An Aristocracy of Mere Wealth

America is a country where the only rank is wealth. That is a triumph.

Stump Speaking by George Caleb Bingham, 1854. A politician rouses a mixed crowd of voters in rural Missouri. His opponent, just behind, waits to speak.

When Joe Biden, in his farewell address, said “Today, an oligarchy is taking shape in America of extreme wealth, power and influence that literally threatens our entire democracy, our basic rights and freedoms, and a fair shot for everyone to get ahead,” he repeated perhaps the most common warning in American history. From the Jacksonians’ “money power,” to William Jennings Bryan’s “plutocracy,” to the 20th-century progressives’ “malefactors of great wealth,” each generation of Americans has shouted, with fresh horror, at the nefarious machinations of the wealthy.

The nature of their outcry, too, has remained almost the same. Americans feared that concentrated wealth would destroy the democracy that underpinned their own aspirations. Wealth, in America, should be available to all, and an oligarchy threatens an ossification of the economic structure. That impinges on the fundamental social contract of the country, and thus must be fought. Biden’s oligarchy here is a complaint of political capture, and his “fair shot” is another restatement of the radical equality of opportunity the country was founded on.

250 years on from America’s independence, these ideals are so omnipresent they’ve drifted into cliche, and restating them reads as parody. For some portion of my readers, that paragraph probably surfaced objections, like Steinbeck’s famous statement that a working class of “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” was an elite-propagated delusion serving only to undermine any socialist movement, or the long legacy of slavery that impugns any idealistic framing of America.

This modern cynicism, however, prevents us from appreciating how radical this proposition once was. Government of, by, and for the people is not the historical norm. A nation that is founded to guarantee the people’s right to equal treatment and social mobility is a historical miracle. Most people throughout history—including the modern day—live in societies with formalized hierarchies that circumscribe their ambitions. Most people are lowly and accept their lowliness.

An oligarchy means “rule of the few,” a generic-enough term that describes most societies throughout history. Biden reached for it because it’s self-evident to Americans why that is inherently unjust. He deliberately left aside the more common version of “rule of the few”: an aristocracy, or “the rule of the best.” An oligarchy is a state of being, while an aristocracy implies that the slanted distribution of power is somehow desirable or merited.

No one in America believes this today. We honor those that make their own wealth, but we know the very fact of their social ascendance means they’re made from the same clay that we are. We certainly do not offer them deference: who, today, for one example, would doff their cap as Elon Musk’s motorcade passes by, as 18th-century commoners frequently did? And conversely, we scorn inheritance of all sorts and use the levers of government to eliminate as many of the advantages of inherited wealth as we can. American heirs hide their familial status, while self-made people flaunt their humble backgrounds: a contradiction natural to us but unprecedented in most of history.

The true legacy of the American Revolution is this revolution of dignity. This overturning stripped the country of its humility, creating a society where no one “knows their place”: where anyone, anywhere, could be anything. And so, while free America became (and remains) a place of vast economic inequality, it is also one of remarkable psychological equality. Wealth is the universal aspiration and social mobility is the national mythos. Earning wealth is within anyone’s reach, and possessing it is merely a statement of circumstance. Thus, it offers little social distinction.

In a society where distinctions are so shallow, an aristocracy is impossible. There are only capitalists of varying success. Power and social rank usually do not follow automatically from wealth, but when they are perceived to, the great American fear of “oligarchy” leaps once again from the throat.

And yet, we are so far removed from that premodern civilization that our current societal organization seems obvious, perhaps even banal. We will never appreciate how radical the American Revolution truly was until we understand the aristocracy that preceded it.

The Old World

“My parents never expected any titles, honors, or great things for themselves or their children. They wished [only]…that we might earn our bread by the sweat of our brow, as they did.” So wrote Devereux Jarratt, an 18th century Anglican pastor, and so quotes Gordon Wood in the first chapter of The Radicalism of the American Revolution. Wood describes a premodern world of contracted dreams, inhabited by people born to a calling and a place that they largely adhered to. Social mobility was a suspicion, not an aspiration. Ordinary lives orbited a small set of relations to which one owed deference or received fealty.

In this society, to labor was to share in God’s punishment. As Jarratt described, the laboring classes inherited the shame of Adam, cast out as he was of bountiful Eden to earn sustenance by “the sweat of his brow.” All those who worked were party to this shame.

It follows that the core societal division was between those who labored and those who did not. In the traditional frame, the common people labored, while the gentry, those freed of this burden, inhabited a separate mode of existence. And to the gentry, those laboring masses were considered little better than beasts. No less than a young George Washington called the ordinary farmers ridging his estate “the grazing multitude.” John Adams called the lower classes of Boston the “common herd of mankind.”

Mr and Mrs Andrews by Thomas Gainsborough, 1750. Two British inheritors who did not work.

Malthusian dynamics consigned the vast majority of laborers to poverty. But poverty was not merely the expected outcome: it was one the gentry considered optimal. Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, echoed common sentiment when he wrote that “it was poverty that will produce industry and frugality.” The upper classes fretted about commoners becoming wealthier and sending their sons to college, as that would “turn them into consumers and not providers of food,” and sumptuary laws were instituted to control their spending. Labor was thus fundamental to this society but it did not imbue any moral worth. It was assumed to be grueling, mundane, and unrewarding, and something one would only do if they were forced. From this lens, the vaunted Puritan ethic of industriousness and toil was just another cudgel to justify to laborers their own enforced misery. Those predestined to heaven would labor for God without complaint.

The non-laboring gentry—that upper crust that was the closest thing that colonial America had to an aristocracy—made up about 4-5% of the population. By British standards, it was an impoverished upper class. Outside of the largest planters in the South, most gentry struggled to afford their pretensions. And its poverty was matched by its relative equality: it had no ranks, and was composed only of “gentlemen” with no title but “sir” and “Mr.”

The gentry’s central distinguishing characteristic was leisure. Where everyone else produced, they only consumed. Where everyone else worked, they were idle. A gentleman ideally earned from land rents alone, a “pure” form of income that did not influence his disposition. That this income was “unearned,” that he faced no exertion for its maintenance, nor even in its acquisition (as most gentry were inheritors) was a mark of virtue. It’s difficult from our modern vantage point, where hard work and discipline are viewed as the core of moral goodness, to understand the disdain that this generation had for labor. All those who worked viewed it as their shame and sought to shed their burden at their first opportunity. Even Benjamin Franklin, who was a well-known and wealthy polymath by his 30s, refused to refer to himself as “sir” until he retired from business at 42.

Instead of labor, gentlemen adopted ornamental pursuits to emphasize their own distinctiveness. Gentlemen were educated in Greek and Latin and they took great pride in it, peppering their speech and writing with verse. Gentlemen wore silk stockings and breeches and powdered wigs and learned to fence and played the fiddle. Young gentlemen honed these ornamental skills as a mark of their status, in lieu of the “occupation” most commoners inherited.

For at his core, a gentleman was always defined by who he was, not what he did. He may be engaged in commercial interests (in the garb of social good, of course), but he wasn’t a businessman. He may perform science experiments or write poetry or serve in his local council, but he was not a scientist or poet or politician. And above all else in this social construction, a gentleman possessed a reputation: his “good name” that preceded him, and one that he sought to maintain by following various codes of honor. Military success, for example, endowed a man’s reputation, while engaging in trade denigrated him. A gentleman reduced to labor gave himself to servility.

Gentlemen thus dominated the three scholarly professions: lawyers, doctors, and pastors. These were not the totalizing “occupations” of the commoners, but learned positions that elevated a gentleman’s standing. Expertise and training did matter, but they were secondary to reputation. A lawyer with a good reputation bolstered a plaintiff’s standing in court, while one with a bad reputation—or worse, a commoner without a reputation—would be demerited by the judge. The same went for doctors. Medicine was then still a semi-mystical phenomenon of miasma and humors, and a doctor’s role was one of trusted bedside companion and representative as much as it was of healer. One must be trustworthy to embody this role—and who could be trusted but a gentleman?

This fundamental inequality was reinforced by colonial America’s economic structure. In America, almost everyone was a dependent of someone else. In this overwhelmingly rural society, with weak transport and communication links, there was little concept of a market. Instead, all commercial relationships were personal. Farmers seeking credit had to appeal to the local notables, who offered it based on their own assessment of the character of the prospective debtor. Artisans could sell their molded furniture or tailored silk or leather shoes only to the few gentlemen in their town. Shopkeepers kept ledgers that listed people by first name and catalogued their purchases and arrears. In these communities, which had scant hard currency, the ability to consume was a mark of distinction. Those who produced offered deference to those who could consume, because that consumption could always be withdrawn.

These personal relationships formed a network of patronage that underpinned colonial society. The wealthy offered credit and consumption to the common people; the commoners in turn offered gratitude and deference. Wood describes a public entreaty from a farmer in 1770 who urges the young not to harbor animus against the wealthy for “all the little injuries they may do.” Who else, he says, would buy our watermelons, for which “they pay us some thousand pounds a year” and are “no kind of use as food?” This concept of consumption as an indulgence that the rich offered the poor, which entirely devalues the labor and craft in production, is alien to our own thinking today, but was central to colonial society.

Government, despite its universalist pretensions, was enmeshed in this social hierarchy. Governmental offices were an extension of the person and officials were expected to use their private influence and wealth to achieve public ends. Social distinction was a prerequisite for both civilian and military leadership, as one could not ensure obedience from those being led without accepted societal standing. “Merit” as a legitimizing force remained very far from the colonial consciousness. This paradigm was most evident in judges. A town’s judge was always the local notable, and his judgments were accepted only because of the personal prestige he possessed. His societal rank facilitated and reinforced his public service, and served as yet another distinction that separated him from the commons. This was the intention of retaining gentry in government; as the jurist William Blackstone said, “It is impossible that government can be maintained without a due subordination of rank; that the people may know and distinguish such as are set over them, in order to yield them their due respect and obedience.”

As Wood describes, this patronage-based society coalesced at a national level into a broad-based paternalist cosmology. The King was the father to his children, each of whom depended on his benevolence. Below the King were innumerable lines of patronage and deference that bound everyone together. Each person was cognizant of those above him, to whom he owed deference, and those below him, from whom he accepted obeisance and offered favor. All people were organized vertically, forever dependent on another: tenant to landlord, artisan to patron, wife to husband, gentleman to king. But where the gentry’s dependence was mere rhetoric, the common person’s dependence was visceral, felt in a thousand different ways on every day of their lives.

This paternalism supported stark societal divisions. There were commoners that labor, gentry that benefited from their labor, and the society’s entire cultural framework was oriented around accentuating the distinctions between them. Gentry were educated where the commoners were vulgar. The gentry were honorable and trustworthy, while the commoners cheated and insulted without thought. The gentry ministered to souls and bodies while the commoners were fit only for the menial and base.

What’s most incomprehensible to us in the modern (Western) world is that the commoners themselves internalized their consigned role. Jarratt described how commoners were apt to be filled with “consternation and awe” when confronted with “beings of a higher order.” They often stood red-faced and fumbling when speaking to a gentleman. Most of the lowest commoners adopted a “down look” and learned well to “fawn and cringe” before a “sir” or “Mr.”

They felt no shame in this. Theirs was a corporate society of obligations and dependencies, running down the great chain of being from the king to the gentry to the lowly commoners, and each individual rung was anointed in its own fashion. To be a laborer was to be unworthy to rule, but not unworthy of respect. As Wood states, the common folk willingly bowed and doffed their caps to gentlemen because they knew their place was elsewhere, and they accepted it. Very seldom did they express a desire to change places with their supposed betters. They understood they were not equals, that their society had no equals, and they aspired to little beyond their own small lives.

In this, they mirrored the consciousness of common people throughout history. Most people in most places “knew their place” and limited their aspirations. Most people accepted they had “betters,” and doffed their caps or bowed their heads or kowtowed or touched their feet. Most people accepted hierarchy as a price of civilization, and understood the fundamental inequality that implied. That this perspective is alien to us—indeed, that it was alien to even the first generation of independent Americans—is an indicator of the immense overthrow of humility that took place after 1776.

Liberty and Equality

Wood thus locates colonial America not as the burgeoning commercial republic it would become, but as just another hierarchical society in a world that offered no alternative. In doing this, he contradicts even the colonists themselves, who claimed for themselves all the “liberty of Englishmen” with more blinkered enthusiasm than the English themselves.

But the English didn’t have liberty—they had liberties. Through years of parliamentary action and common law litigation, various groups, institutions and corporate bodies in England accumulated customary privileges. This could be particular governance rights granted to the local council of the City of London, or specific taxation exemptions for freeholders in a specific borough of Stoke. A person was thus granted liberties by virtue of their membership in these corporate bodies, and was free in that royal authority, restrained by parliament, could not abrogate their privileges. Englishmen lived under a government they consented to, under laws they could theoretically contest, and thus they were free.

These liberties served to reinforce societal hierarchy. Liberties granted to the nobility placed them above commoners, and inherited privileges compounded this across generations. Group and corporate privileges meant there was never equality before the law: each man demanded his own adjudication according to his own status. This is the legacy of the Magna Carta, and is most exemplified in the English Bill of Rights, which, unlike its American counterpart, asserts few individual rights: it is focused on asserting parliament’s prerogatives against the king.

This was the liberty Patrick Henry demanded, on pain of death, in the Virginia Convention in 1775. He echoed many American elites who assumed the Crown’s accidental policy of salutary neglect was an implicitly granted privilege to self-government, and he sought its restoration. In this, he echoed most of the gentleman revolutionaries. “Taxation without representation,” after all, was a fundamental protest against the deprivation of a liberty, not a proclamation for general liberty.

And yet, a year later, Thomas Jefferson claimed for Americans a far more expansive concept of liberty, founded not in customary, inherited rights, but natural rights endowed by God. It was one predicated on equality, as the famous opening line goes—“all men are created equal”—and thus, a radical sentiment opposing social order. In a society so riven by rituals of obeisance and superiority, where interlocking layers of dependence were the natural condition of most, to decree a simple equality is a radical proposition.

The Gleaners by Jean-Francois Millet, 1857. Gleaning means salvaging leftover grain from a harvested field. It must be done only with the owner’s permission.

But this expanded definition, the one we now accept as writ, certainly wasn’t the intention. As Wood detailed, the Founding Fathers rhetorically broadened English liberty, but never imagined it as a universalist principle. Equality was still intended only for the “better sort,” but now, that upper crust was not a hereditary aristocracy but the “natural aristocracy”: people of merit, who ruled by virtue of their education, their prestige, and their independence. The more honest version of Jefferson’s famous line is the version he helped the Marquis de Lafayette write in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, where to the familiar preamble of “All men are born free and equal in rights,” he added “social distinctions may be founded only upon the general good.” For him, a free country was not an equal country. Free America would be ruled by a republican elite of merit, remade each generation by new men of proven worth.

Jefferson’s view of property is central to his societal ideal. For him, land was the only substantive property, and it was useful primarily to enable leisure. Jefferson aimed to democratize the vaunted aristocratic ideal of independence. Indeed, his original 1776 draft of the Declaration stated “all men are created equal and independent,” and this independence was derived from widespread land ownership. America’s vast Western frontier would let all men provide for themselves, forever severing the colonial bonds of patronage and eradicating the common people’s internalized deference. Rousseau’s observation that “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains” was to beget a utopian society where that freedom is the universal condition.

Yet Jefferson’s republican utopianism presumed an impossible reality. Each of his idealized yeoman farmers—who already existed, in droves, throughout an overwhelmingly rural country—required labor to run the farm and a buyer to sell their crops to. In colonial society, for most, the labor was their burden, and their buyer was the local gentry, who consumed as a societal duty. But now, as those old relations withered, the farmer found others willing to buy from him. He replaced dependence on one man with an emerging independence derived from many potential buyers: from the market.

Most people similarly took democracy as an invitation to pursue their own commercial interests. Colonial America was already a nation of shopkeepers, traders, artisans, small manufacturers, and cash-crop farmers; now, those common people pursued commerce unabashedly for their own ends. For them, property wasn’t an instrumental object towards “independence,” but a tool, and it was in constant flux. It could be expended to acquire goods, mortgaged to finance business expansion, or sold to materialize returns.

Property was, in short, a product of and valued by a new, omnipresent institution that came to dominate America: the marketplace. Entrepreneurs in the early republic invested in a series of transportation improvements, starting first with turnpikes, then canals, and then steamboats for riverine transport. They also formed new banks, which began issuing paper currency and offering credit. These together undermined the traditional patronage-based relations of credit and consumption. Artisans often now manufactured more standardized products for a market of buyers. Traders imported goods from a variety of producers and resold them, and their credit ledgers were replaced with tradable paper money and bank credit. Farmhands and apprentices now freely roamed, contracting for wages alone and weighing employers against each other. “The workman is generally dependent on the master, but not on any particular master,” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America. “The manufacturer asks nothing of the workman but his labor; the workman expects nothing from him but his wages.”

Consumption was no longer a munificence a buyer extended to the producer: the producer sold to many willing buyers and offered no special consideration to any individual. And as credit became impersonal, creditors lost their right to obeisance. Financiers, producers, and consumers were all just semi-equal facets of the production cycle, holding leverage determined by their prominence in the market.

In this emerging capitalist society, property was inextricably tied to labor. Commercial enterprise required constant labor in a way that the proprietary wealth of the past did not, while the endless churn of the market imperiled even the largest fortunes. Wealth now had to be renewed, actively, by each generation, and the American gentry, always relatively poor, were now driven to the marketplace they tried so desperately to avoid. As Tocqueville wrote, in the United States “where fortunes are scanty and insecure, everybody works.”

And so, if land was subject to the vagaries of the market, then what independence could it grant? A landed estate was, after all, just a dividend-paying asset with potential for appreciation, and the years after independence were marked by speculative land bubbles that undermined any belief in the privileged independence real estate bought. This reality very quickly percolated to even landowners themselves. James Robertson, a Virginia slaveholder, argued in 1806 that “Man is man, and it is not within the power of a freehold to change his character.” A New York politician agreed: “Independence consists more in the structure of the mind and in the qualities of the heart.” And these “qualities of the heart” were present in all men, even “the arm that wields a pick or drives a spike.” For in this new America, all were equal. This was not the limited equality of the Founding Fathers, who believed that all men were born alike but differentiated themselves in life, but that all men, everywhere, carried the same moral worth, granted as a natural endowment to all those that labor under the sun. In this, America secularized the Christian belief that all souls were equal before God.

Despite the broadness of this idealism, the Revolution itself remained by and for white men. All of its ideological and economic victories accrued only to white men. It was they who were born equal, they who were endowed with fundamental liberties, and they who now took their new freedoms into the marketplace. Women made no tangible gains from the Revolution: they remained legally children, devoid of individual rights and unworthy of much moral consideration. And slavery, which was legal in every colony in 1776, was protected by the Constitution. Its size and footprint vastly expanded in free, capitalist America.

But while the revolution preserved both of these subjugations, the new ethos of equality highlighted them as anomalies. In colonial society, where almost everyone was a dependent, and all were subject to various depredations, women and slaves were merely the lowest ranks in a long chain of bondage. Their conditions weren’t individually notable because most in this society were unworthy of dignity. And neither had the ideological vocabulary to insist on their own, particular injustices.

In the new climate of equality, however, conditions of unfreedom did become notable. The Founding Fathers, many of whom were large-scale slaveholders and almost all of whom had used slave labor at some point, had to make uneasy excuses about their ownership for their entire lives. Some made promises of eventual freedom, while others created new, 19th-century justifications for subjugations in a society of equality.

Race and gender thus became the outlines of a new hierarchy of ascriptive characteristics. As universal dependence and subjugation gave way to white male equality, a new caste system arose to justify the continued subjugation of black people and women. For slavery, this was the “slavery as a positive good” theory, which posited that slavery uplifted the black race. For women, it centered around general female inferiority. And for both, this hierarchy remained anomalous to the broader American vision of equality.

The movements attacking these hierarchies used Jefferson’s own language to advocate for their freedom. Frederick Douglass, in his famous 1852 speech “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” demanded the very rights of life and liberty, accorded to him by the Declaration of Independence, for him and his fellow enslaved. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, at the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, drafted the Declaration of Sentiments, which declared “that all men and women are created equal.” The abolitionist movement and the long struggle thereafter for women’s equality sprang from that incomplete equality decreed in 1776. The establishment of an ideal, inadequate as it was in implementation, created a society where its abrogation became indefensible.

The Unintentional Revolution

Portrait of Paul Revere by Benjamin Copley, 1768. Revere was a silversmith and his portrait shows his manual occupation. Both of these are rare in this era of portraiture.

This equality, limited as it was, still reverberated across American society. Its very first casualty was titles. All white men in the new republic were known as citizens without any unique distinctions for the gentry. “Mr,” once a title reserved for gentleman, came into general use among all adult white males, while the titles “Esq[uire]” and “His Honor” were stripped from city council members. The “sir” that Benjamin Franklin once refused for himself became a universal term of address. Now, all were “Mr,” all were “sir.” Only officers of the courts retained their titles, and even then, these became formalities attached to the position, not the men themselves.

Education was also rendered suspect. Where common folk once stood in nodded befuddlement when a gentleman quoted Latin or Greek, they now looked at him with disdain. So too were the traditional ornamental skills of the gentry, which were viewed as the vestigial arts of an older, monarchical class. New value was to be found in the practical skills, in the making of furniture and the repair of carriages, in the weaving of clothing and the manufacturing of guns: the base physical arts that underpinned the new nation. America was now a place where everyone worked and everyone was trying to “get ahead.” It had no room for aristocratic contrivances.

But what truly cemented this overthrow of humility was the transmutation of aristocratic leisure into shame. Labor was now the true source of property, and from it, wealth. Industry and inventiveness were widely praised, while idleness was maligned as indolence. Inventors and entrepreneurs gained local celebrity, and it was the aspiration of every common person to become a millionaire, while leisure was a badge of dishonor. A young John D. Rockefeller, then an obscure bookkeeper in Cleveland, represented many when he said his two great ambitions were “to make $100,000 and live to 100 years.” “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” cautioned pastors in small rural churches all across America, and this time, they did not mean only for the commoners.

The traditional gentry professions—the lawyers, doctors, and pastors—now staked out their own claims to labor. As Edward Everett wrote, “Take the case of an eminent lawyer…he passes his days in office, giving advice to clients, arguing business in court.” He had no more leisure than a mechanic. So too it was with doctors, who ministered to patients, assembled remedies, and traveled across towns when called. And as the gentry lost their singular claim to moral worth, their “professions” themselves turned to mere occupations. Lawyers built their reputations on their previous performance and attestations from former clients, and they advertised their services directly. Clients chose them for their perceived skill, not their names. Reputation grew from what one did, not who one was. Lawyers and doctors acquired credentials to certify themselves, and these credentials granted them the title that was once a birthright. It was this system that allowed a self-taught Abraham Lincoln to become one of the best known lawyers in Illinois.

When John Adams, in 1790, observing the new republic of striving gentlemen, asked, with some incredulity, “who will work?” his question was pregnant with possibility. In his traditional frame, he still imagined an upper class of high-minded leisure to direct the affairs of the country. But America, just a decade later, offered a very different answer: everyone works. All were equal before God and men, and all would eat their bread by the sweat of their own brow. The only remaining social gradation that survived this scrutiny was the now revered product of labor: wealth.

The true paragon of early 19th-century America was the self-made man. A man was praised for being “the architect of his own fortune,” who “made it” without family influence or patronage. The greatest honor came from those who started from humble origins and rose to society’s pinnacle. And these new men, unlike most of history’s social climbers, celebrated their humble origins, often embellishing their childhood poverty to emphasize the degree of their success. In this, America was unique. Social mobility in traditional societies was scorned, and those who achieved it took pains to distance themselves from their origins. No less than Cicero, the great Roman orator, spent his life defending himself from aristocratic attacks on his “new man” status—and he was merely from less distinguished gentry. That in America, the new men flaunted their parvenu status with pride speaks to the nation’s fundamental belief in equality.

Wealth became society’s great leveler. In this land of boundless optimism, wealth was open to every man willing to labor for it. Hard work and its resultant prosperity became the new substrate of societal honor. Even failure in commercial enterprise was lauded, as it showed ambition, resilience, and a capability to work for one’s benefit. The only true dishonor was sloth, which showed weakness in character and soul. Even at this early hour, Americans embodied the striving ethos of Theodore Roosevelt’s “Man in the Arena”: a nation of men that dared great deeds.

But while prosperity brought widespread approbation, it did not confer social superiority. Wealth was, after all, a mere state of being, achievable by anyone with enough pluck and circumstance. Indeed, most of the honor in wealth came from its acquisition; merely possessing it meant little. This feeling stirred even before the Revolution: in 1760, the Charleston mechanics union wrote an open letter against a local gentleman, saying “All he ever did was inherit a fortune.” Can he really “claim any merit from possessing an estate not obtained by his own industry?” That contempt for inheritance, and prerogatives that drew on inheritance, became an essential part of the American consciousness, and as each new generation of entrepreneurs gave way to a legacy of heirs, their names fell from national repute. The Astor family, originally America’s first story of self-made brilliance, became a laughingstock of feuding inheritors. The Vanderbilts followed them, followed then by the Rockefellers and now, most recently, the Waltons. This was aided by the endless churn of American capitalism, which continually produced new fortunes and destroyed existing ones.

Post-revolution America was, economically, a far more unequal society than its predecessor, but had a much stronger sense of psychological equality than any nation before it—or indeed, after it. As we’ve seen, those with wealth continually disclaimed any distinction, emphasizing instead their own humble background and lifestyle. Rockefeller made a virtue out of his disdain for luxury, and even in the modern day, Warren Buffett is known for his middle-class upbringing and his average home in Omaha. And because wealth was the sole determinant of societal honor, if wealth seemed attainable, so too was everything else. Hard work and the grace of God were all that separated the rich and the many. And if all could be wealthy, why would one have animus against the rich? Where our colonial watermelon farmer once admonished the young to offer forbearance to the wealthy as they sustained their lifestyle, his revolutionary counterpart would tell those young men to learn from the wealthy so they could gain riches for themselves.

This transformation is exemplified in the reinterpretation of Benjamin Franklin. In life, Franklin was one of the most ideologically genteel of the Founding Fathers. His social rise was driven largely by patronage, starting with his friend Hugh Meredith’s father, who financed his first printing press in 1728. Franklin grew into a successful printer, but then retired at 42 into a life of leisure, where he accomplished much of the science and writing that gave him his fame. But just twenty five years after his death, Parson Weems, a popular biographer, retold his story for a new anti-aristocratic age. Here, Franklin’s success came not from patronage, but from “rising early and working hard each day.” Weems’s Franklin learned to survive on bread and water so no man could tempt him with money to betray his principles. He didn’t finance his first press from patronage, but through work alone, sleeping at midnight and rising at dawn to meet the demands of his one-man shop. Once, he saw a mislaid type just before bed and stayed up all night to fix it. The Franklin that Weems created was a paragon of frugality and hard work and an avowed enemy of recreation and leisure: the ideal of the democratic man, and one that bore little relation to the flesh-and-bone Franklin.

Disillusionment

In all, early America was a product of the unbridled pursuit of happiness. The great economic mobilization of the Revolutionary War had settled into a mass peacetime commercial expansion. Everything was of business, everyone was caught up in the burgeoning marketplace. Labor was virtue, leisure was relegated to vice, and the accumulation of wealth was society’s new determinant of honor. This unleashing empowered, above all, what Americans called “the middling sort”: those small proprietors who, freed of patronage and obligation, now gave themselves entirely to their pecuniary interests.

Much of the history of America thereafter is the story of those “middling” classes. They supplied each subsequent generation of lawyers, doctors, and pastors. Their businesses drove one of the largest urbanization processes in history, and the capitalism they forced onto America is what made it the world’s great economic engine for two hundred years. We are the direct inheritors of these people, and the world they sought to build is the one we live in.

It may be surprising, then, that by 1800, almost all of the Founding Fathers were openly disdainful of what their revolution had wrought. They had never sought a capitalist revolution. Their economic leanings were largely mercantilist, and most of their political principles remained hierarchical. They intended to elevate a deserving meritocracy—themselves—and rule from a place of enlightened virtue. For this, they drew from Locke and Rousseau and Montesquieu, looking backwards to find the future. Instead, they found themselves fading from a country passing them by.

Because, along with the grand economic expansion we described, which undermined much of the Founders’ republican idealism, the revolution elevated the new “middling sorts” to government. And as their vision of property and labor destroyed genteel independence, their influence in government would be fatal to every conception of enlightened rule.

The County Election by George Caleb Bingham, 1852. Well-dressed merchants, laborers in shirtsleeves, and a hunched-over drunk, all coming to the county hall to vote.

Local and state legislatures expanded in size and in suffrage during and after the war. In these new councils, elections became competitive affairs, decided not on one’s character but the policies they supported. Elected representatives were then beholden to the constituencies that elevated them. These new politicians turned legislatures into places of horse-trading and pork-barreling. Every new bill was interpreted through each politician’s own interests, and passed only after endless compromises made it acceptable to a sufficiently large bloc of representatives. This naturally lent itself to the formation of political parties, which enabled continuous adhesion between pre-negotiated interest groups across elections.

To us, governance assuming this form seems an obvious outcome—even a virtuous one. We’ve internalized the idea that a just government can only arise from universal representation of all interests, and that liberty is naturally preserved through negotiation and compromise. But to the Founding Fathers, steeped in ideas of “disinterested” virtue, this interplay of interests was not the substance of liberty but the downfall of republicanism. Alexander Hamilton, who led the emerging Federalist faction, was the most opposed to this universal democracy. Unlike his recent portrayal by Ron Chernow (and in song by Lin-Manuel Miranda), Hamilton was a reluctant capitalist and an avowed aristocrat—not a democratizing modernizer. He believed in a strong central government that could issue debt and tax commerce, and he wanted that government led by a strong executive.

Chastened by early democracy, at the Constitutional Convention Hamilton proposed a President and Senate with life terms. His opponents likened these to the King and the House of Lords, and he did not robustly disagree. James Madison reported later he had said “that the British Govt. was the best in the world”: an incendiary statement for an audience of delegates who had been fighting that British government just four years before.

Jeffersonians, however, were no less skeptical of commercial interests and the universal democracy arising from them. Jefferson himself, as we’ve discussed, believed the market was inherently corrosive to personal independence: his vision was a decentralized republic of proprietary wealth. Madison, in Federalist No. 10, conceded that interests were “sown in the nature of man,” and as long as people have liberty, they will form factions. His great fear was a majority faction set on some “improper or wicked project,” and his solution was a representative democracy, where the “better sort” filtered the views of the people and thus restrained majoritarian tyranny.

Thomas Jefferson’s folly was that he never understood the average person. He offered them freedom, but then expected they’d follow his own prescribed path. His rhetoric described democracy, but he never seriously considered that the leaders a democratic America would elect would be quite different from his own expectations. His faith remained blind and naive, deaf to objections from even his closest friend, James Madison. Perhaps this blindness is why his eventual disillusionment was so bitter, so personally affronted. “All, all dead,” he wrote in 1825, “and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not.” Hamilton, his great political enemy, who never had faith in the people, who aimed to free the republic from their vices, wrote his own lament some 23 years earlier: “this American world was not made for me.”

In this, Hamilton was right. America was not made for him, nor Jefferson, nor any of the Founding Fathers, who sought to build an ideal, enlightened state. It was made for the ordinary people who won their freedom by blood and sweat, and who then hoisted a government that aided them in pursuing their own ends. Their America stripped the gentry bare. Shorn of their distinctions, their supposed virtues, their vaunted reputations, their exclusive professions, they were left only as capitalists, indistinguishable from the great sea beside them. Their undoing forged a new equality in America, where, as distinctions of birth, refinement, leisure, and property all fell away, wealth became the only honor remaining. Social mobility simply required accumulating wealth, and all markers of rank were effectively for sale.

The new “aristocracy” forged from this unending churn turned over every generation. The only real distinction they had was wealth. But wealth makes no claims on the interior, nor exalts the intangibles of breeding and character. It does not impose a shared code of honor, nor grant a reputation, nor establish one’s unique personal dignity. And above all, it has no permanence. It can be built in months and lost in seconds. Within a single generation, it can be divided into irrelevance. It describes little but one’s immediate circumstances.

An aristocracy founded on mere wealth is a feeble creature indeed.

The recurring American fear of oligarchs, which Biden invoked again last year, is a mark of the revolution’s final triumph over aristocracy. That revolution birthed a society so imbued with the fundamental equality of all people that it doesn’t even have the vocabulary to imagine one where social rank is preordained. Over the following decades, the cultural memory of aristocracy was erased entirely from the American consciousness to the point that the word itself has lost meaning. This absence has left us unable to understand colonial-era commoners like Devereux Jarratt’s parents, who believed so strongly in society’s imposed hierarchy that they accepted their consigned lowliness as a fact beyond protest.