MICHAEL ROGIN
99
labor denied the free man his "equal privileges in the race of life ."
Blocking free labor's westward expansion, the slave south brought the
age of Jackson to an end and generated Civil War. The country which
sought "a new birth offreedom" in Civil War had first gained its identity as
a nation of self-made men on the frontier. Indians and the west, as I have
recently argued in
Fathers and Children ,
gave birth to the age of Jackson .
With the primitive accumulation of Indian land and the creation of a
national market, a commodity capitalism of individuals replaced the
eighteenth-century family-based order. Westward expansion did not
merely sustain the material basis of commodity capitalism; it spiritualized
it as well. The dispossession of Indians created self-made heroes who gained
authority by acquiring Indian natural power, and conquering the regressive
temptations these "children of nature" posed . Fears of primitive depen–
dence, laziness, violence, anarchic freedom, and community, although
perhaps logically incompatible, joined each other as psychological threats
to
the hermetically-sealed, independent, liberal self. Attacking communal
and familial loyalties, Indian policy-markers liberated individual Indians
from nature and the tribe, and so freed them for the marketplace . The
archetype of the self-made hero, making himself in Indian combat and then
becoming their "benefactor," was Andrew Jackson.
Family integrated the individual into household order, slave society,
and tribe. Market capitalism bifurcated a conjugal family based on love
from a competitive, unstable, exteriorized marketplace, and the self-made
ideal sought to fill the newly opened space . The myth of self-sufficiency
appealed to a society of independent small-holders, who still owned their
own productive property. At the same time, obscuring the emerging
dependence on market, factory, and mass public, the myth solaced a self
buffeted and alone in the crowd.
Individualism promised liberation not only from exterior social rela–
tions but from interior familial ties. Fornication, prostitution, and
adultery-the adult, interpersonal transgressions-were the eighteenth–
century targets of moral criticism. The nineteenth century discovered
masturbation . Sexual purity writers, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has
shown, ignored active sexuality for this secret, private vice. Self-abuse was
the archetypical nineteenth-century sin; self-control and self-production its
virtues. The self-made man, if we take the phrase literally, had created
himself, without father or mother. He was, as has been said ofLeatherstock–
ing, a hermaphrodite . I want to locate the Adamic American innocent not
so much outside society in general as in flight from sexuality and the family
in particular.
The spreading marketplace, for Whigs and Jacksonians alike, under-
