To Be An American

David Ramsay and the making of the American consciousness

Plot

Shaffer offers the first full-length biography of David Ramsay (1749-1815), an important Revolutionary leader from South Carolina. He details Ramsay's childhood in a Protestant-Irish immigrant family, his medical education at Princeton and the College of Philadelphia, and, as a result of three well-planned marriages, his rise to prominence among the Charleston elite. Using his subject to uncover the roots of American character, the author convincingly argues that Ramsay, most notably in his History of the American Revolution (1789), played a pivotal role in the definition of a republican ideology which promised an equality of opportunity and served as the rationale for the union of disparate regional elites.