This dissertation is a cultural biography of merchant banker Stephen Girard that explores the origins of the mythology as well as the mechanics of capitalism as it functioned on the streets and in the homes of early national Philadelphia. By tracing changes in Stephen Girard's family, both traditional and improvisational, from the 1770s to his death in 1831 and beyond, this project examines how Girard repeatedly capitalized on his family to take commercial risks, reinventing what family meant in a transforming economy. Telling overlapping stories of Girard's family and businesses, including trade networks reaching from Europe, the Caribbean, and China to the United States, I argue that an Atlantic-American culture of capitalism developed at the intersection of the family and the market. Episodes that show the salience and limits of familial bonds in a turbulent economy include Girard's risky commercial strategies during the American Revolution that relied on his brother in Saint-Domingue, and tenuous rationalities of the market and marriage that collided when his wife supposedly went insane. After his public involvement in Philadelphia's yellow fever epidemics of the 1790s, Girard learned that institutions could do the work of families. Applying this lesson to the national political economy, Girard refashioned the Bank of the United States into the Bank of Stephen Girard and lent the U.S. Treasury over one million dollars to help fund the War of 1812. Well before his death in 1831, Girard was one of the wealthiest men in the nation. His will altered the shape and flow of Philadelphia, with repercussions for inheritance and corporate law through the twentieth century. By juxtaposing Girard's personal and public lives, this dissertation integrates scholarship on the market economy with that on gender and the family to better understand the expansion of a culture of capitalism in the early American Republic. Under capitalism, people and relationships were fungible in new and important ways. In telling the story of Stephen Girard, this dissertation follows a central, but overlooked, player in the early American and Atlantic economy in order to explain the paradoxical relationship between capitalism and liberty. / History

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In early Philadelphia, 1783-1788, the classics formed a pervasive presence on the city's cultural, political, and physical landscape. As the American nation commenced its republican experiment, references to the classics in Philadelphia especially emerged as a vehicle and vocabulary employed by statesmen for fashioning a people, political culture, and national identity. According to political theories of republicanism, statesmen in Philadelphia had a vested interest in cultivating the virtue of their citizens. As symbols and lessons in patriotism and virtue, classical antiquity was incorporated into civic iconography and national foundation narratives and projected to the broader public. This thesis examines the classical presence in Philadelphia, 1783-1788. It specifically analyses the public presentation and dissemination of the classics in three cultural avenues beyond the walls of the academy, newspapers, spectacles, and orations, in order to evaluate the barriers and opportunities for engagement with the classics by the broader Philadelphia public. I argue that although the gates to a traditional higher education were shut to many of the Philadelphia public, cultural avenues existed that allowed the classics to disseminate to the wider populace. The broader public was invited to engage with the classics when it served a political purpose and lessons in patriotism and virtue were being transmitted. However, this inclusion was often controlled, mediated, and implemented on the terms of the elite. Further, the classics still served as markers of status, and the two contradictory functions held by the classics placed the wider Philadelphia public on the threshold of inclusion and exclusion. / Master of Arts

In the aftermath of the American revolution, elites sought to defend their power and status against newly empowered popular governments and egalitarian demands. They developed new discursive and political strategies, transforming pre-revolutionary ideas about authority and legitimacy, moving from traditional forms of hierarchy based on deference and allegiance, towards a structure of power relations based on the inviolability of property and contractual rights. A new American ruling class began to constitute itself through these strategies and ideas during the 1780s, replacing structures of British imperial rule. It did so in response to threats from popular and (white male) egalitarian politics—that is, class struggle and class formation drove each other. Both, in turn, generated identities and ideologies that were central to the development of capitalist ideology in the following century. This thesis gives an account of that process from the perspective of a variety of American elites, focusing on the fragmented and contradictory nature of elite discourse and strategy as well as on the emergence of commonalities and the role of class interests. It deals with the formation and early controversy around the Society of the Cincinnati; with the development and debate over new conceptions of public education; with the elaboration of various legal and discursive mechanisms for the defence of property rights; with the interrelated roles of land claims, banking, corporations, and the rights of contract; and with the elite sense of the dual threat posed both by state legislative democracy (tyranny) and by rural insurrection (anarchy). It also assesses the role of the 1787 constitutional convention within this process, as a radical move that can be seen as both a culmination and a break from prior elite strategy.

Diss.--Technische Hochschule, Karlsruhe. / Description based on print version record. Bibliography: p. 109.

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abstract: This project explores the histories of the Dutch Republic and the United States during the Age of Revolutions, using as a lens the life of Francis Adrian van der Kemp. Connections between the Netherlands and the United States have been understudied in histories of the Revolutionary Atlantic. Yet the nations' political and religious histories are entwined both thematically and practically. Van der Kemp's life makes it possible to examine republicanism and liberal religion anew, as they developed and changed during the era of Atlantic revolutions. The project draws on numerous archival collections that house van der Kemp's voluminous correspondence, political and religious writings, his autobiography, and the unpublished records of the Reformed Christian Church, now the Unitarian Church of Barneveld. With his activity in both countries, van der Kemp offers a unique perspective into the continued role of the Dutch in the development of the United States. The dissertation argues that the political divisions and incomplete religious freedom that frustrated van der Kemp in the Dutch Republic similarly manifested in America. Politically, the partisanship that became the hallmark of the early American republic echoed the experiences van der Kemp had during the Patriot Revolt. While parties would eventually stabilize radical politics, the collapse of the Dutch Republic in the Atlantic world and the divisiveness of American politics in those early decades, led van der Kemp to blunt his once radically democratic opinions. Heavily influenced by John Adams, he adopted a more conservative politics of balance that guaranteed religious and civil liberty regardless of governmental structure. In the realm of religion, van der Kemp discovered that American religious freedom reflected the same begrudging acceptance that constituted Dutch religious tolerance. Van der Kemp found that even in one of the most pluralistic states, New York, his belief in the unlimited liberty of conscience remained a dissenting opinion. The democracy and individualism celebrated in early American politics were controversial in religion, given the growing authority of denominations and hierarchical church institutions. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. History 2014

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