Where we were living, we dressed like people in the neighborhood, and there weren't any problems to speak of. So I think they decided that we needed a little loosening up from the Puritan tradition. They overdid it, released erotic, Dionysian forces that they didn't expect to get unleashed, and all hell broke loose, luckily. I would doubt that it was always oppositional. But I would suppose it was always contentious, because it's the tradition of argument.
Rhetoric is argument, and argument implies two sides to things, criticism, dissent, and assent.
I think it's automatically a stance that questions. It's what the legal tradition comes out of, and it's probably no coincidence that people are getting interested in the connections between literature and law now. So I suppose it begins after the Civil War. Then I would say, in a certain way, the Boston Brahmans and Transcendentalism would fit in this, especially Emerson, because this is not necessarily a movement associated with poverty. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.