My doctoral dissertation explores the intersection of politics and material culture in the early American republic. Centered in Philadelphia and spanning the first fifteen years of the nineteenth century, its chapters examine five political events that generated specific forms of material nationalism – the Death of George Washington, the Election of 1800, the Embargo and Non-intercourse Acts, the Abolition of the Slave Trade, and the War of 1812 – using a diverse group of around 550 extant objects as its lens. Put simply, it argues that material culture was a political fulcrum in the early republic, a medium through which everyday Americans shaped the idea of American nationalism on the ground. The dissertation maintains that the processes of cultural Americanization begun during the consumer and American Revolutions were realized in the first decades of the nineteenth century, as objects turned issues like death, partisan politics, oppression, economic failure, and even war into consumable parts of a shared national experience. Like cultural bargaining chips for sovereignty, independence, and patriotism, objects blurred the lines between political and commercial visions for the United States and solidified the uniquely American equation of cultural and political power.