A National Culture 137was a remarkable organizer and administrator—
patient, thoughtful, conciliatory. In a way, his lack
of genius made his achievements all the more
impressive. He held his forces together in adversity,
avoiding both useless slaughter and catastrophic
defeat. People of all sections, from every walk of
life, looked on Washington as the embodiment of
American virtues: a man of deeds rather than
words; a substantial citizen accustomed to luxury
yet capable of enduring great hardships stoically
and as much at home in the wilderness as an
Indian; a bold Patriot, quick to take arms against
British tyranny, yet eminently respectable. The
Revolution might have been won without
Washington, but it is unlikely that the free United
States would have become so easily a true nation
had he not been at its call.
Benjamin Franklin c. 1794–1802at
myhistorylab.com
A National Culture
Breaking away from Great Britain accentuated cer-
tain trends toward social and intellectual indepen-
dence and strengthened the national desire to
create an American culture. The Anglican Church
in America had to form a new organization once
the connection with the Crown was severed. It
painfully weaned itself from government support,
and in 1786 it became the Protestant Episcopal
Church. The Dutch and German Reformed
churches also became independent of their
European connections. Roman Catholics in
America had been under the administration of the
vicar apostolic of England; after the Revolution,
Father John Carroll of Baltimore assumed these
duties, and in 1789 he became the first American
Roman Catholic bishop.
The impact of post-Revolutionary nationalism
on American education was best reflected in the
immense success of the textbooks of Noah Webster,
later famous for his American dictionary. Webster
was an ardent patriot. “We ought not to consider
ourselves as inhabitants of a particular state only,” he
wrote in 1785, “but as Americans.” Webster’s
famousSpelling Bookappeared in 1783 when he was
a young schoolteacher in Goshen, New York. It
emphasized American forms and usage and con-
tained a patriotic preface urging Americans to pay
proper respect to their own literature. Webster’s
Reader, published shortly thereafter, included selec-
tions from the speeches of Revolutionary leaders,
who, according to the compiler, were the equals of
Cicero and Demosthenes as orators. Some 15 million
copies of the Speller were sold in the next five
View theImagedecades, several times that number by 1900. The
Readerwas also a continuing best-seller.
Webster’s work was not the only sign of nation-
alism in education. In 1787 John M’Culloch pub-
lished the first American history textbook. The
colleges saw a great outburst of patriotic spirit.
King’s College (founded in 1754) received a new
name, Columbia, in 1784. Everywhere it was recog-
nized that the republic required educated and culti-
vated leaders.
Nationalism affected the arts and sciences in the
years after the Revolution. Jedidiah Morse’s popular
American Geography(1789) was a paean in praise of
the “astonishing” progress of the country, all the
result of the “natural genius of Americans.” The
American Academy of Arts and Sciences, founded at
Boston during the Revolution, was created “to
advance the interest, honor, dignity and happiness of
a free, independent and virtuous people.”
American painters and writers of the period
usually chose patriotic themes. The artist John
Trumbull helped capture Dorchester Heights and
force the evacuation of Boston, took part in the
defense of northern New York against Burgoyne,
and fought in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.
When he later took up painting, he went to London
to study technique, but he explored American sub-
jects in such pictures asThe Battle of Bunker’s Hill,
The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown(see
p. 127), and The Declaration of Independence.
Trumbull referred to these and similar efforts as his
“national work.” Joel Barlow intended hisVision of
Columbus, written between 1779 and 1787, to
prove that America was “the noblest and most ele-
vated part of the earth.” Royall Tyler’s playThe
Contrast, which was produced in New York in
1787, compared American virtue (the hero was
called Colonel Manly) with British vice and con-
tained such chauvinistic lines as these:Why should our thoughts to distant countries roam
When each refinement may be found at home?Such fine words betrayed an underlying anxi-
ety. The United States in the 1780s was far from
the powerful centralized nation it has since
become. Probably most citizens still gave their first
loyalty to their own states. In certain important
respects the confederation was pitifully ineffectual.
However, people were increasingly aware of their
common interests and increasingly proud of their
common heritage. The motto of the new nation,
E pluribus unum—“from many, one”—describes a
process that was gradually gathering force in the
years after Yorktown.