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Professor JOYCE APPLEBY (Author, "Inheriting the Revolution: The
First Generation of Americans): Well, it was a long time
gestating--gestating. It--I'm an early American historian and so I'd
studied 17th and 18th century America, the colonies, and then I'd
particularly been interested in the American Revolution and the era of
the writing of the Constitution and then I became very curious about
what happened to this revolutionary heritage. How did it turn into a
heritage? What difference did it make to the lives of those people
who were the sons and daughters of the revolutionaries? And
that--that was the beginning, that question, and it took me--it took
me a couple of years to figure out the best way for me to answer it.

LAMB: So what period are you writing about?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I'm really writing about--oh, the 1790s through
the 1820s, a little bit into the 1830s. But, as you know, I'm writing
about a cohort of people and so what I decided to do was to study
those men and women who were born between 1776 and 1800 because they
would not have any contact with--would not have had any contact with
the colonial era. They would have none of the sensibilities of having
been subjects to the king of England and they were the inheritors of
the revolution and so I followed their lives and I really stopped when
I figured that they were no longer the dominant force in public life.
And that's--that's about the end, the late '20s, early '30s.

LAMB: Where did you find the material?

Prof. APPLEBY: Everywhere actually. I, first of all, just began to
collect information about individuals. I knew I wanted to build it up
through lives and so wherever--there were dictionaries, there were,
you know, a list of West Point graduates. There were the, you know,
pioneer ministers of the disciples of Christ. Wherever I could find
information about individuals, I gathered it. And then I discovered
that about 300--oh, about 350, 360 of these people in this cohort had
written autobiographies and that was a wonderful resource. So I
s--set about reading those autobiographies.

LAMB: Define the word `cohort.'

Prof. APPLEBY: Cohort is--well, you know, it's a military term.
It--it means that people who have--a band of people who have a
similarity. Demographers use cohort to mean people who are born at a
particular time. So I use that--cohort interchangeably with
generation. These people, as I said, who were born in the 24 years
after the revolution.

LAMB: How many people lived in this country in 1800?

Prof. APPLEBY: In 1800, about eight million. The first census was
1790. It was just shy--oh, I'm sorry. No. No. No. Yeah--no. It
would have been more like six--six million. The first census,
the--the population was just shy of four million. And the American
population doubled about every 20 years. So in between, as you're
saying 1800, it would have been around six million.

LAMB: What--where did they live? I mean, w--or maybe where didn't
they live?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, pretty much--well th--well--well, they lived in
what you might call sort of the Appalachian shelf--that--that Atlantic
shelf between the Appalachian Mountains and the Atlantic Ocean.
That's where they started out living. It was--it was a little bit in
the West, but not a great deal, because the revolution prevented
migration into the West. But once the Revolutionary War had been won,
then you had a outpouring of people from this little shelf--this
confined area up and down the Atlantic Coast into the western parts of
the original states. New York--western New York was the frontier of
the 1790s, in the early decades of the 19th century, but also western
Virginia, western Georgia, western Pennsylvania.

LAMB: What was the difference between the North and the South then?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well interestingly, the most important difference
between North and South is a consequence of events that were--that
took place after the revolution. After the revolution in--as--and it
was no part of the revolution, directly at least. After the
revolution, the states--the Northern states one by one found the means
for abolishing slavery. Prior to that, slavery had been--existence
everywhere though obviously much more concentrated in the South. So
you could say that slavery was the big difference between the two, but
there were lots of other differences. One of them is that the
Southerners had pursued a very profitable intensive monoagriculture.
Maybe it was rice one place or tobacco another place. That was
different, where there was much more of a mixed economy in the North.

But I started to say about Northern abolition--that had a tremendous
ideological and social impact on the North and differentiated it from
the South in a very conspicuous way, because now it wasn't just the
paucity of slaves in the North, it was an actual moral stance having
been taken against slavery.

LAMB: How many slaves were there in the North?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm. Goodness. That's a question I'm not prepared to
answer. A quarter--let me give you some figures--a quarter of the
working population in Manhattan was enslaved. I know that. In the
New England states, it was about 4 percent to 6 percent of the
population. If--in Pennsylvania, it might be 10 percent to 12
percent. New York: 16 percent, 18 percent. New Jersey--about that.
So...

LAMB: What was the impetus to get rid of the slaves or take them out
of slavery?

Prof. APPLEBY: I--the impetus was very much a sense of the
contradiction between the natural rights affirmed in--in America's
founding, in the Declaration of Independence. It was a--it was a--a
dramatic move. It was the first legislative act abolishing slavery in
the history of the world. It's in--interesting that England gets
credit for being the first country to abolish slavery because the
United States as a whole didn't abolish it, but these states had--the
Constitution left the states in control of having laws that created
property in human beings or abol--getting rid of those laws. So
actually the state of Pennsylvania, in 1780, was the first political
unit to abolish slavery.

LAMB: Why didn't that happen in the South?

Prof. APPLEBY: It didn't happen in the South because there wasn't
the same drive to do it. There was a m--and there were many, many
more slaves in the South--th--about 40 percent of Virginia's
population, which is a--far and away the largest state in the Union
was African-American. South Carolina had a slave majority--more like
60 percent of the population. So there were many more complicated
problems associated with abolishing slavery in the South. And as I
said, it didn't have the same group of--of reformers--anti-slavery
reformers. But there was anti-slavery agitation in the South. North
and South the contradiction between slavery and the Declaration of
Independence was evident and spoken about, but it was just a much more
difficult--th--in so many different ways it would have been harder
because in the s--the North, there was a--a small free black
population to grudgingly integrate into the white population.

One thing--interesting things about Northern abolition is that it was
gradual. It was peaceful and it was gradual. Typically, a state
would, you know, pass a law that would say: All slaves will be--born
after this date will be free when they reach the age of 21 for women,
or 24 for men. So it was a gradual way. They--there--it would have
been difficult to have a gradual emancipation in the South, or at
least it would have been straining the moral and economic resources of
the South in a way that it wasn't in the North.

LAMB: Did you write about people that were born in this country?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. There...

LAMB: They didn't--they didn't come here from somewhere else.

Prof. APPLEBY: There are a couple of people who float through who
come--who immigrate in the 1790s, but it's--yes,
primarily--overwhelmingly about people born here.

LAMB: How many autobiographies did you read for this book?

Prof. APPLEBY: I read about 220. The...

LAMB: How long were those?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, they could be 17 pages or two volumes. They
get...

LAMB: And where--and where do you find them?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, fortunately someone before me has made a
bibliography of American autobiographies, which I used to find them;
though I did find some on my own. Some of them are still in
manuscript, but most of them have been published. Sometimes they're
published by grandchildren or they're published by an historical
society.

LAMB: What was your biggest--or--or a couple of your surprises
that--in them and what were the names of the people? Anybody.

Prof. APPLEBY: You mean in the lives of them?

LAMB: In all the lives you found.

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, Icabod Washburn was a--had a life that I was
bou--rather fascinating. Cumulative, there were more surprises.
Julia Tevis was a big surprise. A really fascinating woman.

LAMB: Who was she?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, she was a--a young woman who was born in the
Kentucky frontier, but her father was a German. His name was
Aronamous, so she was born Julia Aronamous, and he had a very advanced
idea of the importance of education for his children, including
his--his daughters, and he brought--came back to Washington, DC, from
Kentucky because he didn't think they could get the proper education.
And then her father subsequently dies and a brother also dies, so she
becomes the supporter of her mother and younger sister and she becomes
a school teacher. She's converted by a Methodist minister and marries
a Methodist circuit writer.

And the most amazing thing is that on her honeymoon she convinces her
husband to give her the wedding gift from his family of a house and to
turn that house into a school for girls. And she converts it into the
Science Hill Academy. She used the word `science' because she wants
to demonstrate that women can learn about science just as men. And
for the next 60 years, she runs this school. Sh--her first child--she
has seven children. Her first child is born a couple of months after
the school is opened. But just this vision that she had and the
determination and the sense that there was an opportunity and she
figured out how she could act on it.

LAMB: Why did they write the autobiographies?

Prof. APPLEBY: I think they wrote the autobiographies for a number
of reasons. One of them is that their lives saw dramatic changes.
A--a--this is the age of invention. This is when people
could--for--for th--be born and never see anything more complicated
than a windmill and end up with railroads and steam engines doing
everything. So there was--there were dazzling technological changes.
There was a sense of being a part of a--of a new country and this
American experiment. They--all of them were modest successes. People
who are failures don't write autobiographies. So they wrote to tell
generat--their family what they had seen, how the times they had a
changed and also to register their accomplishments.

LAMB: Did they publish these autobiographies?

Prof. APPLEBY: Some of them do, but most of them are published after
their deaths.

LAMB: So they were done for what reason...

Prof. APPLEBY: So it's a mixed bag.

LAMB: ...just--just to have on the record for the families?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I think--I think Benjamin Franklin
had something of a--of an influence. I think that--that was one of
the first autobiographies and I think it was sort of a model. Here
was an American that you would like to emulate, who had put down
information about his childhood and what he had seen and how he had
grown and developed.

LAMB: Can you parallel the public figures that were revolutionary vs.
the ones that you're thinking about?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Well, I mean, you know, there are all the--the
John Adamses, Thomas Jeffersons, James Madison, all of those
are--would be parents or grandparents of the people that I am looking
at. The political figures in my cohort are the presidents: John
Tyler, Benjamin Harrison, Martin Van Buren, John Calhoun, Daniel
Webster, Henry Clay. These are the--the political stars of this
generation.

LAMB: Where did you write the book--what part of the country?

Prof. APPLEBY: In Los Angeles--west Los Angeles.

LAMB: What do you do out there?

Prof. APPLEBY: I teach history.

LAMB: At--at...

Prof. APPLEBY: The University of California at Los Angeles.

LAMB: UCLA.

Prof. APPLEBY: UCLA, yeah.

LAMB: How long have you done that?

Prof. APPLEBY: I've taught history for 33 years and I've been at
UCLA since 1981.

LAMB: Why history?

Prof. APPLEBY: You know, I think--I have a theory about people and
why they become what they become. I think there are about four basic
ways to understand reality or understand the world. One of them is,
obviously. through measuring and it, you know, it appeals to people
who are--who be--who become scientists of observation and measurement.
Another one is clearly a religious sensibility. There's also, I
think, a poetic and imaginative way of grasping reality. And another
is to understand what has gone before--to see what human beings in
very different times and different places have created out of this
human potential. And there are just people who are naturally curious
historically and I'm one of them.

LAMB: When did you start being curious?

Prof. APPLEBY: I--I was a history major as an undergraduate and I
think I was curious before then, though I tended to satisfy my
curiosity by reading novels. Nineteenth century novels taught me an
awful lot about the past.

LAMB: What book is this, what number for you?

Prof. APPLEBY: Four and a third.

LAMB: What were the others about?

Prof. APPLEBY: I wrote one about economic thought in 17th century
England. It was a kind of--that was the first book that I published.
I did by doctoral dissertation on how the French used American ideas
in their--the opening months of the French Revolution and that I
published as articles. And then I did a study of economic thought in
England which was tied into America. I was interested in--in how
Americans had come to conceive of soci--society as having a natural
harmony--what--what was--what was behind Americans' belief in limited
government and an expansive ambit for voluntary action and individual
ambition. And so it took me back to economic writings in 17th century
England.

And then I wrote a book about the Jeffersonians in the 1790s, the
battle with the Federalists. The battle royal in American politics is
the--is the battle that changed am--this--the direction of the
American Revolution and has informed our political system ever since.
And then my third book--that is to say my one-third book--I did with
co-authors Lynn Hunt and Marcus Jacob and it's called "Telling the
Truth About History." And it's a study of what we expect from history
and historians, what kind of knowledge and truths we seek in the past.

LAMB: There were three little things--maybe they're not so little,
but they're symbols that you write about that--for instance, was it
John Adams that developed the Mister President title?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm--no, he--no, he lost.

LAMB: He made th--it was--but it was decided during...

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Right. Yes. Yes.

LAMB: ...during--what--what did he want?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, I think he wanted `your excellently,' `his
highness,' `the protector of our liberties,' something like that.

LAMB: Why?

Prof. APPLEBY: Because he believed as--he was a cons--he was a
conservative revolutionary and he believed that order was fragile and
that in order to maintain order, you had to en--create some awe
between the people and their officeholders. And the president he saw
as the pre-eminent officeholder in America and he thought that the
president needed all the respect and honor, adulation and obeisance
almost possible in order to keep this frail republic intact.

LAMB: Who--who beat him on this?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, the--the--the people who later became
Jeffersonians. They weren't that yet in the first Congress. They
came as just elected men from their neighborhood. They weren't
clearly defined by party yet. But there were people like James
Madison. Others just thought this was laughable. It was just
ridiculous.

LAMB: Well, you say that--was it Madison or his wife that wanted the
"Hail to the Chief"?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes, that was later.

LAMB: And why was that? What was the...

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, let me--let me start with that. So--so they
won the battle and--and they settled with Mister President. You
couldn't have a--a--a sparer title for that. Then fast forward to the
presidency of James Madison. James Madison was a small man. He
was--people described him as sort of birdlike. Always in a black
suit. And m--Dolly Madison noticed that when the president and she
arrived at various receptions around Washington, that no one paid any
attention to the fact the president had entered the room and this
disturbed her. And so she arranged and worked with someone to have
"Hail to the Chief" written and performed wherever there was a
reception to--to which her husband was going. And so that's how "Hail
to the Chief" came. But those--those are--they're similar, but
they're also different. And--but, yes I guess you could say that she
was concerned with the same issue that had bothered Adams, but after
the informality had--had entered in to a degree that seemed alarming.

LAMB: And then you wrote about Thom--Thomas Jefferson being
interested in getting rid of the wig, getting rid of the bow.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: What's that about?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I think Jefferson was very, very shrewd. And
he saw that if you wanted to have democratic politics and you wanted
to have participatory politics where voters were not just
opinion-givers at--on Election Day but active participants in the
political process, informed and giving opinions and sharing
information, that you had to collapse the distance between
officeholders and voters so that there wasn't this awe that made
people tongue-tied.

So he did everything he could to remove formality from the presidency.
If the doorbell rang and he was near the door, he opened it. If he
was still in his morning coat, he opened it still. He got rid of all
the protocol. There was a--protocol at state dinners was that the
president usually entered the dining room when the dinner was served
with the wife of the ambassador of Great Britain on his arm, and then
the ambassador would come with the president's hostess on his arm, a
wife if there was a wife. Jefferson had the rule: He who is next to
the door goes in first. This created a diplomatic flap because the
ambassador of Great Britain was just outraged at this.

LAMB: Again, you--you're writing about people who were born between
1776 and 1800.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: So the focus--the years that you're really focused of them
being old enough to be involved, would be what?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I would say really the first three decades of
the 19th century.

LAMB: 1800 to 1830?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I have material on the 1790s
because it's a very tumultuous decade and it's important, and there
are some of them who, by that time, are in their 20s. But, yes, most
of the action.

LAMB: Give us a profile on what the United States looked like in
those 30 years: people, where they had come from, what their religion
was.

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, to give a profile of a country that was as
rambunctious as American society in those decades is going to be very
hard. I can give you some snapshots. In 1810, a third of the
Americans lived in new communities. Never have we had that many
people in--on the frontier. So it was a--a society in motion, moving
West, moving into the cities. The American cities double;
they're--they're doubling in population every 10 years when the nation
as a whole takes 20 years.

Religion, too, is just going through an exuberant period; it's what
historians refer to as the Second Great Awakening. But what happened
is that the old-line churches lost their financial support. In time,
all churches in America are turned into voluntary associations. And
the people are moving West, and there are no churches going with them.
It's--it's expensive.

LAMB: What--what are the old-line churches?

Prof. APPLEBY: The Episcopalian Church, which was the Church of
England; the Presbyterian Church; the Congregational Church is a
dominant church in New England. Those are the old-line churches. The
Methodists are a new group that grew--they began in the--the bosom of
the Church of England, but they break with the Church of England, they
break with Episcopalians, become a separate mesc--Methodist Episcopal
Church in America.

And then the Baptists--now there had always been Baptists in America,
but they were very small sects. But they--what's happened is that
these--the Methodists and the Baptists have the means to reach the
people in the West who are going west without churches and after five,
10 years, are unchurched. Their children are unbaptized; they're
getting married without marriage ceremonies. And there is a thirst
for religion. And you have these often unskilled--I shouldn't say
unskilled--uneducated preachers; they do have a skill and a talent and
a calling to preach. But you have them going into the frontier and
preaching and creating converts and building new churches. So
religiously for these--at this time, you have a proliferation of
sects. They finally pull back and don't maintain the distinction
between church and sect and call them all denominations.

LAMB: As you know, a quarter of the population today is Catholic, and
about six million of the population are Jewish. When did the Jews and
the Catholics come to the United States?

Prof. APPLEBY: There--there--the first Jewish congregation came in
the 17th century, actually. It came from Brazil to New York City.
But that population--the Jewish population, I mean, was very small.
There's several people in my cohort who are Jewish, but it's very
small. And that population, the real Jewish immigration doesn't come
till the end of the 19th century.

Catholic population, there are some Catholics with the Irish
population that came in the 18th century, but many more Scotch-Irish,
as they were called, who were Presbyterians. Catholic immigration
begins in the 1840s, with the potato famine and--and other
dislocations in Ireland, and then also in Germany. So you don't have
very much--let me just--this also is a period with the lowest
foreign-born population in American--percentage in American history;
about only 3 percent are foreign, and most of those are slaves who've
come in with the opening up of the slave trade, the brief opening up.

LAMB: And I--I just saw a figure, I think it's like 9 1/2 percent now
foreign-born in the country.

Prof. APPLEBY: Right.

LAMB: And there were times when it was a lot larger than that.

Prof. APPLEBY: Much larger. At the end of the 19th, early 20th
century, it was--two-thirds of the people in American cities at the
end of the 19th century were either foreigners or foreign-born.

LAMB: What did they do for a living?

Prof. APPLEBY: Who, all the people?

LAMB: Back in--back--back in those--those three decades.

Prof. APPLEBY: They farmed. They farmed; overwhelmingly rural. But
it's the beginning of a shift out of the rural areas and into commerce
and into manufacturing, into the professions, into preaching,
teaching, becoming a lawyer. These are all growing, because the
society is becoming more intensely commercial, and that's creating the
need for an infrastructure of--of teachers. Literacy fi--is--is
moving up. It...

LAMB: Was there electricity?

Prof. APPLEBY: No, no electricity.

LAMB: Were there railroads?

Prof. APPLEBY: No, not yet. The first railroad is, I think, 1832,
the B&O. They're--you know, they're just beginning. There're canals.
The Erie Canal was the great engineering triumph. It s--opened in
1825. That--there--and there're roads. There's a national road;
there are post roads; there are toll roads. They're doing everything
they can to connect the country in a transportation system. There is
a steamboat which finally enables the--the Western farmers to get
their boats back up the Mississippi and the--and the Ohio.

LAMB: You say that--that women and couples had lots of children, like
there was a--once there was, I remember, as many as nine children on
average per family.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes, yes. There's a pretty high mortality rate,
though. It's unusual to have a big family. The average number, I
think the demographic figures, the average number of children is about
seven point something at the beginning of the 19th century, and it's
dropped to four by the end. So there are some big families. But
there are also--I have lots of families that are just--children wiped
out by diphtheria or tuberculosis or cholera. I mean, so it's--it's a
mixed picture; it's not--it's not even. And that's true of just about
everything about this generation.

LAMB: Who got educated?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, in the North, almost everyone, including free
blacks got three years of three-month schooling. That was the goal,
to teach reading, writing and ciphering. South, it would be many
fewer, but there were lots of academies for planters' children in the
South. What's fascinating about teaching is that--illiteracy--is that
teaching was the great s--bridge for talented boys and even some
talented girls to get off the family farm, then if they were good at
book learning, they could become teachers, and then a year or two they
could move into one of the new areas, perhaps become a lawyer, move on
to becoming a newspaper editor, a clerk in a store. It's fascinating
what teaching offered young people.

LAMB: How big was the military?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, the military was very, very small. It swells
at the time of the War of 1812. I think at the end of the war, there
were about 70,000 in the Army. They quickly d--demobilize and get
down to a force of about 13,000, 14,000. West Point is founded in--in
the first decade of the 19th century.

LAMB: And how important was the--if you were in the military back in
those years, were you a big deal?

Prof. APPLEBY: You were in the War of 1812. It created a lot of--of
particularly Naval heroes. I don't think so. I don't think it was
terribly important. I think at time of war, yes, you had some heroes.
What you did have the military doing is teaching men civil
engineering, and the Army virtually lent civil engineers to railroad
companies and to canal companies and to expeditions--expedition that
found Yellowstone, Stephen Long's expedition. So there were many ways
that military people participated in the economic life.

LAMB: Would you have liked to have lived back then?

Prof. APPLEBY: No. I love my own time.

LAMB: What do you think would be the major differences?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, a much more circumscribed role for women, which
I couldn't help but think of instantly.

LAMB: Could you have taught school back then?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm, but I couldn't have taught at the
university. I couldn't have been a scholar. There are very--I don't
think there are any women who were scholars. There were certainly
some brilliant women.

LAMB: You couldn't have voted, or could you in some places?

Prof. APPLEBY: I could have in New Jersey for a brief period, if I
had property and no husband.

LAMB: Why no property--I mean, why property and no husband?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, because the way the law was written, it would
be--there was a property qualification, and they didn't put in that
you had to be a man. And so women voted. But women only controlled
their property if they didn't have a husband, and so it was mainly
wealthy widows who voted. And then that was changed, and then `women'
wa--was put in and the vote was taken away from them.

LAMB: How many states in the early 1800s?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, about 26. They move up to about 26. They're
coming along very rapidly. Vermont comes in, Ohio and Alabama and
Mississippi and Indiana and...

LAMB: Who could vote?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, that ch--the voting is determined by states,
and so that d--could be--it'd be very different.
African-American--free African-Americans vote in New Hampshire and
Massachusetts all through this period. They voted in North Carolina,
and then it was taken away from them. There is a movement to begin to
have white male suffrage, but it--in 1850, Virginia still has property
qualifications. Vermont comes in with no slavery and no property
qualifications. So it's a patchwork quilt. But the--the move, the
thrust is for free white men to be able to vote.

LAMB: Someplace you say that a black could not be a mailman?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, postmaster, I think it was. There--the--the
Congress passed very--very differently--I mean, you--a black couldn't
be in the Marines, but a black could be in the Army or the Navy. They
were very different. Again, it's kind of featurive of the United
States, and partly because we have states and federal government.
It's--it's--has to be quite specific to the place and time.

LAMB: Don't know where the exact numbers are, but I remember
you--back in those years, that a member of Congress represented
something like 33,000 people where today it's over 600,000.

Prof. APPLEBY: Right. Right.

LAMB: And then you said there was a big jump between the number of
members in the House. You know, there had been 435 members of the
House since...

Prof. APPLEBY: Right. Right, right. Right.

LAMB: ...like, 1912 or something like that. But back then, it went
from 100 to a couple hundred.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Right, because they changed the--the--the
proportions, and that often was done after the census was taken. But
it was--what I estimated also, I think in that same business about
33,000 people, that the actual voters were more like 6,000, and the
voting pool would be the candidate pool. And that's
pretty--that's--you could know those people in your district. You
could know all the voters if you were out there as a politician and
interested.

LAMB: You built up a--a kind of a--a battle between the Federalists
and the non-Federalists.

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm, that's right.

LAMB: Who would have been a Federalist back in those early 1800
years, and what would that have meant?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, the Federalist is the party that--that wrote
the Constitution. Its most lu--illustrious members are George
Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton. And, by and large, these
were men who were conservative. They wanted to retain what they'd
gained in the Revolution, but they believed in order, and they thought
that order was fragile. And they really wanted to have a Great
Britain cleansed of the impurities and corruptions of Great Britain.

Now Thomas Jefferson wa--and--and I use him to stand in for other
people, but he was so far and away the important figure here--saw this
as a--just a terrible loss if the Revolution in America just stopped
at being another Great Britain, and he wanted to see a revolution in
the sense of creating a new kind of society that was thoroughly
democratized, where there was political participation, where there was
free speech. He wanted to animate the--the--the public. He--and he
very much wanted religious toleration, and he was very interested in
scientific speculation.

But he had this idea that human beings--and he--we have to say he
really meant white men had been shackled down, they'd been burdened by
hierarchies: hierarchies in the church, hierarchies at home and the
father, hierarchies in politics. And if you could just get rid of
those hierarchies, you would release the energy that's just bubbling
in there, in each human being. So he challenges Washington's
administration, and they do it around such issues as political
participation, forming political clubs, free speech. The Federalists
then pass laws to restrict free speech, alien sedition laws. So it
thoroughly politicizes this generation, these battles of the 1790s.

And because democratic politics is new, men take political disputes as
an inf--impugning their honor. I think you may have read in there how
important dueling was; `important' sort of the wrong word, but
how--what a prominent part dueling plays because these men aren't used
to disagreeing. They don't have a concept of an issue, something that
good men can disagree on.

LAMB: You wrote that it's something like 100 people in politics have
been killed.

Prof. APPLEBY: That's--that's--that's what one of the newspapers
estimates, and I find duels everywhere, and they're al--and the
amazing thing is that three-quarters of these duels, according to
contemporaries, were over politics. They weren't over gambling debts
or women, which was typical in Europe. They were about
politics--being on the opposite side in politics, getting up
and--and--and slurring someone in a speech because of his support of a
Navy or a salt tax or a--a road to be built a certain place.

LAMB: Alexander--I mean, Andrew Jackson.

Prof. APPLEBY: Andrew Jackson was--was known as a dueler.

LAMB: Killed somebody.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Yes. Indeed. In fact, it was--this was
particularly awful because the young man's gun--it was a much younger
man--gun was--was--misfired, so he had to just stand there while
Jackson points his gun and kills him. But, yes. I mean, so the--the
Federalists--to get back to your question, so the Federalists in the
early part of the 19th century were dramatically defeated by
Jefferson. Not that it was a landslide; it was very even. But
they're so astounded that they would be turned out of office, and then
after that they are the conservers of a more traditional set of
political values.

LAMB: You mention that after the War of 1812 veterans received 160
acres of land.

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

LAMB: How did that work? And what impact did that have on where
people went in those years?

Prof. APPLEBY: It had a big--another surge forward into the West.
Some veterans would sell those bounties--they might set up a store and
sell the bounty. So there was always a brisk trade in the--the paper
involved in--in land. But, in fact, most of them went west, and
that's when you have these states of the Northwest and the old
Southwest coming into the Union.

LAMB: There's a quote you have here from John Adams, "Americans are
ambitious because the lowest can aspire as much as the highest." Why
did that happen in this country and say, not in Britain or not in
other European countries?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I think in part because of this Jeffersonian
challenge that just--it chal--it broadly challenged not only politics,
but the social forms of hierarchy. Also, just as you asked me about
how many people were living there, there were four million of them,
they're on the edge of a very, very fertile continent, so they have
the opportunity--indeed, everybody wants to see them be ambitious--and
then the nation is--is forming at a time of economic development--the
beginning of the--of industrialization, of trade, of finance, of the
professions. So it's a very fortuitous convergence of developments.

LAMB: What impact did the printed word have back then?

Prof. APPLEBY: Enormous impact. And that's, I would say, probably
as important a story as any that I tell in this book is the--the way
in which Americans are knit together--this--countries were just
scattered over this continent--is knit together with print. It's--the
publishing becomes cheap, printing becomes cheap. America acquires
all of the printing mach--machinery to do its own printing. Literacy
is high. The importance of commerce means that people--boys and girls
need to learn to read and write. And then they are l--reading is an
entertainment. It br--85 percent of them live in rural areas. Books
and pamphlets and--and songs--printed songs--brings the world into
them--into the...

LAMB: Did anybody have an unusual amount of concentration of power
back then in the print?

Prof. APPLEBY: No. No. There--there are lots of publishers, lots
of printers. They tend to--oodles of printers. I started to do
something on printers; there were too many of them to handle. There
are just hundreds and hundreds of printers, and newspapers. In 1822,
Americans are buying more issues of the newspaper than any country in
the world regardless of size, regardless of population. It's just a
phenomena. Foreigners are just dazzled by this. They say everybody
reads the newspaper. The little African-American bootblack reads the
newspaper, the woman who's hocking fruit reads the newspaper, fathers
read the newspaper to their children at breakfast.

LAMB: You say there were 371 dailies in 1810.

Prof. APPLEBY: That's a lot. That--that's a coun--a country of
eight million.

LAMB: What about education? How--was there college?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes, there were seven colonial colleges, and then
after the Revolution there are a number of new colleges that are
formed. In my period you have the beginning of the state
universities. So there are--I don't know--I don't--I hesitate to
guess--probably 30 or 40 by the end of my period. And, of course, the
religious revivals inspire colleges, because groups wish to have their
boys and girls reared in the--in their church and learn th--do their
actual secular learning in a religious environment. And then, of
course, there are seminaries for preachers.

LAMB: There is not a chapter you have in here where slavery doesn't
come up.

Prof. APPLEBY: No, it's everywhere.

LAMB: Was it everywhere when you found your material from back then?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: They talk about.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes, they talk about it. It is the problem that they
cannot resolve. Absolutely. It is fascinating. I think
what's--what's--one of the fascinating things is that the Founding
Fathers and the next generation, they knock out slavery where it's
weakest and they leave it where it's strongest. And they almost make
the Civil War inevitable by doing that.

LAMB: And how did that happen?

Prof. APPLEBY: Wa--well, it happened because they--there were
reformers who took the initiative and abolished slavery in the North,
and the absence of slavery in the North not only meant that they
didn't have slaves, it meant that it freed Northerners to imagine a
world without slaves, to write critically of slavery. If slavery had
still been in the m--in their midst in the North, you wouldn't have
had people being so freely critical of it. I--so I think it's both
the absence in the North and the presence in the South that keeps it
in the public eye. And then, of course, there are vocal anti-slavery
people. Congress opens each session, and there are a bunch of
petitions, some of them from free blacks, some of them from Quakers.
They can't get away from it. Southerners are just enraged that
this--that this, their institution which they understand and want to
wall off, is--is having--you know, is being examined and criticized by
former slaves.

LAMB: What was the American Colonization Society?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, that's a group that forms to resettle free
blacks in Africa. They're actually the founders of Liberia on the
west coast of Africa, like Sierra Leone was founded by Great Britain
in order to prev--provide a haven for former slaves that the British
freed in--during the--the American Revolution. The Colonization
Society attracted a lot of attention as a possible solution to the
problem of slavery in America, because the problem was twofold. It
was not only the existence of this hideous and degrading institution,
which was now being publicly exposed, but there was a problem of white
America's disin--being disinclined to live in a biracial society. So
the thought was, `Well, what if we repatriate free slaves, send them
back to Africa?' And indeed a couple of thousand do go back and form
the nucleus of Liberia. But it's--it's--it's a fantasy solution. The
population of slavery is, you know, doubling every 20 years.

LAMB: Some big names in history--Henry Clay and later on Abraham
Lincoln--were for this idea?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes, they were. It's...

LAMB: Why do you think they were for it?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, Clay, I can sort of understand. Lincoln is more
difficult. I--it--I suppose it offered some hope of solving a problem
that--that seemed too big for anyone to solve. It's--it's perplexing
to me, it really is, because it is--if you just sat down with a pencil
and paper and counted up the number of slaves in America and the
number of boats it would take, wha--there was no organization that
could have transplanted all of the slaves back to Africa.

LAMB: And the total number of slaves in the United States in these
early 1800 years?

Prof. APPLEBY: A million moving to four million by the time of the
revo--of the Civil War.

LAMB: Now I remember a figure you had in here of 197 free
blacks--197,000 free blacks.

Prof. APPLEBY: Right. Right. There are about 500,000 by the end of
my period.

LAMB: By the end of your period?

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: Could have the s--they have the same rights as everybody else?

Prof. APPLEBY: No. Their s--their citizenship is circumscribed very
definitely, again, depending upon the states. They could not serve in
the militia, and this often prevented them from voting. It was really
a catch-22. They couldn't vote because they couldn't serve in the
militia. And also the--they were often in the--in court action. They
couldn't be witnesses against a white person, which was very difficult
for people in business, because if they didn't have a bill paid to
them, they didn't have the same access to the courts. In other--free
blacks, their lives, their civic personality was circumscribed
dramatically.

LAMB: You write that Washington Irving coined the phrase `the
almighty dollar.'

Prof. APPLEBY: Yeah, isn't that interesting?

LAMB: What was the reason?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I think that--that Americans w--contemporaries
said they were money mad. Does that surprise us? I mean, it--it was
a very ebullient economy, they were all--there was this release of
ordinary ambition and there was this sort of scrambling for land. In
the South you had a scrambling for land and slaves. But the
Southerners managed to keep this out of public view. In the North it
was much more open, and this was new; this was novel. It wasn't
refined. It wasn't restrained the way it had been, and people were
shocked at this open avidity for gain.

LAMB: Where did it come from?

Prof. APPLEBY: `Almighty dollar'?

LAMB: No, the idea of...

Prof. APPLEBY: The--the--the...

LAMB: ...the--the rush for money. I mean, that comes up in
your--materialism.

Prof. APPLEBY: I--I think it came from the absence of restraints. I
think it m--it meant that people could follow their ambition and they
could be--they could brag about it at the tavern, they could talk
about it in the parlor. And maybe there were some people who were
outraged that they were doing this. I mean, people of taste, no
doubt, you know, were offended. But it was the--the arbiters--the
social arbiters had been dismissed. They had been sent home, sent
away, and the public was pretty much open to whatever group was out
there and wanted to do something in the public.

LAMB: Any other place in the world like it then?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't think so. No, not at all. I think it was
remarkable. And foreign travelers attest to its remarkable status. I
mean, they were fascinated.

LAMB: Did you read the Franny Trollope stuff and the...

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: ...Charles Dickens? And what did they find when they came
here?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, they found much of what I'm reporting. They
found a society that was intoxicatingly free. They saw things that
they--that they loved. They s--they loved this outpouring of human
energy. They loved to see these associations that were forming. But
they were appalled at--at other things like the scramble for money or
the--the servants' lack of respect appalled everyone. Servants in
America were saucy. They wouldn't accept the word `servants'; they
were `help.' That was an Americanism that the British thought was just
ridiculous; you don't have servants. So they--there was a mixed
report. It--it was a society in which the--all the arrows were not
pointing in the same direction.

LAMB: Where did the rush for temperance come from?

Prof. APPLEBY: I think it came from--well, obviously, the religious
revivals had a lot to do with it, because you're not in control of
yourself if you're--if you drink too much. And--and the Revolutionary
generation drank a lot, way more than we drink today. And so I think
there was this desire for more control; the control had religious
impetus, but I also think that it had to do with ambition. If you
have a plan, a life plan, and you want to succeed in that life
plan--this is not an easy society to get ahead in; it takes a lot of
hard work--it's incompatible with drinking in the morning or drinking
in the afternoon, whereas in the old society, in an artisan's shop, as
a printing shop, the youngest apprentice went out at--at 10:30 and
came back with a bottle of--of liquor, and then at 2:00 they went out.
I mean, there--no one ever built a ship or raised a house without
providing liquor for the--for the workers.

So drink was--was, you know, just implicated in all the--it--everyday
routines, and I think it became incompatible with many people's sense
of--of how to--how to get what they want, how to get ahead, how to do
what they--activate their plans.

LAMB: How far did the restrictions go?

Prof. APPLEBY: Restrictions on drink?

LAMB: Yeah.

Prof. APPLEBY: It was all voluntary. It was...

LAMB: They did--they didn't s--it wasn't like Prohibition?

Prof. APPLEBY: No, no, no.

LAMB: They didn't--they didn't stop?

Prof. APPLEBY: No, no, no. No. No. The only thing I know that was
sort of violent was--that was--may have been ...(unintelligible)
with--they--once the temperance for--once they formed associations,
then they wanted to get rid of all liquor, and they cut down hundreds
of apple trees to get rid of apple cider which was fermented, and hard
apple cider was one of--one of the liquors. No, it was all voluntary,
but I--you know, this--we conform to the social mores if we see that
something is going to get--earn us frowns and--and--and ugly looks,
we'll move away, just like smoking today. The poor people who smoke
and have to huddle up against business buildings outside, you know,
that--that's a miracle of the anti-smoking campaign in the last 30
years.

LAMB: What was the Sabbath Crusade?

Prof. APPLEBY: Sabbath Crusade was to stop all business on Sunday,
and--and this--most churches and churchgoers observed that; they
observed the Sabbath and they didn't do any ordinary work on Sunday.
But as the tempo of commerce increases, post offices stayed open on
Sunday. And the worst thing is that the Erie Canal ran on Sunday
'cause you couldn't stop the Hudson River and the other rivers from
flowing; you couldn't stop the canal.

So this upset people, and there was a move to get the federal
government to enforce the Sabbath in the ways that it could. One of
them was to--to not deliver the mail on Sundays, and the--and this
failed. A--in this case, the churches were beaten back by those
people who argued that the government shouldn't interfere in this way.

LAMB: You write up Richard M. Johnson...

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: ...the senator, who is himself con--controversial, but...

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: ...did he kill Tecumseh?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't know. I don't know that--I don't know that
anyone knows. He was in battle. He was alleged to have. I
don't--I'm not even certain that he claimed to, but other people
claimed for him, and it gave him a certain--he was certainly there.
It gave him a certain ...(unintelligible).

LAMB: Went on to be vice president. You find--did you find much
about him?

Prof. APPLEBY: Not a lot. Y--you remember, he was the--the--he was
such a hero that the--that--that when he was a congressman, they got
him to put forward the bill to raise the salaries, the congressional
salaries.

LAMB: And what happened?

Prof. APPLEBY: And just--people were just outraged that the
congressmen were going to vote themselves a raise. I think it was a
25 percent raise. And they--the people rose up and--as I say, locally
and formed associations and--and defeated all the incumbents--not all
of them, but just an--an incredible number of incumbents the next time
around, and got the--their congressmen to pledge that they would
repeal the act, and they did.

LAMB: When you did your research, could you find newspapers from this
period?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Yes.

LAMB: Where do they keep them?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, the American Antiquarian Society has a
wonderful collection of newspapers. It's--it's in Worcester,
Massachusetts. And actually, the nephew of the founder of the
American Antiquarian Society is in my book. So they have a--they have
a great collection. They're in the Library of Congress. I read most
of the autobiographies in the Library of Congress.

LAMB: Now one of the things you--you mentioned in here Thomas Paine
in your book, and I was--because we were having a guest on our program
from TomPaine.com, saw your name on the advisory committee.

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes.

LAMB: What's that?

Prof. APPLEBY: What is TomPaine.com?

LAMB: Yeah, and how did you get involved in that?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I'm not deeply involved in it. I'm sort of
there as an adviser. It's--it's a Web site where opinions--pieces are
posted and letters are invited, and it--it--they produce editorials
that are concerned with issues--public issues of the sort that Thomas
Paine might be--might have been interested in: good government, you
know, the watchdog on--on our governors.

LAMB: What role did Thomas Paine's writings--and I know they came
mostly before this period--what di--role did they have in the thinking
that went on in the early 1800s?

Prof. APPLEBY: Hard to say. I mean, "Common Sense" does articulate
the idea of a natural social harmony of a society of limited
government in which the people's cooperative--natural cooperative
instincts are brought out. But you know, Paine went on to write "The
Age of Reason," which is an attack on organized religion. So when
he--he does return to the United States many years later, and he's not
warmly received because he's then seen as an infidel; he's seen as
someone who's attacked religion, and the country has become a great
deal more religious than it was during the Revolutionary era. So he
comes back and--and really is in--and--is--just lives in obscurity and
dies in New Rochelle.

LAMB: Because of the TomPaine.com, are you an activist in the world
out there, or...

Prof. APPLEBY: I certainly care a lot about a lot of things. I
don't know that I'd characterize myself as an activist. I march
occasionally and--and, you know, participate in discussion groups and
lend financial support to causes that I care about. But I--I don't
think I could be characterized as an activist now.

LAMB: Are people more or less active today in things like this than
back in the 1800s?

Prof. APPLEBY: I think--oh, I think less active. Oh, definitely
less active.

LAMB: Why?

Prof. APPLEBY: I suppose because there's so many more things for
them to be active in, so many more recreational pursuits, so many
other intellectual interests, so many other tastes to indulge, so much
just pure recreation to enjoy. And there wasn't that. But also I
think this generation took very seriously the fact that they had
inherited a remarkable revolution, and they wanted to demonstrate to a
world of monarchs and monarchies what democracy--what a democratic
society could truly be.

LAMB: So looking back to this time period, who do you--who would you
th--name as the most responsible for what we are today? Back in, you
know, the--the activists back in the 1800s.

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm. You know, there are--there are a number of them;
I don't think there is any one. I would say that Thomas Jefferson's
influence was the most pervasive in this generation. They frequently
talk about him. As a hero, Henry Clay looms large, as does George
Clinton and--I'm sorry, not Clinton--George Clinton; his nephew DeWitt
Clinton, because he was the one who championed the--the Erie Canal.
So those figures in my generation are important.

Interestingly enough, Andrew Jackson doesn't figure as a--as a great
hero. I'm sure he was to people, but he doesn't seem to be to the
people that I've read. But Jefferson was important because he so
clearly articulated a different conception of what a republic could
be, and a d--and he had a different vision of how human
beings--how--could participate in their society. And this--people
refer to him throughout this period.

LAMB: Where are you from in the country originally?

Prof. APPLEBY: Omaha, Nebraska.

LAMB: How long'd you live there?

Prof. APPLEBY: Seven years. So...

LAMB: Where from--where did you go from there?

Prof. APPLEBY: I went to Dallas, Texas, and then to Kansas City,
Missouri, and then to Evanston, Illinois, and then to Phoenix,
Arizona, and then to Pasadena, California.

LAMB: Why all the moves?

Prof. APPLEBY: My father was with a large corporation, and they were
transferring him.

LAMB: How about your mom? What'd she do?

Prof. APPLEBY: She was a homemaker and voluntary worker.

LAMB: Who got you interested in--i--or--I don't know if it's a
person, but in--in the history thing in the first place, do you think?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't know. My--my father had two very radical,
talkative a--sisters who were my aunts, and they were very interested
in politics. And this was during the Roosevelt era. And they would
argue with my father about Roosevelt. And he would--he would argue
and sort of goad them. And I realized that they really cared, and he
was sort of teasing them. And I...

LAMB: What side were they on?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, they were always on the--my father became
increasingly conservative as he became part of the business community.
And so they were always on the radical side of Roosevelt's
administration. And there was a divide in 1936, '7, and they were
always on the more--the more radical side.

LAMB: Where'd you go to college?

Prof. APPLEBY: I went to Stanford.

LAMB: And how about what--the rest of your degrees?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I got a master's at the University of
California at Santa Barbara, and I got my PhD at Claremont Graduate
School, which is the graduate school for the Associated Colleges of
Claremont, Pomona College now.

LAMB: And what about students today and when you teach your history?
Do they--do they care? Are they interested?

Prof. APPLEBY: Yes. Again, it's back to my ideas there are
different ways that people understand what it is to be human. There
are always going to be people who understand that by looking at the
past. They just have--it's just a cast of curiosity. And, yes, they
always find them...

LAMB: Now what courses will you teach them?

Prof. APPLEBY: Well, I'm teaching a course now on the impact of the
Enlightenment on American nation building. That's a--a seminar that
I'm teaching. I teach the introductory course in 17th- and
18th-century America. I teach upper-division courses on the
Revolution and the writing of the Constitution. That's, you know, a
mix, but almost always 17th and 18th century.

LAMB: You say you've been at UCLA since 1981.

Prof. APPLEBY: Mm-hmm.

LAMB: What's changed in 19 years of teaching at UCLA?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't know that the teaching has changed. The--the
quality of interaction of the students has changed, and it's just--I
l--I really love it. UCLA is an extraordinarily diverse campus. I
mean, we're just every ethnic group, every religion, every race. And
I--over the 18 years, 19 years, I have seen the students become more
and more at ease with each other. It's--it truly is wondrous to watch
their interaction. There was always I--a lot of goodwill, but it--but
it tended--there was a certain formality, and that's just gone.
They're just college students.

LAMB: You mentioned in your book the Second Great Awakening, which
was back during this period. What was the first?

Prof. APPLEBY: First was a religious revival in the 1740s, the one
that's associated with Jonathan Edwards. And it was much more
confined and it was much more intellectual. It ha--it was a--both of
them were efforts to go back to recapture religious experience, a
really intense zeal, an intimate personal experience of God.
Both--that was a common feature, but the first Great Awakening had its
intellectual disputes, and it tended to end, whereas the Second Great
Awakening never really has ended in the United States. It--it created
American Christianity, with its emphasis upon the, you know,
evangelizing, reaching out to people, upon the personal experience of
sin, about being an active soldier for Christ in society. That is
there in the Second Great Awakening, and I don't think--and it left a
f--a--a--interlocking groups of churches in America that persist to
this day.

LAMB: You told us you probably wouldn't want to go back and live in
that period, but of the things that you learned about that period,
what would be your favorite if you could capture something that
happened back then or, you know, the way they lived back then that
they don't now?

Prof. APPLEBY: Oh, I think the--the--the voluntary association, the
zeal that just, you know, getting people together and forming a
society to determine America's national character or to get rid of
liquor or to honor the Sabbath or to whatever, just the idea that
there was--that these people could move for women's rights, which of
course happens in the next decade. I think that voluntary spirit
was--was wonderful because it did create a--the--the social
integration that I think is sometimes lacking in our world today.

LAMB: You have another book in ya?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't know. I...

LAMB: If you--if you'd had time, what would you write?

Prof. APPLEBY: I don't--I really don't know. I'm sort of eager to
find out.

LAMB: This is the book we've been talking about by Joyce Appleby
called "Inheriting the Revolution"--that period back there--"The First
Generation of Americans" born in this country somewhere between 1776
and 1800.

Thank you very much.

Prof. APPLEBY: Thank you.

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Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans