3.11 Developing an American Identity

Having won political independence, many Americans wanted cultural independence too. They tried to show that the new republic could produce its own art and ideas worthy of a great nation.

Painters celebrated the Revolution and its heroes. Charles Willson Peale painted dozens of portraits of Revolutionary leaders, including Washington, and opened a museum in Philadelphia in 1786 to display American natural history and portraits. John Trumbull painted scenes of the Revolution, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence, and Gilbert Stuart painted the portrait of Washington that later appeared on the dollar bill.

Noah Webster believed a new nation needed its own language. His spelling book (1783), known as the 'Blue-Backed Speller', taught generations of children to read and promoted simpler American spellings such as 'color' instead of 'colour' and 'center' instead of 'centre'. He later published his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828).

Writers explored what it meant to be American. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), the French-born writer J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur asked 'What is an American?' and described people of many European backgrounds blending into a new people. Phillis Wheatley, who had been enslaved, published a book of poems in 1773 and later wrote praising Washington. Mercy Otis Warren wrote plays and later a history of the Revolution.

Americans connected their republic to the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. Neoclassical architecture, with columns, domes and symmetry modeled on ancient buildings, became the style of the new government. Jefferson designed the Virginia State Capitol in 1785, modeled on a Roman temple in France. The US Capitol and the President's House (later the White House) were begun in the 1790s in Washington, D.C., in neoclassical styles.

New national symbols spread too: the Great Seal with its eagle and the motto E pluribus unum ('out of many, one'), Fourth of July celebrations, and the near-worship of Washington as a national hero.

National identity grew alongside, not instead of, older loyalties. Many people still thought of their state as their 'country', and regional differences in economy, religion and slavery stayed strong (3.12).

The new identity also excluded many. The Naturalization Act of 1790 limited citizenship by naturalization to 'free white persons'. Republican motherhood gave white women a role as teachers of republican virtue in the home (3.6), but not political rights. Native nations and enslaved African Americans were outside the national community, even as African Americans and Native peoples built their own identities and communities.