Over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the transatlantic slave trade delivered millions of Africans to American markets but also encountered serious attempts to dismantle what contemporaries called the ‘Guinea traffic’, all of which were eventually successful. One by one, different nations – Britain, Denmark, the United States, Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Brazil – abolished their slave trades for various reasons. The demolition of the slave trade mainly occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century by the same governments who had created it. Moral and humanitarian criticism of what has been described as ‘the cruellest commerce’ was one significant component in the motivation to eradicate the slave trade. But there were always other factors lying behind anti-slave trade sentiment, including economics, political decisions and pragmatic considerations, all of which combined with humanitarian abolitionism, in varying proportions in different countries, to bring about slave trade abolition.

The subject of the slave trade was acrimonious and divisive at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It had never before been discussed at such length by virtually all of the states and many divergent views were expressed. Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution signalled that the federal government through Congress would have the right to interpose in regulating the slave trade for the whole of the United States in the future but this could not occur for twenty-one years until 1808. This was guaranteed by Article 5. A compromise had been hammered out between the northern and southern states whereby strong reservations expressed by South Carolina and Georgia over interference with the slave trade were accommodated in order to secure the American union. Constitutional arrangements over the slave trade left plenty of areas of debate on the subject during the ratification conventions of 1787–8. Some commentators were disappointed at the compromise struck there and the effective tying of hands of the federal government on this issue for twenty-one years. Others exercised their patience and were willing to wait until 1808, comforting themselves that action would then be taken promptly. Many northern states expressed their opposition to the slave trade on moral grounds in their ratifying conventions while South Carolina and Georgia avoided public debate about the humanitarian desire to get rid of slave importations. The sheer amount of commentary on the subject indicated that prohibition of the slave trade was a lively topic of political debate that would continue for some years to come.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, America’s breathtaking economic and territorial expansion furnished the context for a Second Great Awakening, Romanticism, and electoral politicking. These accelerated the ascent of individualism and encouraged self-refashioning to pursue new ambitions. Individuals’ choices inspired stories that reveal how the evolving myth of self-made success both symbolized and widened the nation’s social and cultural chasms. High-profile self-fashionings of the period included Eliza Jumel’s rags-to-riches, Henry Clay’s feigned humble origins, and reformer Dorothea Dix’s discarding of traditional roles. Leading preachers, including Charles Grandison Finney, inspired thousands to take on individual spiritual choices and worldly service, while Romanticists beckoned men to accept heroic self-agency as their duty. Chief among the latter, Ralph Waldo Emerson insisted that American men exert their "self-reliance." Amid all this churning, antebellum storytellers shifted use of the phrase “self-made” from a rhetorical tool for moral judgments to one for increasingly secular accolades, preparing the way for a gradual turn to financial measures of success.

Oliver Cromwell was a stern, Puritan dictator from the seventeenth century, and Kylie Jenner is a twenty-first-century pop culture princess and lipstick mogul. They could not be more different, yet they have in common that they’ve been tagged with the provocative and powerful label “self-made.” Their stories bookend the history of how what was once a sin became an accolade. For Cromwell, a claim of self-making would have endangered his social and political standing, as well as his soul. Jenner, in contrast, proudly accepted this label as a badge of esteem, a reward for being a “selfie-made success.” Over the centuries between them, the concept of self-making evolved, always serving storytellers as a tool for judgment. It became socially and politically destructive along the way because storytelling based on its false assumptions and judgments has fostered policies and cultural attitudes that advance inequality and absolve the affluent of community obligations. Although much of its modern persuasiveness comes from claims that it belongs among core American values, the myth’s history reveals that there is nothing intuitive, stable, or tied to the real world about the idea of self-made success.

Industrialists and enabling financial institutions accelerated America’s economic motion, operating organizations so colossal that they commanded economic influence and encroached upon the nation’s cultures and politics. These institutions altered the national face of business and wielded increasing quantities of money, laborers, technological innovations, and political power. Narratives increasingly portrayed businessmen as a new type of hero, “self-made” even if operating within potent networks. They and their advocates portrayed their influence and wealth as proof of their superiority and, by implication, everyone else’s shortcomings. The rhetoric of self-making acquired a new grandeur. The frequency of the term “self-made” reached its nineteenth-century peak in the press around 1890, by which time the concept was well embedded in mainstream culture, and a related term, “individualist,” was climbing rapidly, along with terms like “self-reliance” and “survival-of-the-fittest.” Elites defended their male offspring as “self-made” if they didn’t lose family fortunes. At the same time, laborers and other critics asked whether the rich were “Self-Made or Made for Self”?

The term “self-made” was fully embedded in 1920s popular culture, intertwined with individualism. Master of positive thinking Dale Carnegie dominated armies of cultural entrepreneurs selling tales of success. The Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression turned many Americans against businessmen’s leadership, but business advocates militantly circulated the myth of self-made success to justify why the privileged still deserved esteem and power. They rejected efforts at systemic change. They used the myth of self-making to explain success and failure as individual matters, and explicitly upheld inequality as a valid outcome of merit alone. To resist the progressive state, conservatives invested enormous resources to attack reformers for threatening freedom and opportunities. Among their rhetorical tools were fantasies of self-made success that they often imagined came from Horatio Alger, distorting his legacy into an individualistic and often harsh “bootstraps” mythology. Into the 1950s, positive thinker Norman Vincent Peale and others magnified the faith that people could “make” their own lives regardless of what the world handed them.

Americans’ zeal for mobility intensified after the Civil War, and self-help recipes offered ways to achieve it. But “self-help” is not the same as “self-made,” as Frederick Douglass explained. Many argued that individuals and communities benefit through mutual assistance. People outside of the mainstream who engaged in collective self-help were often undermined by powerful authorities who attacked communal codes. In 1887, federal legislation further dispossessed Native Americans with the Dawes Severalty Act in the name of individualism. In 1892, Pittsburgh’s highly collaborative industrialists suppressed labor organization using their collective resources of law and armed force. Collective self-help was central to African Americans’ efforts to improve their lives despite the weight of discriminatory laws and social bigotry. The motto “Lifting as We Climb” reflected their sense of mutual obligation. Storytellers in the mainstream rebuffed others’ ethos of collective self-help while claiming self-made success for those they championed. "Positive thinkers" such as Dale Carnegie promised success for those who "believed" enough. "Self-made" success was deeply embedded in 1920s culture.

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.