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.