From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   Gordon S. Wood is Alva O. Way University Professor Emeritus at Brown   
   University. His new book, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic,   
   1789 -1815, offers a brilliant account of the early American Republic which   
   was marked by change in all    
   aspects of American life–in politics, society, economy, and culture. In this   
   excerpt from the introduction, Wood explains how the classic American story,   
   Rip Van Winkle epitomizes this time period.]   
      
   During the second decade of the nineteenth century, writer Washington Irving   
   developed an acute sense that his native land was no longer the same place it   
   had been just a generation earlier. Irving had conservative and nostalgic   
   sensibilities, and he    
   sought to express some of his amazement at the transformation that had taken   
   place in America by writing his story “Rip Van Winkle.” Irving had his   
   character Rip awaken from a sleep that had begun before the Revolution and had   
   lasted twenty years.    
   When Rip entered his old village, he immediately felt lost. The buildings, the   
   faces, the names were all strange and incomprehensible. “The very village   
   was altered–it was larger and more populous,” and idleness, except among   
   the aged, was no    
   longer tolerated. “The very character of the people seemed changed. There   
   was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed   
   phlegm and drowsy tranquility”–a terrifying situation for Rip, who had had   
   “an insuperable    
   aversion to all kinds of profitable labour” Even the language was   
   strange–”rights of citizens–elections–members of Congres   
   –liberty…and other words which were a perfect babylonish jargon to the   
   bewildered Van Winkle.” When people asked    
   him “on which side he voted” and “whether he was Federal or a   
   Democrat,” Rip could only stare “in vacant stupidity.”   
      
   “Rip Van Winkle” became the most popular of Irving’s many stories, for   
   early nineteenth-century Americans could appreciate Rip’s bewilderment.   
   Although superficially the political leadership seemed much the same–on the   
   sign at the village inn    
   the face of George Washington had simply replaced that of George III–   
   beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that “every thing’s   
   changed.” In a few short decades Americans had experienced a remarkable   
   transformation in their society    
   and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened   
   and who they really were.   
   Before the Revolution of 1776 American had been merely a collection of   
   disparate British colonies composed of some two million subjects huddled along   
   a narrow strip of the Atlantic coast–European outposts whose cultural focus   
   was still London, the    
   metropolitan center of the empire. Following the War of 1812 with Great   
   Britain–often called the Second American Revolution–these insignificant   
   provinces had become a single giant continental republic with nearly ten   
   million citizens, many of whom    
   had already spilled into the lands beyond the Appalachian Mountains. The   
   cultural focus of this huge expansive nation was no longer abroad but was   
   instead directed inward at its own boundless possibilities.   
      
   By 1815 Americans had experienced a transformation in the way they related to   
   one another and in the way they perceived themselves and the world around   
   them. And this transformation took place before industrialization, before   
   urbanization, before    
   railroads, and before any of the technological breakthrough usually associated   
   with modern social change. In the decades following the Revolution America   
   changed so much and so rapidly that Americans not only became used to change   
   but came to expect it    
   and prize it.   
      
   The population grew dramatically, doubling every twenty years or so, as it had   
   for several generations, more than twice the rate of growth of any European   
   country. And people were on the move as never before. . .In a single   
   generation Americans occupied    
   more territory than they had occupied during the entire 150 years of the   
   colonial period, and in the process killed or displaced tens of thousands of   
   Indians.   
      
   Although most Americans in 1815 remained farmers living in rural areas, they   
   had become, especially in the North, one of the most highly commercialized   
   people in the world. They were busy buying and selling not only with the rest   
   of the world but    
   increasingly with one another, everyone, it seemed, trying to realize what   
   Niles’ Weekly Register declared was “the almost universal ambition to get   
   forward.” Nowhere in the Western world was business and working for profit   
   more praised and honored.   
      
   This celebration of work made a leisured slaveholding aristocracy in the South   
   more and more anomalous. Slavery was widely condemned, but it did not die in   
   the new United States; indeed, it flourished–but only in the South. It   
   spread across the    
   Southern half of the country, and as it disappeared in the North, it became   
   more deeply entrenched in the Southern economy. In a variety of    
   ays–socially, culturally, and politically–the South began to see itself as   
   a beleaguered minority in the    
   bustling nation.   
      
   All these demographic and commercial changes could not help but affect every   
   aspect of American life. Politics became democratized as more Americans gained   
   the right to vote. The essentially aristocratic world of the Founding Fathers   
   in which gentry    
   leaders stood for election was largely replaced by a very different democratic   
   world, a recognizably modern world of competing professional politicians who   
   ran for office under the banners of modern political parties. Indeed,   
   Americans became so    
   thoroughly democratic that much of the period’s political activity,   
   beginning with the Constitution, was devoted to finding means and devices to   
   tame that democracy. Most important perhaps, ordinary Americans developed a   
   keen sense of their own worth–   
   a sense that, living in the freest nation in the world, they were anybody’s   
   equal. Religion too was democratized and transformed. Not only were most of   
   the traditional European-based religious establishments finally destroyed, but   
   the modern world of    
   many competing Christian denominations was created. By 1815 America had become   
   the most evangelically Christian nation in the world.   
      
      
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