themselves freeholders or householders, at the very least—"men who have wives and children to protect and support... and ... every thing but the mere dust on which they trod to bind them to the country."

Both sides in early-nineteenth-century debates about suffrage and the labor question, in short, linked political freedom to the supremacy of the "middling interest" or "substantial yeomanry," as the Jacksonian Robert Rantoul called them. Both sides took the position that freedom could not flourish in a nation of hirelings. It is anachronistic to see in such views, merely because they did not include a condemnation of private property, the ideology of a "rising middle class," the advance guard of capitalism. They were the views of small producers and of publicists attuned to the needs of small producers—farmers, artisans, master craftsmen, journeymen—who believed that "small but universal ownership," in the words of Robert MacFarlane, a mid-century labor leader, was the "true foundation of a stable and firm republic."

Sometimes the same historians whose work enables us to recognize this characteristic style of thought, neither capitalist nor socialist, fall back into the older ways of thinking when they seek to explain its significance. In his study of the Republican party in its formative years—the last of the major parties to give voice to this producerist ideology—Eric Foner refers to the Republicans as spokesmen for a "dynamic, expanding capitalist society." Their Protestant work ethic, Foner believes, provided a "psychological underpinning for capitalist values." The evidence in his book clearly shows, on the contrary—as does the study of New York artisans by Sean Wilentz, together with many other recent studies—that the producer ethic, as Wilentz puts it, was "not 'liberal' or 'petit-bourgeois,' as the twentieth century understands the terms." It was anticapitalist but not socialist or social democratic, at once radical, even revolutionary, and deeply conservative; and it deserves a more attentive hearing, on its own terms, than it has usually received.

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