"Free Trade and Hucksters' Rights!" Envisioning Economic Democracy in the Early Republic

Abstract

Amid the clinking glasses of nationalist toasts and the smol-dering fireworks of independence celebrations, Americans began to sort through the most pressing political and economic issues facing a young republic. By the late 1780s, the men who held the reins of power in the nation’s new state and federal governments had already over-come steep differences to master seemingly impossible feats. They had crafted a declaration of their own independence so provocative and powerful that it would soon inspire revolutions throughout the Atlantic world. They had waged and won a war against a formidable empire by mustering and arming undisciplined men and corralling enough servants and slaves to support them through battle. And they had drafted and ratified a frame of government that toppled hereditary monarchies and stitched together the disparate elements of their population into a central nation-state. Yet for all their success in designing a new republic, the men who sat around the green-cloaked tables of the national and state legislatures had yet to reach a genuine consensus regarding the shape of their political and economic future. Instead, as the dust of the federal constitution debates settled, they would enter into equally intense intellectual disputes over how far to extend the tenets of democracy and whether to embrace an economic system governed more by trade regulations or the principles of laissez-faire. Out of these negotiations would arise wildly different political and economic visions that competed for supremacy in the era of the early republic.

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