One of the vexing ambiguities in the historiography of the civic republican tradition has been just when and how republicanism ended. The American Revolution itself, according to Gordon Wood and J. G. A. Pocock, was waged for republican principles, but the government established in its wake represented what Wood called "the end of classical politics," abandoning virtue in the name of commerce and liberal individualism. Later historians sought to extend republicanism's life into the nineteenth century, identifying figures and institutions who held fast to the tradition against the prevailing commercial and industrial winds, while others have taken the ambiguity of republicanism's end to suggest that no such coherent worldview existed in the United States, which was from the outset a liberal project employing only an occasional and misleading republican vocabulary. But republicanism's demise--or perhaps, more accurately, its transformation into precisely a "civic morality for the market man"--can be traced in clearer detail in the early republic's debate over the education of the young. The postrevolutionary education debate illuminates the contradictions of republicanism in the federal period with particular clarity because education sat at the intersection of political theory and political practice. In this article, the author discusses the post-revolutionary turn to public education and the political rhetoric of education in the early republic. (Contains 116 footnotes.)