US founders sought to build a republic of citizens who improved themselves and their nation, free of unearned aristocratic entitlements, but that fostered an unfamiliar mobility. Reactions against aristocratic idleness elevated the importance of self-improvement and work for winning cultural esteem as well as for material well-being. Benjamin Franklin led in promoting these values to nurture useful citizens; only after his death did a revised version of his autobiography portray him as having “raised myself.” Although mobility came to be expected of White men, legal and cultural presumptions marginalized most others, who were subject to harsh physical and social penalties if they attempted to claim self-agency or to seek self-improvement and work that brought respect. Georgia’s early history illustrates how self-serving stories about work and initiative both defended enslavement and closed off opportunities for poor White people. The elderly George Washington was among the rare citizens who took seriously Revolutionary-era rhetoric about equality, and he came to appreciate how the work of enslaved people made his self-improvement and prosperity possible.

In the early nineteenth century the idea of self-making emerged along America’s many frontiers: western lands and growing cities; plus political, commercial, technological, cultural, material, communication, and religious frontiers. These all beckoned, demanding new choices and encouraging new feelings of self-agency. As before, the label “self-made” could point to a flawed person who had gone astray. However, use of the idea of “self-made” began to shift toward positive connotations that sanctified individualism and ambition if applied to religious, social, or patriotic service. Storytellers who grasped that connection transformed self-seeking and ambition from dangers into bulwarks against aristocracy’s evils. Competitors for political power told stories of self-improvement, self-fashioning, and self-making to align themselves with progress for their nation. Electoral politics increasingly induced ambitious candidates to claim that they had risen from lowly origins by their own efforts. Frontier tales of spirited heroes, such as Andrew Jackson and David Crockett, appealed to audiences who appreciated a rough-and-ready masculinity that the Founders had disdained.

In the seventeenth century the Renaissance and Reformation inspired worldly ambitions and self-fashioning among Europeans. New opportunities, such as commercialization and exploration, along with new pressures such as mounting poverty and vagrancy in England, threatened communities and traditions. English adventurers sought their fortunes in Virginia and New England, but their loyalties to traditional duties to God and community varied widely. The lives, worries, and circumstances of Captain John Smith, explorer and self-promoter, and Robert Keayne, a prosperous Boston merchant, illustrate emerging ways of thinking about self-made fates among these colonists. Both pursued their worldly ambitions through incessant work, and they participated in an early stage of shaping the criteria by which Americans would judge successes and failures. They also expressed strong beliefs about fostering communities and working for them while they pursued their own ambitions. At the same time, and like their peers, they guarded the boundaries of inclusion in those communities, defining narrowly who could belong, who merited respect, and whose exploitation and destruction they felt was justified.