Ira Allen was the quintessential late-eighteenth-century frontier entrepreneur. At the age of 21, he founded the Onion River Land Company, a loose family partnership designed to speculate in land titles to the disputed northern New England territory known as the New Hampshire Grants. By the time he turned 40, Allen claimed ownership of more than 100,000 choice acres along the eastern shore of Lake Champlain. Where most of his contemporaries saw an inhospitable wilderness, Allen anticipated a Champlain Valley of thriving communities, busy commercial centers, and extensive trade, all under his profitable control. Combining a romantic faith in the future of the backcountry with a relentless drive to acquire more land, he devoted his life to the elusive goal of prosperity in the area he called "the country my soul delighted in." Yet there was more to Allen's tangled career than land speculation and development schemes. He was a key figure in the oligarchy that preserved the independence of the fledgling State of Vermont during the American Revolution, serving as Vermont's first Treasurer, Surveyor-General, and tireless ambassador-at-large. Absorbing the rhetoric of the national struggle against England, he adapted it for local application by writing books, pamphlets and broadsides that described Vermont as an unyielding opponent of foreign and domestic tyranny. After the war, Allen led the drive to create the University of Vermont, which he envisioned as a beacon of republican virtue and educational opportunity for the common man. When his Green Mountain empire collapsed, he planned revolutions in Canada and Mexico in desperate, unsuccessful attempts to regain his lost power and wealth. In his grand dreams, remarkable achievements, and ultimate failure, Ira Allen was an outstanding example of the backwoods leaders whose blending of personal and public priorities influenced the development of the American frontier from Maine to the Carolinas.

This dissertation examines the political economy of the United States in the second quarter of the twentieth century, focusing on the public career of David E. Lilienthal. This is not a biography, but rather, uses Lilienthal's career as a lens for viewing the American economy at a time when the relationship between the state and private economic enterprise underwent a profound transformation. A student of Felix Frankfurter at Harvard Law School, Lilienthal went to work as a labor lawyer with Donald Richberg in the aftermath of the 1922 railroad shopcraft strike and helped craft the legislation that culminated in the Railway Labor Act of 1926. During 1931-1933, Lilienthal reorganized the Wisconsin Public Service Commission under Governor Philip La Follette, establishing a reputation as a regulatory activist that resulted in his appointment to the board of the newly-chartered Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA). After a protracted struggle with TVA chairman Arthur E. Morgan, Lilienthal gained control of the agency, where he remained until the end of World War II. During the interwar period, Lilienthal was a participant in the formation of what has come to be known as a "Keynesian" political-economic perspective. Working with colleagues such as Frankfurter and social reformer Morris L. Cooke, as well as elements from both corporate capital and organized labor, Lilienthal designed an agenda for aggressive federal intervention in the marketplace with a macroeconomic approach for coordinating the relationship between mass production and mass consumption. Through the Electric Home and Farm Authority's low-cost appliance program, through high-wage, pro-union labor policies at the agency, and most importantly through the TVA's promotion of cheap and plentiful electricity, Lilienthal was experimenting with the growth-oriented policies that came to characterize Keynesianism. This position became prominent in the New Deal during the mid-1930s, creating salients within the federal government of a social democratic state. By the end of the decade, however, political opposition and the conservative implications of this growth perspective moderated the Keynesian agenda for the TVA and the New Deal.

Charles Sumner is one of America's greatest yet most neglected statesmen. A founder of the Free Soil and Republican parties, perhaps the most outspoken anti-slavery leader in the United States Senate from 1851 to 1874, and its powerful Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sumner must be included in any history of the American anti-slavery movement and of the Civil War and Reconstruction. Yet he is often dismissed as a narrow zealot, while the intellectual and moral principles that propelled him into public life and guided his career are misunderstood or ignored by historians, including his most influential twentieth-century biographer, David Donald. By examining his life until his 1851 election to the Senate, this dissertation seeks to recover Sumner's true intellectual outlook and character, and thus to help restore him to his true stature in American history. Born in Boston, in the afterglow of the American Revolution and of the Enlightenment, Sumner was deeply influenced by the republican principles of duty, education, and liberty balanced by order, as well as by Moral Philosophy, the dominant strain of American Enlightenment thinking, which embraced cosmopolitanism and the dignity of man's intellect and conscience. As a young lawyer, Sumner was greatly attracted by the related principles of Natural Law, which since ancient times had conjoined law and ethics. These influences are symbolized by Sumner's closeness to John Quincy Adams, William Ellery Channing, and Joseph Story. Sumner, with many early nineteenth-century American intellectuals, desired to build an American culture that would combine the principles of American liberty with European culture. He thus eschewed law for reform—including education, promotion of the arts, prison discipline, international peace, and anti-slavery—and eventually politics, not from rashness or ambition, but from the belief in each individual's duty to work for the public good and in the humanistic ideals of the Enlightenment. Sumner grew increasingly disillusioned as the controversy surrounding these reforms divided Boston and the nation over the significance of that Enlightenment legacy, but he devoted his entire public career to the realization of the Enlightenment's vision of a civilized nation, both cultivated and just.

Born January 8, 1809, George Luther Stearns was from an old New England family. His father's death forced him to enter the business world at an early age. He rose from a clerk to a linseed oil manufacturer for the shipbuilders of his native Medford, Massachusetts. Later, the lead pipe factory he started solidified his wealth and standing in the manufacturing community. A conservative businessman, Stearns kept half his earnings in gold. From the Compromise of 1850 on, Stearns became increasingly active in antislavery efforts and involved with the Concord literati, including Emerson and Alcott. With slowness of speech, Stearns preferred working behind the scenes, allowing his money to speak for him. Although he did not join radical antislavery groups and other reform movements, in the cause of Kansas, he used his managerial skills effectively, eventually becoming chairman of the Massachusetts State Kansas Aid Committee. About this time, Stearns met John Brown, became involved with his commitment to free blacks in America, and emerged as chief financial backer for Brown's Harper's Ferry plan. After this episode, Stearns helped organize the Emancipation League and recruited the 54th and 55th Massachusetts. His success led Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton to ask him to recruit blacks for the Union armies. As Assistant Adjutant-General for the Recruitment of Colored Troops, Major Stearns was most productive in Nashville, Tennessee, where he met Andrew Johnson. Sympathetic to the plight of "Contraband," Stearns also organized hospitals and schools, stopped impressment, and organized Unionists into a lobby for the emancipation of slaves in their state. Sensitive and quick-tempered, Stearns ran afoul of Stanton and resigned. He then channeled his energy into a civil rights movement and organized the Impartial Suffrage Association. After the Civil War, Stearns continued his efforts on behalf of blacks, sending out pamphlets and publishing a paper, The Right Way, to advance the cause. Finally his strength gave way, and Stearns, who suffered from bronchial problems, died of pneumonia in New York in April 1867.

The Rev. John Brown's story makes a useful addition to the history of American public address. As a mainstream Colonial evangelical Calvinist who was deeply influenced by the Great Awakening, he held a Presbyterian ministry of forty-two years in the Valley of Virginia (1753-1795). He operated schools, helped establish two presbyteries and a synod, and raised a remarkable family. Brown never published, but his surviving "Memorandum Book," contains approximately sixteen of his sermons, most of them in the somewhat illegible, abbreviated notes typical of Colonial ministers. Painstaking scrutiny of the notes reveals the first four sermons in the book to consist of two occasional pieces (a fast sermon and a fragmentary lecture sermon) and two standard Sunday calls to salvation. Each piece follows a typical pattern of explication and application of scripture and generally avoids mention of immediate circumstances. The style is plain, but some features of Donne-like eloquence appear. Conclusions drawn from Brown's biography and the presentation of four of his sermons include the finding of his having been subject to the fallacy of "historicism," the claiming to understand God's will in events. Evidence of Brown's warmth and wit, however, serves to counter stereotypes of dour Calvinists. He seems, moreover, to have reflected Scotch-Irish assimilation in America; the Southern traditions identified by Richard Weaver; the unifying nature of Colonial Calvinism; the Presbyterian stumbling block of ministerial education; and the American frontiersman's various strengths and weaknesses. His limitations in leadership appear to have been his greatest liability. Brown's was a career rich in historical, rhetorical, and spiritual implications. Studying it reaps the rewards of understanding that Harry S. Stout notes only the unpublished, non-esoteric texts of Colonial ministers can provide.

Blanche Ames Ames, an elite graduate of Smith College and a distinguished state and national leader in the woman suffrage and birth control causes, was one of a small cadre of educated women who, in the early 1900s, recast the iconography of political cartoons, long a means of discourse used only by men, to promote women's rights. In this, she was most unusual. Fortunately, because of her prominence, Ames's extensive family papers have been preserved in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. She has not slid into obscurity as other women political artists and reformers have done. As a result, Ames serves as a sort of template of how an elite woman chose to become publicly involved in issues she might have funded others to pursue and also how women cartoonists went about adapting the political cartoon to promote their goals. It becomes clear from studying her letters and diaries that Ames was an unusually logical, pragmatic and determined progressive feminist, involved and engaged, who preserved a sense of humor, of irony, of detachment that allowed her to persevere in her causes without fanaticism, while carving an autonomous place for herself in a world uncertain of the wisdom of women's rights. Part of Ames's success was that she was buoyed at each step of her life from prep school to the presidency of the Birth Control League of Massachusetts by her fascinating family, the founder of which was the brilliant and outrageous Civil War Gen. Benjamin "Beast" Butler. Ames's parents encouraged her education and allowed her a growing autonomy in which to learn to think and then to act for herself. After an early and difficult struggle for autonomy in her marriage, Blanche and her husband, Oakes Ames, became partners in a joint campaign to create a sustaining family life at their North Easton estate at Borderland, while allowing Oakes to pursue a distinguished career at Harvard and Blanche an equally distinguished career as a suffragist, a political cartoonist, botanical illustrator, painter and birth control reformer. Thus the study of the life of Blanche Ames Ames is not just one of individual artistic or political brilliance, but also of how that brilliance was nurtured, encouraged and sustained throughout the vicissitudes of a life defined by a desire for real social reform by a domestic support system that too often goes unrecognized. This family support system, along with Blanche Ames Ames's activism and achievements as a political cartoonist and a leader in the suffrage and the birth control fight, are the focus of this dissertation.