American Enterprise Institute

Capitalism and the American Revolution

The American Revolution and the Pursuit of Economic Equality Notes

  1. The word “revolution” was seldom used, except in passing, by Americans before the publication of Gouverneur Morris, Observations on the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Styner and Cist, 1779). The term came into widespread use after a pamphlet debate between Abbé Raynal and Thomas Paine. Although Raynal used the title The Revolution of America for his work denouncing the “upheavals” taking place as unjustified by any injustice Americans experienced, Paine happily adopted the term in his Letter Addressed to the Abbé Raynal on the Affairs of North-America, rebutting the French writer’s misguided and misinformed account of the struggle for independence. See Ilan Rachum, “From ‘American Independence’ to ‘American Revolution,’” Journal of American Studies 27, no. 1 (April 1993): 73–81, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40464078.
  2. As the etymology of the word “radical” suggests, revolutions are extreme or thoroughgoing events that go to the very roots.
  3. Thomas Paine, “Common Sense,” in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel Press, 1945), 1:45.
  4. On the varieties of stratification structuring British colonies in the 18th century, see Jack P. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). On the “politics of deference” before independence, see J. G. A. Pocock, “The Classical Theory of Deference,” American Historical Review 81, no. 3 (June 1976): 516–23, https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article-abstract/81/3/516/70853; and J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966). For an overview and critique of the historiography on deference, see Richard R. Beeman, “The Varieties of Deference in Eighteenth-Century America,” Early American Studies 3, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 311–40, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23546525.
  5. On incidents of urban protest against political elites before the Revolution, see Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 47–48, 132–33. For an example of rural protest against economic and political elites before the Revolution, see Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
  6. John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity,” in The Puritans in America: A Narrative Anthology, ed. Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 82.
  7. Thomas S. Kidd, The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
  8. The conditions contributing to this rapid increase in population were explored in Benjamin Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” in Benjamin Franklin: Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 367–74.
  9. The market revolution continued to evolve after independence was won and was both an effect of and contributor to the political upheaval it helped shape. See John Lauritz Larson, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
  10. See Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
  11. See, for example, Charles A. Beard, An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States (New York: Free Press, 1986); and Carl Becker, The History of Political Parties in the Province of New York, 1760–1775 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1909). For critiques, see Forrest McDonald, We the People: The Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1991); and Robert E. Brown, Charles Beard and the Constitution: A Critical Analysis of “An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution,” rev. ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1979).
  12. J. Franklin Jameson, The American Revolution Considered as a Social Movement (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1926); and Merrill Jensen, The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1940), 11.
  13. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1965). One of the first works to deny that the American Revolution engaged in the social “experimentation” that led to the violent “excesses” of the French Revolution was Friedrich von Gentz, The Origins and Principles of the American Revolution Compared with the Origins and Principles of the French Revolution, trans. John Quincy Adams (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2010).
  14. Jack P. Greene, “The Social Origins of the American Revolution: An Evaluation and an Interpretation,” Political Science Quarterly 88, no. 1 (March 1973): 4, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2148646.
  15. See, for example, Jackson Turner Main, The Social Structure of Revolutionary America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965); Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; and T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004).
  16. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993). See also James L. Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765–1900 (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1998); and J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), 28, 35–36.
  17. See, for example, Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2017).
  18. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 476.
  19. Benjamin Franklin, letter to Thomas Cushing, January 13, 1772, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-19-02-0007.
  20. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution.
  21. See, for example, T. H. Breen, “Horses and Gentlemen: The Cultural Significance of Gambling Among the Gentry of Virginia,” William and Mary Quarterly 34, no. 2 (April 1977): 239–57, https://blogs.dickinson.edu/hist-117pinsker/files/2011/01/Breen-article.pdf; and Linda L. Sturtz, “The Ladies and the Lottery: Elite Women’s Gambling in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 2 (Spring 1996): 165–84, https://www.proquest.com/docview/195917692.
  22. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980), 41. See also Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution; and Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750–1800 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 155–63.
  23. Christopher Gadsden, “To the Planters, Mechanics, and Freeholders of the Province of South Carolina, No Ways Concerned in the Importation of British Manufacturers,” in The Writings of Christopher Gadsden, ed. Richard Walsh (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1966), 83.
  24. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 327.
  25. Kerber, Women of the Republic, 53–54.
  26. Quoted in Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 135.
  27. Quoted in Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 159.
  28. Gouverneur Morris to John Penn, May 20, 1774, in Jared Sparks, The Life of Gouverneur Morris, with Selections from Correspondence and Miscellaneous Papers (Boston, MA: Gray and Bowen, 1832), 1:24.
  29. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 137–39.
  30. On the democratic effects of broad landownership in the American colonies, see the famous account in Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Delba Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 27–55.
  31. On general differences among the different sections of the North American colonies, see Greene, Pursuits of Happiness.
  32. Franklin, “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.,” 368.
  33. David Ramsay, “Oration on the Advantages of American Independence” (speech, Charleston, SC, July 4, 1778), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/evans/N28767.0001.001.
  34. These figures are based on assessments later in the century, when economic inequality in the United States had started to creep back up. See Lee Soltow, Distribution of Wealth and Income in the United States in 1798 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 126.
  35. Dennis P. Ryan, “Landholding, Opportunity, and Mobility in Revolutionary New Jersey,” William and Mary Quarterly 36, no. 4 (October 1979): 571–92, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1925184.
  36. Contemporary scholarship confirms this impression. See, for example, Alice Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be: The American Colonies on the Eve of the Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 298, 340–41; and Greene, Pursuits of Happiness, 72–73, 91–92, 137.
  37. The French American author and farmer Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur pointed to the legal rules around property to explain why “the rich and poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe.” Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur, Letters from an American Farmer, ed. Albert Stone (New York: Penguin, 1981), 67.
  38. Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality Since 1700 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016); and Peter H. Lindert and Jeffrey G. Williamson, “American Incomes Before and After the Revolution,” Journal of Economic History 73, no. 3 (September 2013): 725–65, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-economic-history/article/abs/american-incomes-before-and-after-the-revolution/F945C1180EE9D07910EEC886327CF471.
  39. Greene, Pursuits of Happiness; and Hanson Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be.
  40. Benjamin Franklin, “On the Internal State of America,” Franklin Papers, https://franklinpapers.org/framedVolumes.jsp?vol=43&page=781.
  41. John Adams, letter to Abigail Adams, April 12, 1778, The Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1973), 3:10; John Adams, April 6, 1778, diary entry, in The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, ed. Charles Francis Adams (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1856), 3:121; John Adams, December 30, 1779, diary entry, in Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, 3:244; and Benjamin Franklin to Joshua Babcock, January 13, 1772, in Lemay, Benjamin Franklin: Writings, 873–74.
  42. Franklin, “Information to Those Who Would Remove to America,” in Lemay, Benjamin Franklin: Writings, 975.
  43. James Harrington, The Commonwealth of Oceania, ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 57.
  44. On the populist strain of republicanism, especially as articulated by Niccolò Machiavelli, see John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2011); and John P. McCormick, Reading Machiavelli: Scandalous Books, Suspect Engagements, and the Virtue of Populist Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018).
  45. See, for example, Clement Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2015), 57–84. For a perspective that sees the Constitution in more egalitarian terms, see Ganesh Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution: Why Economic Inequality Threatens Our Republic (New York: Vintage Books, 2017), 59–104.
  46. Benjamin Trumbull, A Discourse, Delivered at the Anniversary Meeting of the Freemen of the Town of New Haven, April 12, 1773 (New Haven, CT: 1773), 30.
  47. On the republican “axioms” that guided revolutionaries on this score, see James L. Huston, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765–1900,” American Historical Review 98, no. 4 (October 1993): 1079–105, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2166599.
  48. Colin Bonwick, “The American Revolution as a Social Movement Revisited,” Journal of American Studies 20, no. 3 (December 1986): 355–73, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-american-studies/article/abs/american-revolution-as-a-social-movement-revisited/FBBA6FCA7E3783B947D191703487D9F8.
  49. Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, March 14, 1779, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 2:17–19.
  50. Judith Sargent Murray, “On the Equality of the Sexes,” Massachusetts Magazine 2 (March 1790): 132–35, https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/murray/equality/equality.html. Though the essay was not published until after the Revolution, it was drafted in 1779.
  51. Norton, Liberty’s Daughters, 228–55.
  52. Even conservatives such as Gouverneur Morris approved the notion that “taxes should be raised from individuals in proportion to their wealth.” Morris, “An American: Letters on Public Finance for the Pennsylvania Packet,” February 29, 1780, in “To Secure the Blessings of Liberty”: Selected Writings of Gouverneur Morris, ed. J. Jackson Barlow (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2012), 122.
  53. Many Loyalists explicitly equated republicanism with a demand for agrarian laws and other redistributive policies designed to empower the lower orders. For example, see selections from James Chalmers’s Plain Truth and an untitled document by William Smith Jr. in Ruma Chopra, ed., Choosing Sides: Loyalists in Revolutionary America (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013), 87–89, 217–22.
  54. Thomas N. Ingersoll, The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 215–73. See also Richard D. Brown, “The Confiscation and Disposition of Loyalists’ Estates in Suffolk County, Massachusetts,” William and Mary Quarterly 21, no. 4 (October 1964): 534–50, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1923305.
  55. Ingersoll, The Loyalist Problem in Revolutionary New England, 263.
  56. Edward Countryman, “The Uses of Capital in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York Loyalist Merchants,” William and Mary Quarterly 49, no. 1 (January 1992): 11, https://www.jstor.org/stable/2947333.
  57. Marcus Gallo, “Property Rights, Citizenship, Corruption, and Inequality: Confiscating Loyalist Estates During the American Revolution,” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 86, no. 4 (Autumn 2019): 474–510, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/pennhistory.86.4.0474.
  58. John R. Maass, “‘The Cure for All Our Political Calamities’: Archibald Maclaine and the Politics of Moderation in Revolutionary North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review 85, no. 3 (July 2008): 251–81, https://journals.scholarsportal.info/details/00292494/v85i0003/251_cfaopcomirnc.xml.
  59. Robert G. Mitchell, “The Losses and Compensation of Georgia Loyalists,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 68, no. 2 (Summer 1984): 233–34, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40581224.
  60. For more details, see Howard Pashman, “The People’s Property Law: A Step Toward Building a New Legal Order in Revolutionary New York,” Law and History Review 31, no. 3 (August 2013): 587–626, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-history-review/article/abs/peoples-property-law-a-step-toward-building-a-new-legal-order-in-revolutionary-new-york/2AF0DEB3413D98C14DFF3C3BD24436ED.
  61. As a result, the distribution of property ownership before and after the confiscation program remained more or less the same. Robert S. Lambert, “The Confiscation of Loyalist Property in Georgia, 1782–1786,” William and Mary Quarterly 20, no. 1 (January 1963): 89, 94, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1921356.
  62. On the complicated theory and law of inheritance in the 18th-century British world and how the revolutionary generation transformed it, see Stanley N. Katz, “Republicanism and the Law of Inheritance in the American Revolutionary Era,” Michigan Law Review 76, no. 1 (November 1977): 1–29, https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3901&context=mlr.
  63. John V. Orth, “After the Revolution: ‘Reform’ of the Law of Inheritance,” Law and History Review 10, no. 1 (Spring 1992): 35–36, https://www.jstor.org/stable/743813. The near absence of primogeniture laws in New England was one reason John Adams thought an oligarchy was unlikely to form in that part of the country, stating “the tendency of the laws of inheritance [in New England] is perpetually to distribute and subdivide whatever portion of land acquires any great market value.” John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, in Adams, The Works of John Adams, 4:359–60.
  64. Holly Brewer, “Entailing Aristocracy in Colonial Virginia: ‘Ancient Feudal Restraints’ and Revolutionary Reform,” William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 2 (April 1997): 307–46, https://www.academia.edu/40474992/Entailing_Aristocracy_in_Colonial_Virginia_Ancient_Feudal_Restraints_and_Revolutionary.
  65. Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, in The Works of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1904–05), 1:68. Jefferson’s condemnation of the “unnatural” features of these laws echoed critiques in popular mid-century novels that extolled the virtues of more egalitarian family relations. See Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims, 51–53.
  66. Orth, “After the Revolution,” 41–42. Promoting equality along one dimension sometimes undermined it along another: Equalizing the inheritance rights of children came at the expense of the dower rights of widows, who lost the third share to which they had formerly been entitled. See Kerber, Women of the Republic, 146.
  67. Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Julian Boyd (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 2:139–40.
  68. Quoted in Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality, 48.
  69. For more details about Morris’s tax plans, see Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality, 47–49.
  70. Quoted in Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality, 120. Despite his reputation as an unapologetic plutocrat, an examination of Hamilton’s tax proposals at both the state and national levels reveals a consistent effort to shift tax burdens to the wealthy and relieve, if not eliminate, burdens on the poor. See Fatovic, America’s Founding and the Struggle over Economic Inequality, 119–24.
  71. For an overview of the Constitution’s egalitarian dimensions, see Sitaraman, The Crisis of the Middle-Class Constitution.