In the years between the Revolutionary War and the drafting of the Constitution, American gentlemen-the merchants, lawyers, planters, and landowners who comprised the independent republic's elite-worked hard to maintain their positions of power. Gentlemen Revolutionaries shows how their struggles over status, hierarchy, property, and control shaped

"Cutterham has written a bracing book that demands attention. Gentlemen Revolutionaries is a beautifully written, original, and daring interpretation of the nation's most formative period."--Patrick Griffin, author of America's Revolution

"Gentlemen Revolutionaries provides an engaging and enlightening study of how elite gentlemen strove and struggled to maintain the illusion of power--that is, of being able to control the social and economic transformations wrought by a revolution that they had unleashed. Cutterham advances our understanding of the reality of historical lives."--Colin Nicolson, University of Stirling