On the fore ground, Minerva, the goddess of Wisdom, is pointing to a shield, supported by the Genius of America, bearing the arms of the United States, with the motto UNION AND INDEPENDENCE, by which the country enjoys the prosperity signified by the horn of plenty at the feet of America.
I first saw this print many years ago in Samuel Eliot Morrison’s The Oxford History of the American People. Engraved by Benjamin Tanner after a design by John James Barralet, America Guided by Wisdom is an evocative visual allegory of what American exceptionalism meant to the post-Revolutionary generation. The print draws on the Neoclassical tradition of the Enlightenment, where the United States was often portrayed as an idealized Roman Republic reborn. Issued in Philadelphia between 1815 and 1820, in the wake of Andrew Jackson’s victory at New Orleans, the print expressed the heady nationalistic optimism that the republic had been reborn in the forge of the War of 1812, a second war of independence against Great Britain. Barralet used classical imagery and the symbolism of Greco-Roman mythology to vindicate the triumph of America’s exceptional republican liberty. America, guided by the wisdom of the benevolent deities while engaged in the pursuits of commerce, would now enjoy a golden age of peace and prosperity.
Educated Americans, in the years during and after the American Revolution, were far more familiar with the language of classical iconography and symbolism than we are today. They would understand the print’s allegorical themes without much difficulty. But by 1815 American society was democratizing; middle- and working-class white people were exercising more influence in the cultural marketplace. So the publisher thought it wise to provide a descriptive text (above) for the benefit of those not privileged to have had a classical education.
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