, observers from abroad as well as those within the United States remarked on the enterprising behavior of men and women from all ranks of society. Their comments were frequently derisive, casting Americans as grasping shopkeepers who originated among the middling and lower sorts, and who no longer deferred to the social and political authority of their betters. Linked with other contemporary evidence, these descriptions document the widespread transformation of behavior and attitudes toward the market—toward ways of getting a living, making goods, retailing wares, furnishing households, and consuming information and culture. This essay examines some of the diversity and breadth of changes in the early republic by focusing on innovation in the economy. It points to some of the reasons the bursts of commercial and technological activity came when they did, and how the American Revolution and the nation-building process contributed to these bursts. It examines as well some of the limitations and consequences of the “vigorous spirit of enterprise” that captured American society in the early republic (1).