Americans in the early nineteenth century—at least white ones—began to enjoy a competitive free market in three crucial areas: commerce, politics, and religion. In sharp contrast to the ways of Europe, all three of those realms were unregulated, non-hierarchical, and driven by individual decisions. As an inhabitant of a Mississippi River town happily shouts out in the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, “You pays your money and you takes your choice!”30 That may be the most American sentence ever written.
