American Ambitions

In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggested a way that Great Britain might end the conflict with its American colonies: Offer each colony free trade with Britain and representation in Parliament based on the proportion of taxes the colony supplied to the empire. Aside from its economic logic, the idea suited Smith’s understanding of the rebels’ motivations. It would give colonial leaders what he believed they really wanted.

A peaceful reconciliation, he argued, was impossible without a way “of preserving the importance and of gratifying the ambition of the leading men of America….”

The persons who now govern the resolutions of what they call their continental congress, feel in themselves at this moment a degree of importance which, perhaps, the greatest subjects in Europe scarce feel. From shopkeepers, tradesmen, and attornies, they are become statesmen and legislators, and are employed in contriving a new form of government for an extensive empire, which, they flatter themselves, will become, and which, indeed, seems very likely to become, one of the greatest and most formidable that ever was in the world.

By allotting the colonies their own parliamentary seats, Smith wrote, “a new method of acquiring importance, a new and more dazzling object of ambition would be presented to the leading men of each colony. Instead of piddling for the little prizes which are to be found in what may be called the paltry raffle of colony faction; they might then hope, from the presumption which men naturally have in their own ability and good fortune, to draw some of the great prizes which sometimes come from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics.”

Smith believed, in short, that the American Revolution was driven by ambition. Campaigning for their liberties let obscure provincials feel like big shots. A sense of power and significance trickled down from members of the Continental Congress to village committees enforcing boycotts against British goods, Daughters of Liberty organizing spinning bees, even children collecting tea to be burned in bonfires.

“Almost every individual of the governing party in America fills, at present in his own fancy, a station superior, not only to what he had ever filled before, but to what he had ever expected to fill; and unless some new object of ambition is presented either to him or to his leaders, if he has the ordinary spirit of a man, he will die in defence of that station,” Smith wrote.

Smith couched his recommendations as analysis, designed to find the best outcome for all concerned. He wasn’t moralizing against ambition. Throughout his writings, he assumed that the desire to better one’s condition, and thus enjoy greater public esteem, was an enduring characteristic of human psychology. It could even prove productive.

The famous story of the poor man’s son in The Theory of Moral Sentiments treats ambition as a personal folly but a social good. Admiring the leisured lives of the rich, a striving young fellow scrambles to achieve their station through hard work and self-promotion. “He makes his court to all mankind; he serves those whom he hates, and is obsequious to those whom he despises,” Smith wrote. “Through the whole of his life he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquillity that is at all times in his power.” The unfortunate man has been misled by a glamorous image of wealth and greatness. Yet, Smith concluded, “it is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind.”

Smith’s bemused, dispassionate tone represented a dramatic shift in the western understanding of ambition—a shift that would accelerate in the culture arising from the Declaration’s principles. For centuries, the Christian church had condemned ambition as a sin. It was an attribute of kings and conquerors, of those seeking power and domination. Even Machiavelli decried it in a poem titled “Dell’Ambizione,” writing that “Every man hopes to climb higher by crushing now one, now another, rather than through his own wisdom and goodness.” Ambition disrupted the social order, bringing destruction and strife. It was winner-take-all. Think of Macbeth.

An Anglican homily—dating to 1571 but still in print as late as the nineteenth century—defined ambition as “the unlawful and restless desire in men to be of higher state than God hath given or appointed unto them.” Ambition was a grievous offense, springing from “Luciferian pride and presumption.” Virtuous Christians knew their place. The leaders of the rebel colonies were, in this view, treasonous sinners.

The drafters of the Declaration of Independence understood the stigma. They changed its first sentence to make it less provocatively ambitious, historian William Casey King argues in Ambition, A History: From Vice to Virtue. Thomas Jefferson’s original draft read, “When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for a people to advance from that subordination in which they have hitherto remained….” That formulation skittered dangerously close to articulating a desire to be higher than God ordained. Avoiding the reference to hierarchy, the phrase was softened to “for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another….” (Emphasis added.) The new formulation subtly suggested that the two parties were previously equal partners rather than conceding—and hence challenging—the mother country’s superior status.

It was, of course, the next sentence of the Declaration that became the fundamental tenet of the American creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” This was a statement of liberal political philosophy, embedded in intellectual history. But the principles of the Declaration quickly became something more: a cultural force shaping the lives and expectations of ordinary Americans who would never read John Locke or encounter the concept of eudaemonia.

That culture had political ramifications. In northern states, successful campaigns for the abolition of slavery arose after independence, affirming the public doctrine of liberty. Responding to demands for equality, states throughout the union extended suffrage to almost all white men and, in some places, to free blacks as well. By the early nineteenth century, a higher percentage of Americans enjoyed the right to vote than in any other time or place to that date. Among the enfranchised were servants, apprentices, and sons still under their father’s roofs.

“The great body of the people had got possession of suffrage, and insisted, with increasing vehemence, upon the removal of every impediment to its universality,” recalled Samuel Goodrich, a Connecticut Yankee by birth, in his autobiography. An entrepreneurial publisher and prolific author best known for his children’s books, Goodrich looked askance at the rage for universal suffrage. But he himself represented the new American ambition, combining lucrative business ventures with Whig politics and service in the Massachusetts legislature.

Democratic values allowed ordinary men to aspire to traditionally inconceivable ranks. In an 1811 letter to Josiah Quincy, John Adams pointed to the competition for commissions as military officers. “There is no people on earth so ambitious as the people of America,” he wrote. “The reason is, because the lowest can aspire as freely as the highest. The highest offices are as fair objects to the tradesman or farmer as to the lawyer, the priest, physician, or merchant. In other countries, none of those ranks think of commissions. Employment and profit in their private occupations and pursuits is all they wish. Ambition and its hopes are extinct.”

Legislators and soldiers were essential to the new nation. But they weren’t enough. Even as it embraced ambition, America’s emerging culture rejected the inferiority of “private occupations and pursuits.” Although universally admired, George Washington was not the quintessential new American. The dignified, self-fashioned gentleman of fine manners and landed estate, who married up and channeled his ambition into an army career—that most traditional and hierarchical of outlets—was an icon, not a role model. In his Farewell Address, Washington referred five times to ambition, always as a danger to the union.

The exemplary American was instead Benjamin Franklin, the runaway apprentice, newspaperman, entrepreneur, inventor, scientist, postmaster, and founder of a local fire department, library, hospital, and university. Franklin represented what could happen in Smith’s ideal of a society “where every man was perfectly free both to chuse what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper.” Genius would reveal itself. Nor were such polymathic talents the only ones valued in the new republic. Allowing countless individuals the freedom to piddle for little prizes—using their knowledge, creativity, and energy to address discrete problems and local concerns—built the nation.

Rather than jockeying for a fixed number of slots in a preordained order, ambitious Americans embraced the Declaration’s promises of equality and liberty to shape new outlets for their aspirations. They instantiated the pursuit of happiness in new towns, inventions, schools, occupations, and religious institutions. In an economy of scarce labor and abundant, albeit contested, land, they transformed ambition from a vice threatening a few well-established hierarchies into a virtue enriching a diverse, dynamic society with countless sources of status and respect. The combination of economic circumstances and liberal institutions created a distinctly American version of ambition. No longer winner-take-all, it fueled a culture of growth.

“A new conception of politics converged with a new appreciation of enterprise, and a new character ideal was created: the man who developed inner resources, acted independently, lived virtuously, and bent his behavior to his personal goals—not the American Adam, but the American homo faber, the builder,” writes historian Joyce Appleby in Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans.

Independence freed Americans from British restrictions on manufacturing. Indentured apprenticeships withered away. So did debtors’ prisons. The Constitution created a nationwide zone of free trade. Americans started businesses making shoes and linoleum, saddles and wire, clocks and farm equipment. They started newspapers and expanded postal service. They invented machine tools and interchangeable parts. They brought millions of acres under cultivation, built textile mills, and founded local banks, often taking risks on neighbors’ ventures that disinterested observers would deem foolish.

Michel Chevalier, a French engineer and economist who spent two years traveling in the new United States, drew an invidious comparison between America’s productive financial speculators and those in France. “The spirit of speculation in the United States has strown this vast country with useful works, canals, railroads, turnpike-roads, with manufactories, farms, villages, and towns; amongst us it has been more rash, wild, and foolish, and much less productive in useful results,” he wrote. “It is with us mere stock-jobbing, without any good influence on the prosperity of the country; it is a game in which the dice are loaded, in which the credulous lose the earnings of years in a fever-fit of a moment. Its only results are ruin and despair.”

Chevalier marveled at what he saw in Port Carbon, Pennsylvania, a new town of about thirty houses, with the stumps still standing from the trees felled to clear the homesites. “You make your way from one house to another by leaping over the prostrate trunks and winding round the standing stumps,” he wrote. “In the midst of this strange scene, appears a large building with the words, Office of Deposit and Discount. SCHUYLKILL BANK. The existence of a bank amidst the stumps of Port Carbon, surprised me as much as the universal neatness and elegance of the peaceful Philadelphia, or the vast fleet which is constantly receiving and discharging at the quays of New York, the products of all parts of the world.” Even obscure corners of the new republic offered outlets for ambition.

Alexis de Tocqueville found American ambition paradoxical. It was at once pervasive and remarkably modest. “The first thing which strikes a traveller in the United States is the innumerable multitude of those who seek to throw off their original condition; and the second is the rarity of lofty ambition to be observed in the midst of the universally ambitious stir of society,” he wrote in Democracy in America. “No Americans are devoid of a yearning desire to rise; but hardly any appear to entertain hopes of great magnitude, or to drive at very lofty aims. All are constantly seeking to acquire property, power, and reputation—few contemplate these things upon a great scale; and this is the more surprising, as nothing is to be discerned in the manners or laws of America to limit desire, or to prevent it from spreading its impulses in every direction.” The young country produced inventors, lawyers, and evangelists but no Napoleon.

The cumulative effect of such modest ambitions ratified Smith’s economic analysis more than he himself could have foreseen. Without legally entrenched monopolies limiting accurate price signals and the free movement of labor, he argued in The Wealth of Nations, nations would be richer. Competition, not protectionism, would yield “universal opulence.” Consumption, not production and certainly not gold, was the measure of prosperity.

But American ambition also challenged Smith’s intuitions. He still lived in a world where inherited status was the norm, “place” the object of desire, and geographical mobility limited. He would have understood the ambition for military commissions better than the founding of banks in tiny coal towns. In The Wealth of Nations, farmers work land owned by aristocratic landlords. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, strivers seek favors from their betters. The rational mind, Smith wrote, knows that kings are just servants of the people “to be obeyed, resisted, deposed, or punished, as the public conveniency may require,” but one’s natural instinct is “to submit to them for their own sake, to tremble and bow down before their exalted station, to regard their smile as a reward sufficient to compensate any services.”

What Smith perceived as natural, we see as cultural and decidedly foreign. “The farmer and the mechanic are the lords of the New World; public opinion is their opinion; the public will is their will; the President is their choice, their agent, their servant,” wrote Chevalier. From the earliest days of the republic Americans have bristled at hierarchy—a cultural trait that made southern slavery all the more inconsistent with the new nation’s emerging culture.

Smith also failed to understand the economic viability of American slavery. He disapproved morally of the institution and also believed it represented status-driven economic waste. “The work done by slaves,” he wrote, “though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any.” Relying on enslaved labor, he believed, hampered productivity by discouraging workers from looking for better ways to do the job. Slavery’s appeal wasn’t economic, in his view, but psychological. It flattered the master’s urge to feel superior. “The pride of man makes him love to domineer, and nothing mortifies him so much as to be obliged to condescend to persuade his inferiors,” Smith wrote. “Wherever the law allows it, and the nature of the work can afford it, therefore, he will generally prefer the service of slaves to that of freemen.”

Overemphasizing the desire for status, Smith missed why slavery might be economically profitable in the American South. Slaves could be assigned to jobs and moved over long distances without their consent. When ambitious white pioneers with dreams of cotton wealth settled the Mississippi valley, they forcibly uprooted a million enslaved workers from families, friends, and familiar surroundings on the eastern seaboard. Attracting free labor would have required paying a premium for frontier hardships. The legal status of slavery made such persuasion unnecessary.

“Whenever the legislature attempts to regulate the differences between masters and their workmen, its counsellors are always the masters,” Smith wrote. The South’s peculiar institution was an extreme case, as legislation turned human workers into portable chattel and ambition into a destructive force. Slavery and the racial caste system led to a divergence between northern and southern cultures, leaving a large swath of America outside the dynamism of positive-sum ambition. For many southerners, status remained embedded in a hierarchy of birth. Even among whites, advancement was less open and more winner-take-all than elsewhere in America. In the South, it wasn’t wise to get too big for your britches.

Smith also never imagined the American passion for geographic mobility. He criticized apprenticeship statutes and other restrictions for trapping workers in declining industries while thriving occupations nearby went short-handed. Labor should be free to move, he argued, allowing workers to go where their skills were most valuable, even to switch occupations. “Those two manufactures may sometimes be in the same town, and sometimes in the same neighbourhood, without being able to lend the least assistance to one another,” he wrote, and often “the operations are so much alike, that the workmen could easily change trades with one another, if those absurd laws did not hinder them.”

In Smith’s world, however, opportunities in the same town were the ones that mattered. Even when the poor in Britain were free to move to more promising locations, he observed, they didn’t. “It appears evidently from experience,” he wrote in The Wealth of Nations, “that a man is of all sorts of luggage the most difficult to be transported.” Not so in America. Here the people were restless—a word foreigners frequently invoked.

“I have learnt from experience that the established Authority of any government in America, and the policy of Government at home, are both insufficient to restrain the Americans; and that they do and will remove as their avidity and restlessness incite them,” Lord Dunmore, the governor of Virginia, wrote in 1774. “They acquire no attachment to Place: But wandering about Seems engrafted in their Nature; and it is a weakness incident to it, that they Should for ever immagine the Lands further off, are Still better than those upon which they are already Settled But to be more particular.” Restless Americans coveted lands claimed by natives or the crown.

Frederick Marryat, a British naval officer who published an account of his American travels in 1839, pronounced Americans “a restless, locomotive people: whether for business or pleasure, they are ever on the move in their own country, and they move in masses.” The American zeal for movement drove investment in railroads, canals, and steam-powered riverboats. Alexis de Tocqueville pondered the paradox of “this strange unrest of so many happy men, restless in the midst of abundance.” Like ambition, restlessness was traditionally seen as a negative trait. Americans transformed it into an engine of personal, technological, and civic development.

The life of Thomas Douglas, a Connecticut farmer’s son born in 1790, encapsulates many of the elements of early American ambition. At seventeen, he hit the road as a peddler. “I endeavored,” he recalled many years later in his autobiography, “to spend my nights and Sundays with the most respectable and intelligent people of the neighborhoods through which I was passing.” He wanted to learn as well as to sell. Kindly received by most, he heaped scorn on the Virginians and South Carolinians who boasted of their family heritage. “The more and better class,” he wrote, “estimates others by their own merits, which ought to be the true criterion of nobility.”

On his first trip, Douglas took $500 in merchandise, which he sold for more than $1,200. On his second, he started with an inventory costing $10,000, “which I sold out very well, but did not make a corresponding profit.” The second trip took him to Cincinnati, then a growing city of about 6,000 residents. The reception there was striking.

It was peopled by a liberal, industrious, enterprising population, who, instead of adhering to the ignoble practice—for I can not call it policy—of ‘Dog eat dog,’ seemed to take great pleasure in assisting and pushing forward every enterprising, industrious young man who came amongst them. This, probably, is one of the secrets of its rapid growth and great and continued prosperity.

Douglas eventually bought out two Cincinnati acquaintances who had a store in Madison, Indiana, moving there with his wife and young daughter in 1817. Along with the store, he established a tin and button factory. Like many locals he also “entered pretty largely, for a man of my means, into land speculation,” buying as much as he could on credit with plans to sell some at a profit and pay off his debts. When prices dropped in 1836, he found himself owing more than $30,000 with very little cash to pay it.

Fortunately, Americans tolerated failure. They considered it “a misfortune and not a fraud,” Chevalier observed. “The bankrupt is looked upon as a wounded soldier, who is to be treated with sympathy, and not with contempt.” After settling with his creditors, Douglas decided he needed a steadier occupation and spent the next two years diligently reading law. From there his career took a more traditionally ambitious course, as one appointed legal position led to another. Douglas ended his days as justice on the Florida Supreme Court, dying in 1855. Along the way, he started Bible societies and temperance groups and served as a church vestryman and active mason.

As an example of early American ambition, Douglas’s story illustrates more than upward mobility. Douglas scorned inherited status and embraced hard work. He moved across long distances to pursue new opportunities, driven by curiosity as well as opportunity. He found established businessmen welcoming the talents of young upstarts rather than stifling potential sources of competition. When he went broke, he wasn’t ruined. Despite his lack of formal education, he pivoted to a legal career by combining disciplined daily studies with continued mercantile activities. He built civic and religious institutions. He worked long hours his entire life. Unlike Smith’s poor boy, this restless American didn’t dream of indolence.

Douglas exemplified a culture open to talent without credentials. It was orderly but largely unplanned, and dizzyingly dynamic. Anything seemed possible. “Experiment follows experiment; enterprise succeeds to enterprise,” wrote Chevalier. “Riches and poverty follow on each other’s traces, and each in turn occupies the place of the other. Whilst the great men of one day dethrone those of the past, they are already half overturned themselves by those of the morrow.” What struck a European visitor as inconceivably disruptive had become normal—and productive—in America. Outside the slave states, the country was an experiment in ambition without entrenched hierarchy.

Taking a zero-sum view of ambition, Tocqueville worried that America’s openness to talent couldn’t survive. “In a democratic society, as well as elsewhere, there are only a certain number of great fortunes to be made,” he wrote, “and as the paths which lead to them are indiscriminately open to all, the progress of all must necessarily be slackened.” Tocqueville didn’t reckon on the paths opened by the second industrial revolution, nor did he imagine how waves of immigrants would continually renew American striving. Growth fueled by personal and civic ambition persisted far longer than the Frenchman foresaw.

By the time of America’s sesquicentennial in 1926, however, immigration had been closed off and expert control was becoming a governing ideal. The twenties themselves were culturally and economically dynamic, but the generations who produced that dynamism had grown up in a more open society. Those born later took a more cautious approach, emphasizing regulations and formal credentials. The tensions between ambition and conformity, excellence and egalitarianism grew throughout the twentieth century. More Americans, including women and blacks, became free to aspire even as modest aspirations—opening a small shop, building a home, pursuing a trade—became ever more entangled in procedure.

Today America is known for its entrepreneurial Napoleons: the Elon Musks and Sam Altmans who dream of remaking the world. They have the personalities required to ignore obstacles, critics, and norms. The country is still “the biggest stage,” as a cab driver in northern England once remarked to me. But the modest ambitions that built the nation are unnecessarily difficult to achieve. Too often ambition devolves into a box-ticking exercise—permits obtained, degrees earned, licenses granted—rather than a series of experiments and accomplishments. Zero-sum views of economic success are particularly common among young Americans.

Here, Tocqueville’s words seem eerily prescient. The belief in equality that made America so open, he feared, would lead to attitudes and procedures suppressing talent in the name of fairness.

As men become more alike, and the principle of equality is more peaceably and deeply infused into the institutions and manners of the country, the rules of advancement become more inflexible, advancement itself slower, the difficulty of arriving quickly at a certain height far greater. From hatred of privilege and from the embarrassment of choosing, all men are at last constrained, whatever may be their standard, to pass the same ordeal; all are indiscriminately subjected to a multitude of petty preliminary exercises, in which their youth is wasted and their imagination quenched, so that they despair of ever fully attaining what is held out to them; and when at length they are in a condition to perform any extraordinary acts, the taste for such things has forsaken them.

The Franklins of the future would squander their youth acquiring credentials. The Douglases would get nowhere. A restless, locomotive people would become increasingly static. Ambition would require permission. At its two hundred fiftieth anniversary, the ambition unleashed by the Declaration’s principles of liberty and equality remains a potent characteristic of American culture. But it is one always at risk of succumbing to procedural rigidity, nihilistic envy, or old-fashioned status-seeking.