Joyce Appleby and the Federalists - Ari Sclar

Had the Federalists passed on their power to like-minded men in 1800, the course of economic development in the United States would have been guided by government officials attentive to the nation’s major investors. The intertwined social and economic prescriptions of a national elite would have informed policies for the country as a whole. Bankers and lenders would have controlled the flow of credit. The pace of settlement would have been slower as land passed first to large speculators as it did in the Federalist era, and then to the farming family. Instead, a new political movement explicitly hostile to the exercise of government authority triumphed and the fiscal stability achieved in Washington’s administration rebounded to the benefit of the very people intent upon liberating themselves from the restrain of their social superiors. Women, blacks, servants, and the indigent [poor] continued to be constrained by law, but no elite group in America would emerge with the power to close off the access of ordinary white men to economic resources.

• Historian Joyce Appleby

1. What is Appleby’s point of view concerning the developments that she describes?

2. What was the ‘new political movement’ that Appleby refers to in the passage and how does it relate to what she means when she refers to ‘fiscal stability achieved in Washington’s administration’?

3. Provide details of two examples from 1800-1840 that would lead Appleby to reach the conclusion that “people intent upon liberating themselves from the restraint of their social superiors [benefited]”?