Lawyers and the Elite
05/29/2010 16:45
Morton J. Horwitz
The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
1977
Horwitz argues a fairly radical case, which may not have received wide enough recognition due to the subject matter and style. He says “I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society.” (xv) He also has some interesting ideas about the way “the internal technical life of a field generates autonomous forces that determine its history.” (xi) We make a mistake, Horwitz believes, if we fail to account for the activities and interests of lawyers, judges, the legal profession, law schools, etc., when looking at how “the law” influenced history. The same could probably be said, with equally interesting results, for religion, medicine, or the study of history itself.
Horwitz looks at common law. Constitutional law, he says, “represents episodic legal intervention buttressed by a rhetorical tradition that is often an unreliable guide to the slower (and often more unconscious) processes of legal change in America.” (xii) Constitutional law also focuses on judicial review, rather than what Horwitz characterizes as a very active, constructive, legislative role taken on by nineteenth century jurists. “By 1820,” he says, “the process of common law decision making had taken on many of the qualities of legislation. As judges began to conceive of common law adjudication as a process of making and not merely discovering legal rules, they were led to frame general doctrines based on a self-conscious consideration of social and economic policies.” (2) The ancient tradition of “an eternal set of principles expressed in custom and derived from natural law” gave way to an understanding of law as “an instrument of policy” that could be used “for governing society and promoting socially desirable conduct.” (30) Once this change had been made, the game became one of defining the terms “socially desirable.”
The major examples Horwitz uses to illustrate this change surround the competing uses for water (mill power, irrigation, navigation, fishing -- although he doesn’t really try to make the case for each of these or point out how these interests were distributed in society), which illustrated the problems inherent in “a conception of ownership [including] a commitment to absolute dominion.” (31) There was a problem, in a newly-settled land, respecting the concept that “first in time is first in right.” (32) And resources’ “natural use” came to be seen as a lowest common denominator, that would block socially desirable improvements like the operation of mills. (33) The problem was, it was a pandora’s box. While it made sense to grant initial exclusivity to a developer (how many grist mills did a new town need?), “can the claims of still greater efficiency through competition be denied?” Horwitz asks. (34) He fails to examine closely whether the “greater efficiency” ever really produced its claimed social benefits (or even existed, other than as short-term paper gains) -- but maybe the people at the time didn’t ask these questions either. The point is that “By changing the rules and disguising the changes in the complexities of technical legal doctrine, the facade of economic security can be maintained even as new property is allowed to sweep away the old.” (34) This is Horwitz’s major point. The legal system, he says, was used to not only change the rules of the game to benefit an increasingly elite class, but also to hide the fact that these changes were being made. This is a great argument. What it needs is some people in the story to show how it happened, and how people reacted, assuming anyone on the short end of the transaction knew it was happening. (this raises an interesting question: how do we tell stories about things we now see were happening, but that people of the time were unaware of? Because the evidence was hidden, or they just didn’t see things the way we do. Especially when people know something is wrong, but can’t put their finger on it -- or blame it on the wrong thing? The story isn’t just about unintended consequences, it’s about misunderstood consequences...)
Horwitz says the Massachusetts decision in Cary v. Daniels was “premised on the desirability of maximizing economic development even at the cost of equal distribution.” (41) This opened the door for the courts to direct business toward their idea of the public good and “enabled common law judges to choose the direction of American economic development,” at least when it came into contact with older legal ideas of property and equity. (42) I’ve been wondering how people at the time responded to these changes; maybe one place to look would be at the “storm of bitter protest” caused by the “extension of the mill act to manufacturing establishments.” (51) Apparently there were people who saw through the similarity of water power, and argued that while early mills had been almost communal in nature, “manufacturing establishments were private institutions.” (51) Citizens saw through the law’s provisions for relief, arguing “Generally, the mills and mill seats are in the hands of the active and wealthy -- able to make the sufferers repent, if they resort to the law.” (52)
One of the state’s main economic development tools was eminent domain. But tied up with it is the idea of chartered monopoly and of limiting liability. A State grant is no good if “the grantee cannot exercise it without being subject to ruinous damages, so as to swell the cost of their enterprise” beyond its ability to make a profit, one commentator warned. (69) Rather than examine whether these social costs really argued against the business going forward (especially in the cases of railroads in the 1840s-60s), Horwitz says the courts socialized “consequential damages.” This enabled them to disqualify them, under the legal justification that “The law gives no private remedy for anything but a private wrong.” (quoting Blackstone, 76) So the costs were socialized (in economic terms, externalized) at the same time the benefits were privatized in the form of corporate profits. (Horwitz doesn’t say much about the decision to do projects like Canals and Railroads in the private rather than the public sector; but it would be interesting to understand how this choice was made in America.)
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Horwitz says the basic “attitude toward legal liability” became “based on the assumption that the ‘quiet citizen must keep out of the way of the exuberantly active one.’ Indeed, the law of negligence became a leading means by which the dynamic and growing forces in American society were able to challenge and eventually overwhelm the weak...After 1840 the principal that one could not be held liable for socially useful activity exercised with due care became a commonplace in American law.” (99) The effect of this change was “to create immunities from legal liability and thereby to provide substantial subsidies” to developers. (100) “Change brought about through technical legal doctrine,” Horwitz says, “can more easily disguise underlying political choices [than] Subsidy through the tax system.” (101) Horwitz says “there is reason to suppose” that this “was not simply an abstract effort to avoid political contention but that it entailed more conscious decisions about who would bear the burdens of economic growth.” This is a really interesting claim, but it needs to be backed up, I think, with some evidence that actual people made this decision at the time.
“In every state after 1790,” Horwitz says, “a political decision to avoid promoting economic growth primarily through taxing seems to have crystallized.” (109) Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellions would have helped that crystalization, as well as recognition that there wasn’t any money out there to get through taxing. Horwitz continues, “By 1800 a pattern of private ownership of banks, insurance companies, and transportation facilities had become dominant in America.” (110) Again, true, but the question is why? Attributing the change in definition of corporations to an individualist spirit seems to put the cart before the horse, since early corporations “continued to argue both that their charters were grants of exclusive property interests and that economic rivalry was, in effect, a private law nuisance to property.” (114) This seems like a blatantly opportunistic attempt to have your cake and eat it to: the corporations were capitalizing on their status as something in between public and private, with the benefits of both. But the question is, how did corporations get from the 18th century definition of a public body (like a municipality) working for the public good, to the 19th century definition of a private company doing business to produce profit for its investors?
Horwitz says “eighteenth century...contract law was essentially antagonistic to the interests of commercial classes,” because it sought to judge the underlying fairness or justice of the exchange in question. (167) But ironically, the argument for judging contracts objectively on their terms was based on a claim that value was subjective and circumstantial. Promissory notes were used in place of cash, and “in order to make notes negotiable a subsequent endorsee [must] be allowed to recover on the note regardless of the consideration between the original parties.” (177) The same-as-cash nature of the note enabled “merchants to exclude the question of the equality of a bargain by transacting their business through promissory notes,” and excluded the courts from playing a role in judging the fairness of a transaction. The contract became an authority unto itself, and was no longer seen as part of a tradition of dealings based on just prices or practices. (This is a missing link in the market transition story -- many historians assume the change required a move to a cash-based, spot market. Horwitz shows the market could be depersonalized and objectified even before it stopped being based on long-term, credit relationships.)
Contract law changed the laborers’ world through the “doctrine of ‘assumption of risk,’ [in which] contract ideology...emasculated all prior conceptions of substantive justice.” The fiction of “equal bargaining power inevitably became established as the inarticulate major premise of all legal and economic analysis. The circle was completed: the law had come simply to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produced.” (210)
Returning to the issue of negotiable notes, Horwitz points out that common law not only established rules allowing “subsequent innocent purchasers” to collect on the notes regardless of any defects in the original deal, but it allowed “the legal system [to] sanction private arrangements whose effect was to increase the supply of money by allowing individuals to agree to substitute their own notes for currency designated by the state.” (211) This has interesting implications for the pace and distribution of economic development. After Andrew Jackson’s specie circular, for example, currency was in short supply in already-settled areas. Growth would have been much slower, and demand for state money creation would have been more urgent, if people like my upstate NY merchants had not been able to do business using notes. But I wonder, how much was “the law” making policy? Couldn’t it also be argued that these people were making policy, and “the law” was just trying to keep up with them? Who actually had the agency -- who was in the driver’s seat -- seems to be a major unanswered question here. Massachusetts Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons’ 1808 remarks seem the suggest the law was following: “The circulation of negotiable paper,” he said, “is extremely useful to trade, as it multiplies commercial credit, and the notes pass form man to man as cash. Any rule of law, tending unnecessarily to suppress this circulation, is therefore against public policy.” (220)
Horwitz concludes by describing the “rise of legal formalism” in the 1840s and 50s. “If a flexible, instrumental conception of law was necessary” to promote economic development, “it was no longer needed once the major beneficiaries...had obtained the bulk of their objectives.” (254) In fact, just the opposite. The law needed to become (and be seen as) “self-contained, apolitical, and inexorable;” built on scientific logic and practiced by professionals. Having used it to get to power, Horwitz says, the ruling class used legal formalism as a way of “disguising and suppressing the inevitably political and redistributive functions of law.” (266) This is a startling conclusion, if one came to this book thinking the law was actually ever apolitical or objective. From a broader context, Horwitz shows that American law in the nineteenth century was no different in this respect from that of any other time or place. He outlines some of the ways an emerging elite used and changed the law to facilitate its rise, although he leaves the names and faces out of the story. Horwitz believes recent historians have been “more concerned with finding evidence of governmental intervention than they were in asking in whose interest these regulations were forged.” (xiv) His book suggests who some of the targets of questions should be -- it remains to be seen whether it can be proved these people were acting consciously, and how they and society at large understood their actions and the changes that resulted.
Interesting references:
Handlin and Handlin, Commonwealth
Zephaniah Swift, A Treatise on Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes, 1810
Gulian C. Verplanck, An Essay on the Doctrine of Contracts, 1825 (the “Austrian” argument of subjective value 75 years early)
The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860
1977
Horwitz argues a fairly radical case, which may not have received wide enough recognition due to the subject matter and style. He says “I seek to show that one of the crucial choices made during the antebellum period was to promote economic growth primarily through the legal, not the tax, system, a choice which had major consequences for the distribution of wealth and power in American society.” (xv) He also has some interesting ideas about the way “the internal technical life of a field generates autonomous forces that determine its history.” (xi) We make a mistake, Horwitz believes, if we fail to account for the activities and interests of lawyers, judges, the legal profession, law schools, etc., when looking at how “the law” influenced history. The same could probably be said, with equally interesting results, for religion, medicine, or the study of history itself.
Horwitz looks at common law. Constitutional law, he says, “represents episodic legal intervention buttressed by a rhetorical tradition that is often an unreliable guide to the slower (and often more unconscious) processes of legal change in America.” (xii) Constitutional law also focuses on judicial review, rather than what Horwitz characterizes as a very active, constructive, legislative role taken on by nineteenth century jurists. “By 1820,” he says, “the process of common law decision making had taken on many of the qualities of legislation. As judges began to conceive of common law adjudication as a process of making and not merely discovering legal rules, they were led to frame general doctrines based on a self-conscious consideration of social and economic policies.” (2) The ancient tradition of “an eternal set of principles expressed in custom and derived from natural law” gave way to an understanding of law as “an instrument of policy” that could be used “for governing society and promoting socially desirable conduct.” (30) Once this change had been made, the game became one of defining the terms “socially desirable.”
The major examples Horwitz uses to illustrate this change surround the competing uses for water (mill power, irrigation, navigation, fishing -- although he doesn’t really try to make the case for each of these or point out how these interests were distributed in society), which illustrated the problems inherent in “a conception of ownership [including] a commitment to absolute dominion.” (31) There was a problem, in a newly-settled land, respecting the concept that “first in time is first in right.” (32) And resources’ “natural use” came to be seen as a lowest common denominator, that would block socially desirable improvements like the operation of mills. (33) The problem was, it was a pandora’s box. While it made sense to grant initial exclusivity to a developer (how many grist mills did a new town need?), “can the claims of still greater efficiency through competition be denied?” Horwitz asks. (34) He fails to examine closely whether the “greater efficiency” ever really produced its claimed social benefits (or even existed, other than as short-term paper gains) -- but maybe the people at the time didn’t ask these questions either. The point is that “By changing the rules and disguising the changes in the complexities of technical legal doctrine, the facade of economic security can be maintained even as new property is allowed to sweep away the old.” (34) This is Horwitz’s major point. The legal system, he says, was used to not only change the rules of the game to benefit an increasingly elite class, but also to hide the fact that these changes were being made. This is a great argument. What it needs is some people in the story to show how it happened, and how people reacted, assuming anyone on the short end of the transaction knew it was happening. (this raises an interesting question: how do we tell stories about things we now see were happening, but that people of the time were unaware of? Because the evidence was hidden, or they just didn’t see things the way we do. Especially when people know something is wrong, but can’t put their finger on it -- or blame it on the wrong thing? The story isn’t just about unintended consequences, it’s about misunderstood consequences...)
Horwitz says the Massachusetts decision in Cary v. Daniels was “premised on the desirability of maximizing economic development even at the cost of equal distribution.” (41) This opened the door for the courts to direct business toward their idea of the public good and “enabled common law judges to choose the direction of American economic development,” at least when it came into contact with older legal ideas of property and equity. (42) I’ve been wondering how people at the time responded to these changes; maybe one place to look would be at the “storm of bitter protest” caused by the “extension of the mill act to manufacturing establishments.” (51) Apparently there were people who saw through the similarity of water power, and argued that while early mills had been almost communal in nature, “manufacturing establishments were private institutions.” (51) Citizens saw through the law’s provisions for relief, arguing “Generally, the mills and mill seats are in the hands of the active and wealthy -- able to make the sufferers repent, if they resort to the law.” (52)
One of the state’s main economic development tools was eminent domain. But tied up with it is the idea of chartered monopoly and of limiting liability. A State grant is no good if “the grantee cannot exercise it without being subject to ruinous damages, so as to swell the cost of their enterprise” beyond its ability to make a profit, one commentator warned. (69) Rather than examine whether these social costs really argued against the business going forward (especially in the cases of railroads in the 1840s-60s), Horwitz says the courts socialized “consequential damages.” This enabled them to disqualify them, under the legal justification that “The law gives no private remedy for anything but a private wrong.” (quoting Blackstone, 76) So the costs were socialized (in economic terms, externalized) at the same time the benefits were privatized in the form of corporate profits. (Horwitz doesn’t say much about the decision to do projects like Canals and Railroads in the private rather than the public sector; but it would be interesting to understand how this choice was made in America.)
Over the course of the nineteenth century, Horwitz says the basic “attitude toward legal liability” became “based on the assumption that the ‘quiet citizen must keep out of the way of the exuberantly active one.’ Indeed, the law of negligence became a leading means by which the dynamic and growing forces in American society were able to challenge and eventually overwhelm the weak...After 1840 the principal that one could not be held liable for socially useful activity exercised with due care became a commonplace in American law.” (99) The effect of this change was “to create immunities from legal liability and thereby to provide substantial subsidies” to developers. (100) “Change brought about through technical legal doctrine,” Horwitz says, “can more easily disguise underlying political choices [than] Subsidy through the tax system.” (101) Horwitz says “there is reason to suppose” that this “was not simply an abstract effort to avoid political contention but that it entailed more conscious decisions about who would bear the burdens of economic growth.” This is a really interesting claim, but it needs to be backed up, I think, with some evidence that actual people made this decision at the time.
“In every state after 1790,” Horwitz says, “a political decision to avoid promoting economic growth primarily through taxing seems to have crystallized.” (109) Shays’ and the Whiskey Rebellions would have helped that crystalization, as well as recognition that there wasn’t any money out there to get through taxing. Horwitz continues, “By 1800 a pattern of private ownership of banks, insurance companies, and transportation facilities had become dominant in America.” (110) Again, true, but the question is why? Attributing the change in definition of corporations to an individualist spirit seems to put the cart before the horse, since early corporations “continued to argue both that their charters were grants of exclusive property interests and that economic rivalry was, in effect, a private law nuisance to property.” (114) This seems like a blatantly opportunistic attempt to have your cake and eat it to: the corporations were capitalizing on their status as something in between public and private, with the benefits of both. But the question is, how did corporations get from the 18th century definition of a public body (like a municipality) working for the public good, to the 19th century definition of a private company doing business to produce profit for its investors?
Horwitz says “eighteenth century...contract law was essentially antagonistic to the interests of commercial classes,” because it sought to judge the underlying fairness or justice of the exchange in question. (167) But ironically, the argument for judging contracts objectively on their terms was based on a claim that value was subjective and circumstantial. Promissory notes were used in place of cash, and “in order to make notes negotiable a subsequent endorsee [must] be allowed to recover on the note regardless of the consideration between the original parties.” (177) The same-as-cash nature of the note enabled “merchants to exclude the question of the equality of a bargain by transacting their business through promissory notes,” and excluded the courts from playing a role in judging the fairness of a transaction. The contract became an authority unto itself, and was no longer seen as part of a tradition of dealings based on just prices or practices. (This is a missing link in the market transition story -- many historians assume the change required a move to a cash-based, spot market. Horwitz shows the market could be depersonalized and objectified even before it stopped being based on long-term, credit relationships.)
Contract law changed the laborers’ world through the “doctrine of ‘assumption of risk,’ [in which] contract ideology...emasculated all prior conceptions of substantive justice.” The fiction of “equal bargaining power inevitably became established as the inarticulate major premise of all legal and economic analysis. The circle was completed: the law had come simply to ratify those forms of inequality that the market system produced.” (210)
Returning to the issue of negotiable notes, Horwitz points out that common law not only established rules allowing “subsequent innocent purchasers” to collect on the notes regardless of any defects in the original deal, but it allowed “the legal system [to] sanction private arrangements whose effect was to increase the supply of money by allowing individuals to agree to substitute their own notes for currency designated by the state.” (211) This has interesting implications for the pace and distribution of economic development. After Andrew Jackson’s specie circular, for example, currency was in short supply in already-settled areas. Growth would have been much slower, and demand for state money creation would have been more urgent, if people like my upstate NY merchants had not been able to do business using notes. But I wonder, how much was “the law” making policy? Couldn’t it also be argued that these people were making policy, and “the law” was just trying to keep up with them? Who actually had the agency -- who was in the driver’s seat -- seems to be a major unanswered question here. Massachusetts Chief Justice Theophilus Parsons’ 1808 remarks seem the suggest the law was following: “The circulation of negotiable paper,” he said, “is extremely useful to trade, as it multiplies commercial credit, and the notes pass form man to man as cash. Any rule of law, tending unnecessarily to suppress this circulation, is therefore against public policy.” (220)
Horwitz concludes by describing the “rise of legal formalism” in the 1840s and 50s. “If a flexible, instrumental conception of law was necessary” to promote economic development, “it was no longer needed once the major beneficiaries...had obtained the bulk of their objectives.” (254) In fact, just the opposite. The law needed to become (and be seen as) “self-contained, apolitical, and inexorable;” built on scientific logic and practiced by professionals. Having used it to get to power, Horwitz says, the ruling class used legal formalism as a way of “disguising and suppressing the inevitably political and redistributive functions of law.” (266) This is a startling conclusion, if one came to this book thinking the law was actually ever apolitical or objective. From a broader context, Horwitz shows that American law in the nineteenth century was no different in this respect from that of any other time or place. He outlines some of the ways an emerging elite used and changed the law to facilitate its rise, although he leaves the names and faces out of the story. Horwitz believes recent historians have been “more concerned with finding evidence of governmental intervention than they were in asking in whose interest these regulations were forged.” (xiv) His book suggests who some of the targets of questions should be -- it remains to be seen whether it can be proved these people were acting consciously, and how they and society at large understood their actions and the changes that resulted.
Interesting references:
- Fogel, Railroads and American Growth, 1964
- Fishlow, American Railroads and the Transformation of the Ante-Bellum Economy, 1965
Handlin and Handlin, Commonwealth
Zephaniah Swift, A Treatise on Bills of Exchange and Promissory Notes, 1810
Gulian C. Verplanck, An Essay on the Doctrine of Contracts, 1825 (the “Austrian” argument of subjective value 75 years early)
Peddlers of Progress
05/29/2010 16:03
Jaffee, D. (1991). "Peddlers of Progress and the Transformation of the Rural North, 1760-1860." The Journal of American History 78(2): 511-535.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079532
Jaffee 1991: Draws heavily on Kulikoff, and talks a little too much about the bourgeoise cultural transformation, the “self-fashioning of new identities,” and the “democratization of gentility.” (513) After the Civil War, he says, the “grass-roots character of rural marketing disappeared as the flow and agents of cultural change in the countryside reversed direction, rural agents becoming urban.” (534) He spends a lot of time on Massachusetts’ Hawkers and Peddlers Act of 1846, “which established a graded level of licenses based on ‘morals and citizenship.’” (533) This was an attempt, he says, by local people to “reduce the number of itinerants in the interior settlements and maintain the dominant role of the storekeeper as mediator between producer and consumer.” (532) Not suprisingly, I’m again dissatisfied with this either-or approach to the issue. Rural is good, urban bad? But by 1846, Massachusetts peddlers (many of them based in rural towns like Ashfield) were covering not only the northeast, but the west and south on behalf of urban and rural manufacturers. So whose interests were being served by the 1846 bill? Who was behind it? Who voted against it?
Maybe I’m particularly hard on these types of accounts, because they come so frustratingly close, and then miss the mark. “The creation of the Yankee peddler in antebellum popular literature served as a rich vehicle to convey the meaning of the charged encounter...[and as] symbolic representations to rural people of changing economic transactions between individuals,” Jaffee says. (527) But then he doesn’t take it anywhere. He lets it stand as just another example of what he seems to imagine is a straightforward, black vs. white conflict in the transition to capitalism: “the market became dislodged from an actual sense of place and became an amorphoous entity, a free-floating concept” (quoting Agnew, 527). If anything, the presence of peddlers in the economic lives of rural people (both as suppliers of stuff, and as brothers, sons, and neighbors engaged in the business) argues that rural people had a more complex, layered engagement with commerce than these accounts from the Kulikoff school would suggest. Their responses to “itinerants” are as ambivalent as their responses to “capitalism,” because in both cases, they’re not engaging with those categories, but with the particulars of the situations they find themselves in.
Along the way, some interesting facts: “in the 1850s the ‘full-line, full-service wholesaler begain to market most standardized consumer goods’” (quoting Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 534). The change from merchants maintaining a variety of supply relationships, to the one-stop wholesale shop seems to imply a radical change in power and agency. And: “By 1860...In Massachusetts as a whole, there were 1,648 peddlers, 5 percent of the total commercial population of 35,937.” (522) That’s a low percentage, but I wonder what counts as commercial population. And “Rufus Porter [founder of Scientific American]...would stroll into villages with his brightly decorated camera box, a camera obscura...Porter advertised his profiles (silhouettes) at twenty cents apiece and could produce perhaps twenty in an evening.” (521) Another guy who needs to make a cameo appearance in a story!
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2079532
Jaffee 1991: Draws heavily on Kulikoff, and talks a little too much about the bourgeoise cultural transformation, the “self-fashioning of new identities,” and the “democratization of gentility.” (513) After the Civil War, he says, the “grass-roots character of rural marketing disappeared as the flow and agents of cultural change in the countryside reversed direction, rural agents becoming urban.” (534) He spends a lot of time on Massachusetts’ Hawkers and Peddlers Act of 1846, “which established a graded level of licenses based on ‘morals and citizenship.’” (533) This was an attempt, he says, by local people to “reduce the number of itinerants in the interior settlements and maintain the dominant role of the storekeeper as mediator between producer and consumer.” (532) Not suprisingly, I’m again dissatisfied with this either-or approach to the issue. Rural is good, urban bad? But by 1846, Massachusetts peddlers (many of them based in rural towns like Ashfield) were covering not only the northeast, but the west and south on behalf of urban and rural manufacturers. So whose interests were being served by the 1846 bill? Who was behind it? Who voted against it?
Maybe I’m particularly hard on these types of accounts, because they come so frustratingly close, and then miss the mark. “The creation of the Yankee peddler in antebellum popular literature served as a rich vehicle to convey the meaning of the charged encounter...[and as] symbolic representations to rural people of changing economic transactions between individuals,” Jaffee says. (527) But then he doesn’t take it anywhere. He lets it stand as just another example of what he seems to imagine is a straightforward, black vs. white conflict in the transition to capitalism: “the market became dislodged from an actual sense of place and became an amorphoous entity, a free-floating concept” (quoting Agnew, 527). If anything, the presence of peddlers in the economic lives of rural people (both as suppliers of stuff, and as brothers, sons, and neighbors engaged in the business) argues that rural people had a more complex, layered engagement with commerce than these accounts from the Kulikoff school would suggest. Their responses to “itinerants” are as ambivalent as their responses to “capitalism,” because in both cases, they’re not engaging with those categories, but with the particulars of the situations they find themselves in.
Along the way, some interesting facts: “in the 1850s the ‘full-line, full-service wholesaler begain to market most standardized consumer goods’” (quoting Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., 534). The change from merchants maintaining a variety of supply relationships, to the one-stop wholesale shop seems to imply a radical change in power and agency. And: “By 1860...In Massachusetts as a whole, there were 1,648 peddlers, 5 percent of the total commercial population of 35,937.” (522) That’s a low percentage, but I wonder what counts as commercial population. And “Rufus Porter [founder of Scientific American]...would stroll into villages with his brightly decorated camera box, a camera obscura...Porter advertised his profiles (silhouettes) at twenty cents apiece and could produce perhaps twenty in an evening.” (521) Another guy who needs to make a cameo appearance in a story!
The Elusive Republic
05/28/2010 07:10
The basic premise of The Elusive Republic is that the Jeffersonian Republicans, especially Madison but even including Franklin, thought they could use the frontier to substitute development across space for development over time. In this way, America could be kept in a sort-of artificial infancy, forestalling the what these men (all familiar with classical antiquity) universally believed was the inevitable declension of civilization and decadence. Their objective was to keep America in an intermediate state which they hoped would allow for commercialization without the “corruption” of public morals and dependence on imported luxuries which they believed marked the beginning of the end for a republic. McCoy believes the republicans were obsessed with personal virtue, because they believed only a “Spartan” citizenry could maintain a republic. The irony, understood by only a few, was that in its attempt to keep people virtuous, Sparta had eliminated the freedoms and individual rights the republicans sought to protect.
McCoy begins with the very important (if not original) observation that “Contemporary Americans all too often presume an unjustified familiarity with their Revolutionary forebears. It is easy to assume that our basic concerns were theirs, and especially that our understanding of the Revolution and its legacy accurately reflects the meaning and significance they attached to it...few acknowledge how frightening and even distasteful twentieth-century America might appear to the members of a Revolutionary generation.” (5) This is due, he says, not only to the unimaginable changes that separate them and us, but also to the fact that they were knowingly engaged in an anachronistic, “poignant struggle to adapt the traditional, classical republican impulse to modern commercial society.” (9) Since “The Revolutionaries lived during an age when a consideration of the normative dimension of economic life” was still expected, McCoy sets out to describe their attempt to “establish...a republican system of political economy in America.” (7)
“American republicanism.” McCoy says, “must be understood as an ideology in transition.” (10) It might also be described, to extend his train of thought, as a system idealists like Jefferson tried to apply to a reality they didn’t (and didn’t want to)completely understand. Or, if one were cynical, it might be described as a political ideology, presented to a European audience (via Francois Marbois) wondering how America was going to arrange its affairs. Consider this description by noted deist and suspected atheist Jefferson:
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition...generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer to measure its degree of corruption.” (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia)
Okay, so this is supposed to be the core statement of the Jeffersonian agrarian myth. But look at it! In the first place, “chosen people of God”?! But okay, let’s call that a figure of speech, and give it the benefit of the doubt. Even so, why should the breasts of farmers be the only possible “deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”? Is it only because Jefferson says so -- and that’s why he needs to resort to “God”? And “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators...” He’s either not talking about Virginia at all, or he’s talking about the slaves. In either case, what’s the foundation of his virtuous republic? If it’s Virginia gentlemen farmers, then he’s conveniently forgetting not only that they owned slaves, but that they owned slaves specifically because they were not living in virtuous subsistence, but producing for foreign commercial markets! And if his virtuous cultivators are slaves, then there goes his whole republican formula.
“Dependence begets subservience,” is only a short step from some type of Rousseau-ian belief that any social interaction is a “fall” from a pure state of nature. But again, it’s not a state of nature Jefferson has ever seen. Of course, he probably wasn’t aware that slaves made his life as a Virginia-aristocrat-with-delusions-of-rusticity possible in the first place. This is why I can’t stand Jefferson.
But back to McCoy. Republicans like Jefferson and George Mason, he says “never doubted that the natural sequence of social development would culminate inevitably in the form of society he feared.” (16) It was the classical paradigm of declension, the fall, the feet-of-clay story. It is interesting, as McCoy notes, how these people are able to mix these ancient paradigms with “enlightenment” ideas from Hume and Adam Smith, in ways that seem unreasonable to us now.
McCoy spends some time defending Adam Smith, in an argument that seems to fit well with Appleby’s (later?) contributions to the “capitalist transition” debate. He says Smith both “emphatically approved of an advanced division of labor as the basis of continuing economic growth and social progress, [and] was also concerned with its concomitant tendency to relegate the laboring classes to a brutish existence that crippled their minds and bodies.” (37) Smith is the smartest guy in this book, offering nuanced, qualified observations, such as his statement that under mercantilism, “the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part of society” was taken to be “the general interest of the whole.” (quoting Wealth of Nations, 43). Other insights are provided by Franklin: “Manufactures are founded in poverty...it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.” (quoting “The Interest of Great Britain Considered,” 51) and John Adams: “the balance of power in a society [parallels] the balance of property in land [so society must] make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society [or] make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.” (68)
McCoy suggests there was some “uneasy suspicion (and sometimes recognition) among the Revolutionaries that even predominantly agricultural America was already a relatively advanced commercial society.” (70) They made practical distinctions, however, between “wealth that accrued through the perseverance of habitual industry” and the “sudden fortunes acquired through the manipulation and chicanery of speculators and stockjobbers.” (85) This seems to go to the heart of the republican objection to Hamilton. After all, as Thomas Paine said, “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe.” (quoting Common Sense, 89)
The cause of America’s problems, in McCoy’s story, was the new nation’s inability to sell its agricultural surpluses freely in Europe and the West Indies. In this sense, Britain nearly defeated the American republic, by causing a political crisis that split the founding generation into republican and federalist partisans. Jefferson and Madison’s idea of “developing across space rather than through time” depended on both the availability of a frontier and the “ability of new settlers to get their surpluses to market.” (121-2) The Embargo and attempts to eliminate foreign luxuries and focus on domestic manufacture of “necessaries” raise interesting questions about the role of government in economic development. McCoy reminds the reader that even Hamilton insisted “the development of advanced manufactures in America would require extensive government encouragement.” (quoting the “Report on Manufactures,” 159) He concludes that the republicans’ revolution, the “escape from time,” had always been understood by Madison as temporary. (259) At some point, the frontier would close. By his 1815 annual message, Madison had begun explicitly supporting “manufacturing establishments...of the more complicated kind.” (245) Was this Madison’s acknowledgement of the basic mismatch between classical republicanism and nineteenth century America? Was it a political victory for the capitalists and their cronies in professional government? Maybe the defining moment, in political changes like the demise of agrarian republicanism and its reappearance as an American myth, is not when the other guys finally win out, but when its proponents give it up.
McCoy begins with the very important (if not original) observation that “Contemporary Americans all too often presume an unjustified familiarity with their Revolutionary forebears. It is easy to assume that our basic concerns were theirs, and especially that our understanding of the Revolution and its legacy accurately reflects the meaning and significance they attached to it...few acknowledge how frightening and even distasteful twentieth-century America might appear to the members of a Revolutionary generation.” (5) This is due, he says, not only to the unimaginable changes that separate them and us, but also to the fact that they were knowingly engaged in an anachronistic, “poignant struggle to adapt the traditional, classical republican impulse to modern commercial society.” (9) Since “The Revolutionaries lived during an age when a consideration of the normative dimension of economic life” was still expected, McCoy sets out to describe their attempt to “establish...a republican system of political economy in America.” (7)
“American republicanism.” McCoy says, “must be understood as an ideology in transition.” (10) It might also be described, to extend his train of thought, as a system idealists like Jefferson tried to apply to a reality they didn’t (and didn’t want to)completely understand. Or, if one were cynical, it might be described as a political ideology, presented to a European audience (via Francois Marbois) wondering how America was going to arrange its affairs. Consider this description by noted deist and suspected atheist Jefferson:
Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the face of the earth. Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phaenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example. It is the mark set on those, who not looking up to heaven, to their own soil and industry, as does the husbandman, for their subsistence, depend for it on the casualties and caprice of customers. Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition...generally speaking, the proportion which the aggregate of the other classes of citizens bears in any state to that of its husbandmen, is the proportion of its unsound to its healthy parts, and is a good-enough barometer to measure its degree of corruption.” (Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia)
Okay, so this is supposed to be the core statement of the Jeffersonian agrarian myth. But look at it! In the first place, “chosen people of God”?! But okay, let’s call that a figure of speech, and give it the benefit of the doubt. Even so, why should the breasts of farmers be the only possible “deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”? Is it only because Jefferson says so -- and that’s why he needs to resort to “God”? And “Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators...” He’s either not talking about Virginia at all, or he’s talking about the slaves. In either case, what’s the foundation of his virtuous republic? If it’s Virginia gentlemen farmers, then he’s conveniently forgetting not only that they owned slaves, but that they owned slaves specifically because they were not living in virtuous subsistence, but producing for foreign commercial markets! And if his virtuous cultivators are slaves, then there goes his whole republican formula.
“Dependence begets subservience,” is only a short step from some type of Rousseau-ian belief that any social interaction is a “fall” from a pure state of nature. But again, it’s not a state of nature Jefferson has ever seen. Of course, he probably wasn’t aware that slaves made his life as a Virginia-aristocrat-with-delusions-of-rusticity possible in the first place. This is why I can’t stand Jefferson.
But back to McCoy. Republicans like Jefferson and George Mason, he says “never doubted that the natural sequence of social development would culminate inevitably in the form of society he feared.” (16) It was the classical paradigm of declension, the fall, the feet-of-clay story. It is interesting, as McCoy notes, how these people are able to mix these ancient paradigms with “enlightenment” ideas from Hume and Adam Smith, in ways that seem unreasonable to us now.
McCoy spends some time defending Adam Smith, in an argument that seems to fit well with Appleby’s (later?) contributions to the “capitalist transition” debate. He says Smith both “emphatically approved of an advanced division of labor as the basis of continuing economic growth and social progress, [and] was also concerned with its concomitant tendency to relegate the laboring classes to a brutish existence that crippled their minds and bodies.” (37) Smith is the smartest guy in this book, offering nuanced, qualified observations, such as his statement that under mercantilism, “the private interest of a part, and of a subordinate part of society” was taken to be “the general interest of the whole.” (quoting Wealth of Nations, 43). Other insights are provided by Franklin: “Manufactures are founded in poverty...it is the multitude of poor without land in a country, and who must work for others at low wages or starve, that enables undertakers to carry on a manufacture.” (quoting “The Interest of Great Britain Considered,” 51) and John Adams: “the balance of power in a society [parallels] the balance of property in land [so society must] make the acquisition of land easy to every member of society [or] make a division of land into small quantities, so that the multitude may be possessed of landed estates.” (68)
McCoy suggests there was some “uneasy suspicion (and sometimes recognition) among the Revolutionaries that even predominantly agricultural America was already a relatively advanced commercial society.” (70) They made practical distinctions, however, between “wealth that accrued through the perseverance of habitual industry” and the “sudden fortunes acquired through the manipulation and chicanery of speculators and stockjobbers.” (85) This seems to go to the heart of the republican objection to Hamilton. After all, as Thomas Paine said, “Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe.” (quoting Common Sense, 89)
The cause of America’s problems, in McCoy’s story, was the new nation’s inability to sell its agricultural surpluses freely in Europe and the West Indies. In this sense, Britain nearly defeated the American republic, by causing a political crisis that split the founding generation into republican and federalist partisans. Jefferson and Madison’s idea of “developing across space rather than through time” depended on both the availability of a frontier and the “ability of new settlers to get their surpluses to market.” (121-2) The Embargo and attempts to eliminate foreign luxuries and focus on domestic manufacture of “necessaries” raise interesting questions about the role of government in economic development. McCoy reminds the reader that even Hamilton insisted “the development of advanced manufactures in America would require extensive government encouragement.” (quoting the “Report on Manufactures,” 159) He concludes that the republicans’ revolution, the “escape from time,” had always been understood by Madison as temporary. (259) At some point, the frontier would close. By his 1815 annual message, Madison had begun explicitly supporting “manufacturing establishments...of the more complicated kind.” (245) Was this Madison’s acknowledgement of the basic mismatch between classical republicanism and nineteenth century America? Was it a political victory for the capitalists and their cronies in professional government? Maybe the defining moment, in political changes like the demise of agrarian republicanism and its reappearance as an American myth, is not when the other guys finally win out, but when its proponents give it up.
Public Land and the frontier
05/26/2010 07:29
Malcolm J. Rohrbough
The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837
1968
A mostly administrative history of western expansion, that offers some interesting hints at culture, mostly unintentionally and between the lines. “The distribution of the public domain had a profound effect on the economic life of the nation,” Rohrbough says. Not only in the “great agricultural empire” of the early twentieth century, but because “In the first fifty years of the Republic’s history, citizens spent much time devising ways to get something for nothing from the public domain.” (of course, this may not have been the Indians’ perspective. 238) As time passed, “The politicians who increasingly administered the public domain did not do so out of a feeling of service but to make a profit.” (229) This is an odd statement, as Rohrbough showed that appointees as early as Gallatin were heavy speculators. “Land speculation,” he says, “was part of the American scene from the first settlements;” and so, it seems, was the tendency to mix the public and private domains.
A recurring issue in distributing public lands were “pioneer families [who] defied the Indians [and] challenged the authority of entrepreneurs,” speculators, and bureaucrats. (3) Pre-emption deals had to be made throughout the period of western expansion, to accomodate those who squatted on frontier lands. But the land and money expended on this seems like a drop in the bucket, compared with the fortunes and political power that accrued to the well-connected. “Congress...sold one million acres to the Ohio Company of Associates in the same week that it passed the Northwest Ordinance.” And “John Cleves Symmes (a territorial judge and William Henry Harrison’s father-in-law) concluded an arrangement with the Treasury Board for one million acres.” (11, 18-9)
Public officials dominate Rohrbough’s story. “As a Congressman, Gallatin...constantly supported the sale of small tracts to individual settlers.” (24) Perhaps, given the size of the western wilderness, this did not seem at odds with his speculations, in Gallatin’s mind. “William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, made a series of extensive purchases from the Indians” in the first decade of the 1800s. (30) The terms of these purchases are not elucidated, so it’s not surprising that the Indians next appear as “two thousand infuriated Hell Hounds” (quoting a settler, 49). Chances are, both Rohrbough and the settlers knew what had infuriated the Indians, but chose not to think about it.
The War of 1812 “had broken the grip of the Indian on the western lands,” Rohrbough says. And “Altho you say the Ohio feever is abated in Vermont--the Missouri & Illinois Feever Rages greatly in Ohio, Kentucky, & Tennessee and carried off thousands.” (quoting a letter from a son to his father back east, 74) Indeed, “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,” wrote a contemporary traveler. “We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of family groups, behind and before us, some with a view to a particular spot; close to a brother perhaps, or a friend, who has gone before, and reported well of the country.” (103) In 1819, the eastern half of Michigan was contained in a Land District whose office was at Detroit. (map, 104-5) By 1834, a new District had been formed for the western half, centered on Bronson (Kalamazoo), est. 1831. The towns of White Pigeon and Bronson were “strategically placed on the Chicago Road.” June 1835 land sales in Bronson totaled $138,000; in October, White Pigeon’s sales exceeded $194,500. (193) Much of this purchasing was speculative and based on shaky credit, as shown by the experience of Allegan, “One of the paper cities that vanished beneath the waves of the panic of 1837.” (194)
Around 1816, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford complained that many “Banks have been incorporated, not because there was capital seeking investment; not because the places where they were established had commerce and manufactures...but because men without active capital wanted the means of obtaining loans, which their standing in the community would not command from banks or individuals having real capital and established credit.” This is an interesting chicken-egg statement. To some extent, it could be seen as a desire to limit economic access to the “haves.” But it also seems reasonable that when “bank capital increased from $65,000,000 to more than $125,000,000” between 1813 and 1819, some bad credit decisions may have been made. (111) The Second Bank of the United States’ “loss of regulatory power...following Jackson’s veto of the bill for recharter and the removal of deposits led to the rise of innumerable state banks which expanded loans at a dizzy rate.” (178) As a result, “In the thirty months from the fall of 1834 to the spring of 1837, the American people generated the largest land office business in the history of the Republic. From the timberlands of Maine to the Cotton Kingdom of Mississippi, in city lots of Chicago, and in the wilderness of central Michigan, the dimensions of the land boom touched people of all stations and locations.” (187)
“The desire for lands,” Rohrbough says, “was not dampened by Andrew Jackson’s declaration that after September 1 only specie would be received in payment for public lands. The Bank of Michigan in Detroit quickly ordered specie from the East, acquired $500,000 in hard money from New York in October alone, and supplied land office money to continue the Michigan boom.” (197) Perhaps the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent ongoing scarcity of cash in places like upstate NY can be attributed in part to the fact that hard money continued to be found on the frontier. Rohrbough mentions James Fenimore Cooper’s satirical Home as Found -- this is probably worth a look. In spite of the continued Michigan boom, Rohrbough concludes that “The specie circular...and the panic of 1837 marked the decline of the land office business as a dominant force in American life...The depression marked the passing of a period in which the land business dominated the thoughts and dreams of the nation. A new world was emerging. It was a world in which people would be drawn to cities rather than the land, in which the rise of the factory system would sharply distinguish a laboring class, in which great industrial complexes would attract the investment capital of the nation.” (238)
This conclusion seems to raise more questions than it answers. These are the central issues, but why did they happen? Did changes in access to land, or the administration of the land office, dampen the speculators’ enthusiasm? Why did people flock to cities? Was there a difference between the German immigrants of the later 1830s and people who had preceded them? Did a reduced interest in the west by speculators diminish the flow of real settlers? Were there no longer “fabled tracts of rich land, fertile beyond all imagination,” just over the next hill? (4) More needs to be said about this change. Rohrbough has made a good start -- now a social and cultural history of the people who came west, and the communities they formed, needs to take the next step.
Books to check into:
R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period, 1815-1840, 1951
Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1957
The Land Office Business: The Settlement and Administration of American Public Lands, 1789-1837
1968
A mostly administrative history of western expansion, that offers some interesting hints at culture, mostly unintentionally and between the lines. “The distribution of the public domain had a profound effect on the economic life of the nation,” Rohrbough says. Not only in the “great agricultural empire” of the early twentieth century, but because “In the first fifty years of the Republic’s history, citizens spent much time devising ways to get something for nothing from the public domain.” (of course, this may not have been the Indians’ perspective. 238) As time passed, “The politicians who increasingly administered the public domain did not do so out of a feeling of service but to make a profit.” (229) This is an odd statement, as Rohrbough showed that appointees as early as Gallatin were heavy speculators. “Land speculation,” he says, “was part of the American scene from the first settlements;” and so, it seems, was the tendency to mix the public and private domains.
A recurring issue in distributing public lands were “pioneer families [who] defied the Indians [and] challenged the authority of entrepreneurs,” speculators, and bureaucrats. (3) Pre-emption deals had to be made throughout the period of western expansion, to accomodate those who squatted on frontier lands. But the land and money expended on this seems like a drop in the bucket, compared with the fortunes and political power that accrued to the well-connected. “Congress...sold one million acres to the Ohio Company of Associates in the same week that it passed the Northwest Ordinance.” And “John Cleves Symmes (a territorial judge and William Henry Harrison’s father-in-law) concluded an arrangement with the Treasury Board for one million acres.” (11, 18-9)
Public officials dominate Rohrbough’s story. “As a Congressman, Gallatin...constantly supported the sale of small tracts to individual settlers.” (24) Perhaps, given the size of the western wilderness, this did not seem at odds with his speculations, in Gallatin’s mind. “William Henry Harrison, Governor of the Indiana Territory, made a series of extensive purchases from the Indians” in the first decade of the 1800s. (30) The terms of these purchases are not elucidated, so it’s not surprising that the Indians next appear as “two thousand infuriated Hell Hounds” (quoting a settler, 49). Chances are, both Rohrbough and the settlers knew what had infuriated the Indians, but chose not to think about it.
The War of 1812 “had broken the grip of the Indian on the western lands,” Rohrbough says. And “Altho you say the Ohio feever is abated in Vermont--the Missouri & Illinois Feever Rages greatly in Ohio, Kentucky, & Tennessee and carried off thousands.” (quoting a letter from a son to his father back east, 74) Indeed, “Old America seems to be breaking up, and moving westward,” wrote a contemporary traveler. “We are seldom out of sight, as we travel on this grand track, towards the Ohio, of family groups, behind and before us, some with a view to a particular spot; close to a brother perhaps, or a friend, who has gone before, and reported well of the country.” (103) In 1819, the eastern half of Michigan was contained in a Land District whose office was at Detroit. (map, 104-5) By 1834, a new District had been formed for the western half, centered on Bronson (Kalamazoo), est. 1831. The towns of White Pigeon and Bronson were “strategically placed on the Chicago Road.” June 1835 land sales in Bronson totaled $138,000; in October, White Pigeon’s sales exceeded $194,500. (193) Much of this purchasing was speculative and based on shaky credit, as shown by the experience of Allegan, “One of the paper cities that vanished beneath the waves of the panic of 1837.” (194)
Around 1816, Secretary of the Treasury William H. Crawford complained that many “Banks have been incorporated, not because there was capital seeking investment; not because the places where they were established had commerce and manufactures...but because men without active capital wanted the means of obtaining loans, which their standing in the community would not command from banks or individuals having real capital and established credit.” This is an interesting chicken-egg statement. To some extent, it could be seen as a desire to limit economic access to the “haves.” But it also seems reasonable that when “bank capital increased from $65,000,000 to more than $125,000,000” between 1813 and 1819, some bad credit decisions may have been made. (111) The Second Bank of the United States’ “loss of regulatory power...following Jackson’s veto of the bill for recharter and the removal of deposits led to the rise of innumerable state banks which expanded loans at a dizzy rate.” (178) As a result, “In the thirty months from the fall of 1834 to the spring of 1837, the American people generated the largest land office business in the history of the Republic. From the timberlands of Maine to the Cotton Kingdom of Mississippi, in city lots of Chicago, and in the wilderness of central Michigan, the dimensions of the land boom touched people of all stations and locations.” (187)
“The desire for lands,” Rohrbough says, “was not dampened by Andrew Jackson’s declaration that after September 1 only specie would be received in payment for public lands. The Bank of Michigan in Detroit quickly ordered specie from the East, acquired $500,000 in hard money from New York in October alone, and supplied land office money to continue the Michigan boom.” (197) Perhaps the Panic of 1837 and the subsequent ongoing scarcity of cash in places like upstate NY can be attributed in part to the fact that hard money continued to be found on the frontier. Rohrbough mentions James Fenimore Cooper’s satirical Home as Found -- this is probably worth a look. In spite of the continued Michigan boom, Rohrbough concludes that “The specie circular...and the panic of 1837 marked the decline of the land office business as a dominant force in American life...The depression marked the passing of a period in which the land business dominated the thoughts and dreams of the nation. A new world was emerging. It was a world in which people would be drawn to cities rather than the land, in which the rise of the factory system would sharply distinguish a laboring class, in which great industrial complexes would attract the investment capital of the nation.” (238)
This conclusion seems to raise more questions than it answers. These are the central issues, but why did they happen? Did changes in access to land, or the administration of the land office, dampen the speculators’ enthusiasm? Why did people flock to cities? Was there a difference between the German immigrants of the later 1830s and people who had preceded them? Did a reduced interest in the west by speculators diminish the flow of real settlers? Were there no longer “fabled tracts of rich land, fertile beyond all imagination,” just over the next hill? (4) More needs to be said about this change. Rohrbough has made a good start -- now a social and cultural history of the people who came west, and the communities they formed, needs to take the next step.
Books to check into:
R. Carlyle Buley, The Old Northwest, Pioneer Period, 1815-1840, 1951
Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1957
Yankee Peddlers
05/17/2010 21:23
Richardson Wright, Hawkers & Walkers in Early America, 1927
Although old, this book is still considered the master text on peddlers and itinerants in early America. Wright devotes about half his time to Yankee Peddlers, and the rest to preachers, cobblers, tramps, itinerant craftsmen, and entertainers. There are some interesting observations about the rise of automobile and bus transportation -- Wright expects technology will begin “freeing” people from urban life just as it once “confined” them.
“The dealer in small wares, essences and such, was called a ‘trunk-peddler,’ because he carried his goods in one or two small, oblong, tin trunks slung on his back by a webbing harness or a leather strap.” (19) I’d like to see one of these set-ups. Even more, I’d like to put it on and carry a loaded rig for a couple of miles, to see what it felt like. Wright mentions Timothy Dwight’s disdain for peddlers, adding “whatever exuberant youth does, the clergy consider wrong. And these peddlers were young men.” (21)
The young peddler’s travels, Wright says, “afforded him a fairly complete survey of the rural markets; he could judge the best neighborhoods in which to open a store.” (22) They covered the entire settled area of the country; “Even Horn’s Overland Guide to California--the Baedecker of the forty-niners--contains the advertisement of a Mr. Sypher in Fort Des Moines, who is willing to supply peddlers...at the lowest possible rates.” (26)
“The essence peddler,” says Wright, “was quite a different sort. Usually a free-lance, he managed to scrape together ten or twenty dollars [and] fill his tin trunk with peppermint, bergamot, and wintergreen extracts and bitters. In the backwoods these bitters were in great demand. They were mixed with the local brand of homemade liquor...Other extracts were used as remedies and antidotes.” (56-7) Wright quotes Hawthorne’s 1838 passage from the American Note-books describing his conversation with an essence peddler on the way home to Ashfield, to renew his supply.
Wright thinks “We can trace the dislike of the town for the country through practically all phases of itinerant life.” Despite the fact that “had there been no peddlers there would have been no countryside distribution, and...manufacturing, even of the humblest household sort, could never have survived,” Wright says “the peddler’s foe was the established, settled, town merchant.” (89) It’s hard to judge this argument, because Wright simply asserts it. He does not cite any examples (and although he includes a large bibliography, he includes no notes), but his general attitude is betrayed a few pages later when he comments “a vast amount of sentiment has been wasted over this Homespun Era.” (93)
In an interesting aside, Wright dates the entry of Jewish peddlers into the picture to about 1836, “following the oppressive marriage laws promulgated in Bavaria” in 1835. He doesn’t spend a lot of time on this, and it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to my story, but it’s interesting that there’s a whole other view of peddling and the rise of Jewish families in America, that originates here. See, for example, the American Jewish Historical Society website.
I raced through the sections on preachers and entertainers, but noticed a couple of interesting people and facts along the way: Jonathan Chapman and William Augustus Bowles are both probably worth a closer look at some point. And “the yeast man who kept his precious fluid--barm, it was called locally--in a jar in front of him in his cart,” is probably a character who should make a cameo appearance in a story, someday. (229) New York street sellers are interesting, but seem a lot tamer than London costermongers.
“Out of Boston, in 1832...ran no fewer than 106 coach lines to all parts of the State and contiguous States.” (265) Important for me to keep in mind that Ashfield was a rest-stop on the Boston to Albany mail run. There’s got to be some material on this, either in Ashfield or at the PVMA. William F. Harnden, who started the “Express Package Carrier” company between Boston and New York in 1839 is also probably worth looking into. (268)
“The dealer in small wares, essences and such, was called a ‘trunk-peddler,’ because he carried his goods in one or two small, oblong, tin trunks slung on his back by a webbing harness or a leather strap.” (19) I’d like to see one of these set-ups. Even more, I’d like to put it on and carry a loaded rig for a couple of miles, to see what it felt like. Wright mentions Timothy Dwight’s disdain for peddlers, adding “whatever exuberant youth does, the clergy consider wrong. And these peddlers were young men.” (21)
The young peddler’s travels, Wright says, “afforded him a fairly complete survey of the rural markets; he could judge the best neighborhoods in which to open a store.” (22) They covered the entire settled area of the country; “Even Horn’s Overland Guide to California--the Baedecker of the forty-niners--contains the advertisement of a Mr. Sypher in Fort Des Moines, who is willing to supply peddlers...at the lowest possible rates.” (26)
“The essence peddler,” says Wright, “was quite a different sort. Usually a free-lance, he managed to scrape together ten or twenty dollars [and] fill his tin trunk with peppermint, bergamot, and wintergreen extracts and bitters. In the backwoods these bitters were in great demand. They were mixed with the local brand of homemade liquor...Other extracts were used as remedies and antidotes.” (56-7) Wright quotes Hawthorne’s 1838 passage from the American Note-books describing his conversation with an essence peddler on the way home to Ashfield, to renew his supply.
Wright thinks “We can trace the dislike of the town for the country through practically all phases of itinerant life.” Despite the fact that “had there been no peddlers there would have been no countryside distribution, and...manufacturing, even of the humblest household sort, could never have survived,” Wright says “the peddler’s foe was the established, settled, town merchant.” (89) It’s hard to judge this argument, because Wright simply asserts it. He does not cite any examples (and although he includes a large bibliography, he includes no notes), but his general attitude is betrayed a few pages later when he comments “a vast amount of sentiment has been wasted over this Homespun Era.” (93)
In an interesting aside, Wright dates the entry of Jewish peddlers into the picture to about 1836, “following the oppressive marriage laws promulgated in Bavaria” in 1835. He doesn’t spend a lot of time on this, and it doesn’t seem particularly relevant to my story, but it’s interesting that there’s a whole other view of peddling and the rise of Jewish families in America, that originates here. See, for example, the American Jewish Historical Society website.
I raced through the sections on preachers and entertainers, but noticed a couple of interesting people and facts along the way: Jonathan Chapman and William Augustus Bowles are both probably worth a closer look at some point. And “the yeast man who kept his precious fluid--barm, it was called locally--in a jar in front of him in his cart,” is probably a character who should make a cameo appearance in a story, someday. (229) New York street sellers are interesting, but seem a lot tamer than London costermongers.
“Out of Boston, in 1832...ran no fewer than 106 coach lines to all parts of the State and contiguous States.” (265) Important for me to keep in mind that Ashfield was a rest-stop on the Boston to Albany mail run. There’s got to be some material on this, either in Ashfield or at the PVMA. William F. Harnden, who started the “Express Package Carrier” company between Boston and New York in 1839 is also probably worth looking into. (268)
1994 Panel Discussion
05/06/2010 21:19
Clark, C., D. Vickers, et al. (1994). "The Transition to Capitalism in America: A Panel Discussion." The History Teacher 27(3): 263-288.
http://www.jstor.org.silk.library.umass.edu:2048/stable/494769
This is another in a series of what seem to be central texts in the evolution of the “market revolution.” Probably seems like incredibly old news to those who participated, so I should probably keep my mouth shut about it until I have a better sense of how it turned out.
Christopher Clark mentions in his introduction that most interpretations “stress the class and other conflicts that helped structure politics in the Jacksonian period and after.” (266) I wonder, looking at it put this way, if there’s a periodization issue? When we look at “transitions” in different regions, do we assume (like Turner) that they recapitulate a similar process? Or on the other hand, are we tied to these national political eras like the Jacksonian, and do we miss similarities between regions at different times and long, slow developments?
Daniel Vickers proposes we look at “a period in which: 1) commerce spread gradually and mattered vitally to everyone it touched but did not dominate everywhere; 2) business interests were acquiring increasing influence over the state but had not captured it entirely; 3) the rules of custom and law were changing to facilitate the expropriation of small producers, although the process of expropriation was far from complete; and 4) wage labor was growing in importance but rarely became the sole support of any family.” (268) Seems like we ought to call this “the long, slow, irregular transition to a capitalist market economy”
My initial reactions:
I do agree with Vickers that the “ambivalent sense of the opportunities and dangers that nascent capitalism presented” is really interesting. (268) How did people perceive these changes? Where were they getting their information? On what were they basing their opinions and subsequent actions?
Stephen Aron’s focus on frontier land and the role of speculators is interesting partly because it highlights the way historians have made speculators the bad guys of the west (like merchants are the bad guys of the northeast?). “Unrestrained acquisitiveness,” he says, on the part of both “backcountry men” and “better-capitalized gentlemen...interfered with the homestead ethic, undermined the potency of agrarian radicalism, and ultimately eroded the sphere of economic life that existed apart from market relations.” I’m not sure if I buy this, but the “favoritism” shown by the government to its friends when distributing land throughout the history of the frontier seems like a legitimate provocation for a “radical agrarian critique of market relations,” if that’s the way they actually saw the situation. Or did they see it as corrupt government intrusion into business, in a way we no longer do?
Nancy Grey Osterud observes that the division of labor between men and women meant that in some places, women preceded men into the market economy, while in others they trailed behind. So attitudes would have been different from place to place. It’s interesting that in women’s diaries she examined, “it is difficult to distinguish an occasion of shared labor from a social visit.” But I’m not sure this proves that “men adopted market paradigms” more readily than women, while women “maintained a mode of conceiving of cooperative labor that was modeled on kin relationships.” (276) Maybe this isn’t a (hard-wired) different response, but a difference in the timing of a response, based on differing experiences?
Michael Merrill continues to fascinate me with his claim that the debate is “marred by insufficient attention to questions of power.” (277) “Other historians,” he admits, “use the term [capitalism] differently--to refer to a system of production based, supposedly exclusively, on private enterprise, freedom, and individual initiative. This usage obscures the fact that commerce does not have to be organized to benefit only the few...A commercial system run by or in the interests of farmers, mechanics and laborers deserves to be called something else.” (278)
Merrill offers a concrete measure this time, to support his differentiation between “capitalist” and “democratic” market economies. “The higher the return to capital,” he says, “the more powerful the capitalists. Or, the greater the share of the national income accruing to capital rather than labor (property rather than work) the more powerful the capitalists. (This ration might be called the ‘productivity of capital.’) Conversely, the higher the real wage...the more powerful the wage earners.” (279) This is interesting, but is the power he mentions a cause or an effect? And what about technology? A higher-tech industrial base would seem to increase capital productivity (think semi-conductors vs. bricks), but buried in that conclusion are a lot of assumptions about intellectual property, who benefits from invention, etc. There are a million qualifications that need to be made, but somehow I still sympathize with the idea that you can tell something about a society from looking at the wealth and income curves. Not to mention Merrill’s conclusion: “Securing higher wages is not a diversion from the revolution. It is the revolution.” (279)
Clark concludes that “the dichotomy between ‘market’ and ‘social’ approaches” is old news, and can safely be abandoned. (282) In it’s place then, what? I think one unresolved question relates to the differentiation of public and private spheres. Both in terms of family vs. market orientation, and also with respect to private enterprise and government involvement. I think a lot of what I’m seeing, when I look at the documents I’m uncovering, can be understood as people working out not only economic, but social and political approaches to living in a rapidly modernizing world.
http://www.jstor.org.silk.library.umass.edu:2048/stable/494769
This is another in a series of what seem to be central texts in the evolution of the “market revolution.” Probably seems like incredibly old news to those who participated, so I should probably keep my mouth shut about it until I have a better sense of how it turned out.
Christopher Clark mentions in his introduction that most interpretations “stress the class and other conflicts that helped structure politics in the Jacksonian period and after.” (266) I wonder, looking at it put this way, if there’s a periodization issue? When we look at “transitions” in different regions, do we assume (like Turner) that they recapitulate a similar process? Or on the other hand, are we tied to these national political eras like the Jacksonian, and do we miss similarities between regions at different times and long, slow developments?
Daniel Vickers proposes we look at “a period in which: 1) commerce spread gradually and mattered vitally to everyone it touched but did not dominate everywhere; 2) business interests were acquiring increasing influence over the state but had not captured it entirely; 3) the rules of custom and law were changing to facilitate the expropriation of small producers, although the process of expropriation was far from complete; and 4) wage labor was growing in importance but rarely became the sole support of any family.” (268) Seems like we ought to call this “the long, slow, irregular transition to a capitalist market economy”
My initial reactions:
- 1. In what context did commerce matter? I like the idea that trade was often supplemental to “competence,” but it seems like women’s relatively quick abandonment of household textile manufacture is based on a very clear (and very smart) understanding that their time and energy is better spent doing other things. So it’s not just about buying little trinkets and luxuries. It’s about what’s best for the family (over the limited, contingent terrain they can see from where they stand).
- 2. What are business interests? Would it be useful for part of this period to say that people (white men) exercised influence in their roles as businessmen -- rather than through some other leadership role they may have used earlier (political, social, religious, wealthy-gentleman)? Don’t “business interests” really take off with (and as a result of) the widespread creation of (personalized, immortal) chartered corporations?
- 3. Why and how did laws and customs change to favor big producers? Doesn’t seem like it was an accident. So how was it done? (But that said, it’s true that boom and bust business cycles tend to drive smaller people out of businesses, which allows the big guys who can weather the recession to buy assets cheap, gain market share, etc. So it’s not ALL an evil plot by the rich to expropriate the poor...)
- 4. I really like a comment Clark makes in the wrap-up, about “the likelihood that wage work was often not an imposition, but demanded by men and women seeking to loosen the constraints imposed on them by family labor, servanthood or apprenticeship.” (280) This seems like a reasonable recognition that there are a lot of things worse than working for wages.
I do agree with Vickers that the “ambivalent sense of the opportunities and dangers that nascent capitalism presented” is really interesting. (268) How did people perceive these changes? Where were they getting their information? On what were they basing their opinions and subsequent actions?
Stephen Aron’s focus on frontier land and the role of speculators is interesting partly because it highlights the way historians have made speculators the bad guys of the west (like merchants are the bad guys of the northeast?). “Unrestrained acquisitiveness,” he says, on the part of both “backcountry men” and “better-capitalized gentlemen...interfered with the homestead ethic, undermined the potency of agrarian radicalism, and ultimately eroded the sphere of economic life that existed apart from market relations.” I’m not sure if I buy this, but the “favoritism” shown by the government to its friends when distributing land throughout the history of the frontier seems like a legitimate provocation for a “radical agrarian critique of market relations,” if that’s the way they actually saw the situation. Or did they see it as corrupt government intrusion into business, in a way we no longer do?
Nancy Grey Osterud observes that the division of labor between men and women meant that in some places, women preceded men into the market economy, while in others they trailed behind. So attitudes would have been different from place to place. It’s interesting that in women’s diaries she examined, “it is difficult to distinguish an occasion of shared labor from a social visit.” But I’m not sure this proves that “men adopted market paradigms” more readily than women, while women “maintained a mode of conceiving of cooperative labor that was modeled on kin relationships.” (276) Maybe this isn’t a (hard-wired) different response, but a difference in the timing of a response, based on differing experiences?
Michael Merrill continues to fascinate me with his claim that the debate is “marred by insufficient attention to questions of power.” (277) “Other historians,” he admits, “use the term [capitalism] differently--to refer to a system of production based, supposedly exclusively, on private enterprise, freedom, and individual initiative. This usage obscures the fact that commerce does not have to be organized to benefit only the few...A commercial system run by or in the interests of farmers, mechanics and laborers deserves to be called something else.” (278)
Merrill offers a concrete measure this time, to support his differentiation between “capitalist” and “democratic” market economies. “The higher the return to capital,” he says, “the more powerful the capitalists. Or, the greater the share of the national income accruing to capital rather than labor (property rather than work) the more powerful the capitalists. (This ration might be called the ‘productivity of capital.’) Conversely, the higher the real wage...the more powerful the wage earners.” (279) This is interesting, but is the power he mentions a cause or an effect? And what about technology? A higher-tech industrial base would seem to increase capital productivity (think semi-conductors vs. bricks), but buried in that conclusion are a lot of assumptions about intellectual property, who benefits from invention, etc. There are a million qualifications that need to be made, but somehow I still sympathize with the idea that you can tell something about a society from looking at the wealth and income curves. Not to mention Merrill’s conclusion: “Securing higher wages is not a diversion from the revolution. It is the revolution.” (279)
Clark concludes that “the dichotomy between ‘market’ and ‘social’ approaches” is old news, and can safely be abandoned. (282) In it’s place then, what? I think one unresolved question relates to the differentiation of public and private spheres. Both in terms of family vs. market orientation, and also with respect to private enterprise and government involvement. I think a lot of what I’m seeing, when I look at the documents I’m uncovering, can be understood as people working out not only economic, but social and political approaches to living in a rapidly modernizing world.
Vexed?
05/05/2010 19:49
Appleby, J. O. (2001). "The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians." Journal of the Early Republic 21(1): 1-18.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125092
Definitions, again. Appleby defines capitalism as “a system that depends upon private property and the relatively free use of it in economic endeavors.” (1) This is a fairly open definition, of the type that Merrill objects to. Against this, Appleby contrasts the classical (Smithian) and Marxian definitions. “Smith discerned a benign law of unintended consequences [through which] the invisible hand of the market guided self-interested and competitive participants” to the good of society, while “For Marx, capitalists represented not only new men, but new men who shared common political goals” at odds with the interests of the majority. (8) “Neither theorist,” she says, “showed much interest in the meaning market participants gave to their activities.” (9) A more insightful approach, she suggests, would build on the questions posed by Max Weber, using a concept of culture developed by Franz Boas. (9, 15)
The historiography Appleby provides is especially useful to me. Beginning with Charles Beard, who she says “separated the economy of commercial agriculture--the capitalism of the many--from the investments of bankers and merchants--the capitalism of the few.” (2) This is a division that is still being attempted by people like Merrill, and it seems to me with good reason. One type of “capitalism” didn’t necessarily imply the other, and changing attitudes towards these different activities done by different people in different places are probably at the heart of this “transition to capitalism.” The “marked tendency of industrial capitalism to concentrate wealth and convert that wealth into political power” needs to be unpacked. (3) What elements of capitalism are responsible for this? Are they always the same ones? Do business cycles favor the rich in some times and places; while law, government policy, or even popular support help people aggregate large fortunes in others?
Progressives, Appleby says, had a “hard-wired...anticapitalist bias.” (3) Their attack was answered by Consensus Historians like Robert Brown, David Potter, Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, who “rediscovered Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and turned the ‘tyranny of the majority’ into the most compelling and disturbing truth of their day” -- which after all it was, since all around them black, female, and other members of the majority began to challenge the status quo. But when social historians of the ‘60s and ‘70s began looking for these other voices, they “followed the Beardians in depicting capitalism as an exogenous force, thrust into the lives of unwary folk by profit-maximizing outsiders.” (4) Where their predecessors had looked at industrial labor, these “neo-Progressives” focused on “the green and pleasant countryside where tradition-bound yeoman fought to repel the relentless intrusion of the market.” (she cites Kulikoff 1989 here, although she doesn’t quote him. Apparently he stands out as the spokesman for this point of view. 5)
This is about the point where I’m beginning to have some doubts. I’ll have to read all these books and articles, I suppose, to determine whether she’s doing their authors justice here. But I do see an element of truth in things I’ve read so far, that capitalism can appear “less a historical development than a malevolent conspiracy perpetrated by outsiders.” (5) Appleby says Morton Horowitz’s The Transformation of American Law is another book in the “promoter-resister mode,” but again I wonder if this characterization doesn’t unnecessarily limit the discussion. “The judges who transformed American law, Horowitz asserted, were responding to an elite whose entrepreneurial goals ran athwart the conservative sentiments of the bulk of the population.” (6) If this is the case (even some of the time), this is exactly the type of situation that Appleby’s continuing use of the words “capitalist” and “anti-capitalist” obscures.
Not that there aren’t anti-capitalists out there. Tony Freyer and Charles Sellers might fit that bill. Appleby lumps them with Michael Merrill, saying they create producer/capitalist and rural/urban binaries. She quotes Sellers saying “every popular cultural or political movement in the early republic arose originally against the market.” Given the “depth and breadth of antipathy to the market in Sellers account,” it’s hard to see how the Jacksonians lost. (7)
Appleby suggests that more sophisticated economic ideas might improve historians’ thinking. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, she notes made “the brilliant observation that capitalism involved a ceaseless process of ‘creative destruction.” (10) It’s an interesting idea, but for a historian wouldn’t the important questions be: whose stuff is destroyed? Whose stuff replaces it? And how do the people involved and society at large feel about this?
The postmodernists, following Horkheimer and Adorno, “defined consumption as escapist buying and commodified leisure, both substitutes for authentic experience.” (10) I think Appleby is dead-on in characterizing this as elite snobbery, especially when applied to the past. While it may be true that some contemporary first-worlders have “borrowed tastes and manufactured needs,” I agree that “Depictions of consumers as victims...leave readers with ‘an uncritical nostalgia toward a precapitalist past’” (quoting Lisa Tiersten 1993. 11).
Appleby boils the problem down to “three deficiencies in our historiography: construing as exogenous a cultural transformation that changed from within; limiting the appeal of a free enterprise economy to the lure of profit-maximizing; and interpreting discrete historical developments as parts of an inexorable process.” (14) The new economy (I’m going to stop calling it capitalism, even though Appleby continues) “resonated with those who wanted...social changes” that would “expand their scope of action and satisfy desires” (13) And clearly historians are wrong when they imply the proponents or adversaries of change had any idea “what would be the consequences of their decisions.” I’m not sure that means all the new economy’s “opponents suffered from association with fixed hierarchies and inherited status.” But in a really interesting aside, Appleby suggests “the attraction of youth to change, particularly changes that brought them early autonomy, has rarely been studied as a force against traditional...practices” (18).
I think Appleby makes a good case for looking at economic change in America as a “succession of novelties compelling unrehearsed responses” (16) I agree that re-embedding this change in a broader context of social and cultural change offers a “recovery of meaning [which] promises access to motives and, through motives, actions” (17). I’d go one step further, I think, and stop using the deceptive and politically loaded term capitalism.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/3125092
Definitions, again. Appleby defines capitalism as “a system that depends upon private property and the relatively free use of it in economic endeavors.” (1) This is a fairly open definition, of the type that Merrill objects to. Against this, Appleby contrasts the classical (Smithian) and Marxian definitions. “Smith discerned a benign law of unintended consequences [through which] the invisible hand of the market guided self-interested and competitive participants” to the good of society, while “For Marx, capitalists represented not only new men, but new men who shared common political goals” at odds with the interests of the majority. (8) “Neither theorist,” she says, “showed much interest in the meaning market participants gave to their activities.” (9) A more insightful approach, she suggests, would build on the questions posed by Max Weber, using a concept of culture developed by Franz Boas. (9, 15)
The historiography Appleby provides is especially useful to me. Beginning with Charles Beard, who she says “separated the economy of commercial agriculture--the capitalism of the many--from the investments of bankers and merchants--the capitalism of the few.” (2) This is a division that is still being attempted by people like Merrill, and it seems to me with good reason. One type of “capitalism” didn’t necessarily imply the other, and changing attitudes towards these different activities done by different people in different places are probably at the heart of this “transition to capitalism.” The “marked tendency of industrial capitalism to concentrate wealth and convert that wealth into political power” needs to be unpacked. (3) What elements of capitalism are responsible for this? Are they always the same ones? Do business cycles favor the rich in some times and places; while law, government policy, or even popular support help people aggregate large fortunes in others?
Progressives, Appleby says, had a “hard-wired...anticapitalist bias.” (3) Their attack was answered by Consensus Historians like Robert Brown, David Potter, Daniel Boorstin and Louis Hartz, who “rediscovered Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and turned the ‘tyranny of the majority’ into the most compelling and disturbing truth of their day” -- which after all it was, since all around them black, female, and other members of the majority began to challenge the status quo. But when social historians of the ‘60s and ‘70s began looking for these other voices, they “followed the Beardians in depicting capitalism as an exogenous force, thrust into the lives of unwary folk by profit-maximizing outsiders.” (4) Where their predecessors had looked at industrial labor, these “neo-Progressives” focused on “the green and pleasant countryside where tradition-bound yeoman fought to repel the relentless intrusion of the market.” (she cites Kulikoff 1989 here, although she doesn’t quote him. Apparently he stands out as the spokesman for this point of view. 5)
This is about the point where I’m beginning to have some doubts. I’ll have to read all these books and articles, I suppose, to determine whether she’s doing their authors justice here. But I do see an element of truth in things I’ve read so far, that capitalism can appear “less a historical development than a malevolent conspiracy perpetrated by outsiders.” (5) Appleby says Morton Horowitz’s The Transformation of American Law is another book in the “promoter-resister mode,” but again I wonder if this characterization doesn’t unnecessarily limit the discussion. “The judges who transformed American law, Horowitz asserted, were responding to an elite whose entrepreneurial goals ran athwart the conservative sentiments of the bulk of the population.” (6) If this is the case (even some of the time), this is exactly the type of situation that Appleby’s continuing use of the words “capitalist” and “anti-capitalist” obscures.
Not that there aren’t anti-capitalists out there. Tony Freyer and Charles Sellers might fit that bill. Appleby lumps them with Michael Merrill, saying they create producer/capitalist and rural/urban binaries. She quotes Sellers saying “every popular cultural or political movement in the early republic arose originally against the market.” Given the “depth and breadth of antipathy to the market in Sellers account,” it’s hard to see how the Jacksonians lost. (7)
Appleby suggests that more sophisticated economic ideas might improve historians’ thinking. Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, she notes made “the brilliant observation that capitalism involved a ceaseless process of ‘creative destruction.” (10) It’s an interesting idea, but for a historian wouldn’t the important questions be: whose stuff is destroyed? Whose stuff replaces it? And how do the people involved and society at large feel about this?
The postmodernists, following Horkheimer and Adorno, “defined consumption as escapist buying and commodified leisure, both substitutes for authentic experience.” (10) I think Appleby is dead-on in characterizing this as elite snobbery, especially when applied to the past. While it may be true that some contemporary first-worlders have “borrowed tastes and manufactured needs,” I agree that “Depictions of consumers as victims...leave readers with ‘an uncritical nostalgia toward a precapitalist past’” (quoting Lisa Tiersten 1993. 11).
Appleby boils the problem down to “three deficiencies in our historiography: construing as exogenous a cultural transformation that changed from within; limiting the appeal of a free enterprise economy to the lure of profit-maximizing; and interpreting discrete historical developments as parts of an inexorable process.” (14) The new economy (I’m going to stop calling it capitalism, even though Appleby continues) “resonated with those who wanted...social changes” that would “expand their scope of action and satisfy desires” (13) And clearly historians are wrong when they imply the proponents or adversaries of change had any idea “what would be the consequences of their decisions.” I’m not sure that means all the new economy’s “opponents suffered from association with fixed hierarchies and inherited status.” But in a really interesting aside, Appleby suggests “the attraction of youth to change, particularly changes that brought them early autonomy, has rarely been studied as a force against traditional...practices” (18).
I think Appleby makes a good case for looking at economic change in America as a “succession of novelties compelling unrehearsed responses” (16) I agree that re-embedding this change in a broader context of social and cultural change offers a “recovery of meaning [which] promises access to motives and, through motives, actions” (17). I’d go one step further, I think, and stop using the deceptive and politically loaded term capitalism.
So what is this capitalism, anyway?
05/03/2010 21:27
Merrill, M. (1995). "Putting "Capitalism" in Its Place: A Review of Recent Literature." The William and Mary Quarterly 52(2): 315-326.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2946977
Merrill begins with Hartz, Hofstadter, and Schlesinger Jr., revisionists who he says “rejected the Progressive emphasis on the important role a transition to capitalism played in American history.” (315) For these revisionists, he says, the American colonists arrived as full-fledged capitalists, ready to participate in the market economy.
The error in this thinking, Merrill says, is in equating the market economy with capitalism, and people’s willingness (or eagerness) to participate in it with an embrace of capitalism. This is an error in definition, he suggests, that has been continued by historians like Appleby and Kulikoff (interestingly, from opposite political directions). When James Henretta describes “a sophisticated, indigenous capital market distinguished by the number and complexity of financial instruments in circulation,” Merrill doesn’t disagree that’s what was happening. But he suggests it might be something other than what we normally define as capitalism. (319)
Why does the definition matter? And why is it important for me?
Well, Kulikoff, for example, builds his story around a group of immigrants who “migrated to North America in an attempt to stay a step ahead of what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation,’ or the appropriation by capitalists of the ‘means of production’ (especially land) of small producers--in effect, to escape capitalism.” (322) These immigrants became yeoman farmers, but they were still “embedded in capitalist world markets,” so the result was inevitable.
Another problem is that equating capitalism with markets creates periodization: we “see the prosperity that followed the Revolution as a sign of an emergent, radically new, capitalist order rather than as the expansion of a dynamic, profoundly anticapitalist, and democratic older order” which Merrill believes it to be. (323) This is important for me, because the guys I’m researching seem to have a foot in both camps. They’re merchants, but they’re not necessarily the protocapitalists they ought to be if the distinction between capitalism and non- or anti-capitalism is viewed through the regular lens.
Merrill doesn’t propose an exact definition to replace the broad, sloppy one he opposes. But it clearly has a political element. People “did not ask whether there should be a market; they asked who would control it and which social class would reap the lion’s share of its benefits.” (324) Of course, this is what they’re still asking; that’s the point. “To equate capitalism with any market economy,” Merrill says, discredits opposition. Any critique is “fundamentally wrongheaded and says, in effect, that...the only acceptable alternative to capitalism is a society without markets.” (325)
So it seems like it would be a good idea, rather than doing a history that says “these guys were sort-of precapitalist, and these other guys were sort-of capitalist,” to try to describe what they actually did and said, and see if they felt they were allies or adversaries. There are still fights and lawsuits -- tons of them, in fact. But the players didn’t seem to be fitting into their roles the way they were supposed to. Maybe the way to go about this is to try to figure out what groups these people thought they fit into, and why.
see also
Henretta 1998: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124895
1994 Panel Discussion: http://www.jstor.org/stable/494769
http://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2946977
Merrill begins with Hartz, Hofstadter, and Schlesinger Jr., revisionists who he says “rejected the Progressive emphasis on the important role a transition to capitalism played in American history.” (315) For these revisionists, he says, the American colonists arrived as full-fledged capitalists, ready to participate in the market economy.
The error in this thinking, Merrill says, is in equating the market economy with capitalism, and people’s willingness (or eagerness) to participate in it with an embrace of capitalism. This is an error in definition, he suggests, that has been continued by historians like Appleby and Kulikoff (interestingly, from opposite political directions). When James Henretta describes “a sophisticated, indigenous capital market distinguished by the number and complexity of financial instruments in circulation,” Merrill doesn’t disagree that’s what was happening. But he suggests it might be something other than what we normally define as capitalism. (319)
Why does the definition matter? And why is it important for me?
Well, Kulikoff, for example, builds his story around a group of immigrants who “migrated to North America in an attempt to stay a step ahead of what Marx called ‘primitive accumulation,’ or the appropriation by capitalists of the ‘means of production’ (especially land) of small producers--in effect, to escape capitalism.” (322) These immigrants became yeoman farmers, but they were still “embedded in capitalist world markets,” so the result was inevitable.
Another problem is that equating capitalism with markets creates periodization: we “see the prosperity that followed the Revolution as a sign of an emergent, radically new, capitalist order rather than as the expansion of a dynamic, profoundly anticapitalist, and democratic older order” which Merrill believes it to be. (323) This is important for me, because the guys I’m researching seem to have a foot in both camps. They’re merchants, but they’re not necessarily the protocapitalists they ought to be if the distinction between capitalism and non- or anti-capitalism is viewed through the regular lens.
Merrill doesn’t propose an exact definition to replace the broad, sloppy one he opposes. But it clearly has a political element. People “did not ask whether there should be a market; they asked who would control it and which social class would reap the lion’s share of its benefits.” (324) Of course, this is what they’re still asking; that’s the point. “To equate capitalism with any market economy,” Merrill says, discredits opposition. Any critique is “fundamentally wrongheaded and says, in effect, that...the only acceptable alternative to capitalism is a society without markets.” (325)
So it seems like it would be a good idea, rather than doing a history that says “these guys were sort-of precapitalist, and these other guys were sort-of capitalist,” to try to describe what they actually did and said, and see if they felt they were allies or adversaries. There are still fights and lawsuits -- tons of them, in fact. But the players didn’t seem to be fitting into their roles the way they were supposed to. Maybe the way to go about this is to try to figure out what groups these people thought they fit into, and why.
see also
Henretta 1998: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3124895
1994 Panel Discussion: http://www.jstor.org/stable/494769
Speculators or developers?
05/03/2010 21:19
Wyckoff, W. (1988). The developer's frontier : the making of the western New York landscape. New Haven, Yale University Press.
Historical Geographers are another group fascinated by Turner’s frontier thesis. Wyckoff focuses on land developers and resident land agents. Their activities, he says, “directly effected the frontier settlement pattern,” and “became an enduring legacy on the landscape, especially in the form of surviving survey lines, village locations, and road networks. That palpable imprint on the land is largely unrecognized and uncelebrated,” and Wyckoff believes “existing theories of frontier settlement...do little to interpret in any penetrating way the impact of these promoters, investors, and developers on the making of the American landscape or on the evolution of American culture.” (4)
Wyckoff acknowledges challenges made to the standard Turnerian model of frontier evolution (the one that recapitulates the evolution of western civilization), especially those of Paul Wallace Gates and A.M. Sakolski, “who began his work The Great American Land Bubble with the dramatic words, “America, from its inception, was a speculation.’” (7) But the derogatory tone surrounding their treatment of speculators is misplaced, he says. Because it links the frontier with eastern (and even international) investors and capital markets, “the presence of the land speculator complicates and to some extent contradicts aspects of the classic Turnerian model.” But Wyckoff insists “the speculator’s frontier is just as sharply distinguished from the developer’s frontier, in which land agents were committed not only to promoting and selling land but also to reshaping and transforming the landscape in a manner that would attract settlers and would endure on the visible scene for decades.” (8)
Wyckoff also suggests, citing Douglass C. North, R.D. Mitchell, and others, that the development he is going to describe is tightly bound to commerce with urban centers, in a way that seems to anticipate central place theory -- or to imply that developers, if not immigrants, had a similar idea in mind. Wyckoff tries to bridge a gap between theory and observation and answer an important question, by suggesting that the agents of this change were the developers whose “decisions shaped the course of settlement and the subsequent look of the land.”
William Cooper’s Guide to the Wilderness is probably worth a look, as well as William Cooper’s Town.
Historical Geographers are another group fascinated by Turner’s frontier thesis. Wyckoff focuses on land developers and resident land agents. Their activities, he says, “directly effected the frontier settlement pattern,” and “became an enduring legacy on the landscape, especially in the form of surviving survey lines, village locations, and road networks. That palpable imprint on the land is largely unrecognized and uncelebrated,” and Wyckoff believes “existing theories of frontier settlement...do little to interpret in any penetrating way the impact of these promoters, investors, and developers on the making of the American landscape or on the evolution of American culture.” (4)
Wyckoff acknowledges challenges made to the standard Turnerian model of frontier evolution (the one that recapitulates the evolution of western civilization), especially those of Paul Wallace Gates and A.M. Sakolski, “who began his work The Great American Land Bubble with the dramatic words, “America, from its inception, was a speculation.’” (7) But the derogatory tone surrounding their treatment of speculators is misplaced, he says. Because it links the frontier with eastern (and even international) investors and capital markets, “the presence of the land speculator complicates and to some extent contradicts aspects of the classic Turnerian model.” But Wyckoff insists “the speculator’s frontier is just as sharply distinguished from the developer’s frontier, in which land agents were committed not only to promoting and selling land but also to reshaping and transforming the landscape in a manner that would attract settlers and would endure on the visible scene for decades.” (8)
Wyckoff also suggests, citing Douglass C. North, R.D. Mitchell, and others, that the development he is going to describe is tightly bound to commerce with urban centers, in a way that seems to anticipate central place theory -- or to imply that developers, if not immigrants, had a similar idea in mind. Wyckoff tries to bridge a gap between theory and observation and answer an important question, by suggesting that the agents of this change were the developers whose “decisions shaped the course of settlement and the subsequent look of the land.”
William Cooper’s Guide to the Wilderness is probably worth a look, as well as William Cooper’s Town.
