My first book project, A Republic of Credit: Building a National Family from Revolution to Reconstruction, which is under contract with Oxford University Press, explores the relationship between emotional family bonds, credit, and the development of commerce and governance in the United States. It shows how enduring practices, focused on family ties, informed conceptions of business and government among the nation’s political leaders. The book focuses on several prominent nineteenth-century slaveholding families—the Coles family of Virginia and the Cameron family of North Carolina—to show how family ties informed their understanding of the public order, its purpose, and people’s relationship to it. While centered in the South, these families extended throughout the country and stretched across the Atlantic. They were deeply invested in the joint project of building the United States and creating a specific image of the country at home and abroad, although they conflated that project with the interests of their own families.

Building on recent scholarly trends that extend early America into the nineteenth century, the book brings the insights of scholarship on the early modern period to bear on the nineteenth-century United States, where the literature has tended to focus on men and women as individuals, rather than as members of far-flung family networks. Elite Americans in the new republic relied on intimate family bonds, much as they had in the early modern period, to further their social, economic, and political interests. People had conducted business affairs and maintained political alliances and relationships through family ties long before the Revolution. In the post-Revolutionary era, Americans used the language of an affective family to form a new governing order in a dual project: building and maintaining a national family as well as their own families’ power. As the book shows, women and men policed the boundaries of their individual families, while Americans created a national family that excluded enslaved people and others from the benefits and advantages of citizenship. Nevertheless, those who were excluded claimed a place in the national family by using the same familial language and rhetoric of belonging.

As I argue, the political implications of those practices, which are particularly apparent in the realm of internal improvements, allowed these elites to define the public good in terms of their own private interests. These practices not only shaped the development of American government, but also played a crucial role in the coming of the Civil War. Merging their own families’ interests with the public good, these elites understood their country as a national family, bound together by bonds of affection, and used familial metaphors to describe the conflict and prescribe solutions to it—with disastrous results. Sectional conflict resulted in a broken family, as Confederate leaders separated from the rest of the nation to preserve their vision of government and their relationship to it, creating a new, “southern” family of sister slaveholding states. The changes wrought by the Civil War and Reconstruction made it difficult for elite former Confederates to maintain this vision. They watched as the federal government enfranchised African Americans while they lost their privileged access to government. Their efforts to reinscribe exclusion in both law and practice led to restoration. Once they regained their privileged access to governing institutions, they continued to use that access to promote projects like railroads and highways that continually blended their family’s self-interest with the public good. Ultimately, as A Republic of Credit shows, their actions and governing vision had enduring consequences that resonated throughout the twentieth century and into the present moment