Why America's Founding Fathers would not recognise the country they created ... 

Article by Tom Hercock. Edited by Sarah Purssell. Additional Research by Michelle Brien. 

American history has often taken a radically different course from the hopes and expectations of the men who wrote the Constitution in 1787. This article explores how the economic principles that would come to define the United States were the very opposite of those held by the man who wrote the Declaration of Independence and laid out the nation’s political ideas. 

Thomas Jefferson is not strictly speaking one of the framers of the Constitution (he was in Paris at the time of the Philadelphia Convention as American ambassador to France) yet the effect of his ideas on the American Revolution and the early American republic was so great that this technicality is often overlooked (the British journalist and historian Alistair Cooke described him as ‘the missing giant of the Convention’). Jefferson’s dream for the future of the republic he had done so much to establish was that it would be a republic of small farmers, a social group who Jefferson idealised, believing that they would safeguard American liberty. As discussed in Issue 2, Jefferson, along with many of the Founding Fathers, thought that only independent men could be trusted with the ballot, since they were not dependent on anyone else, so could exercise their vote freely. Jefferson therefore hoped that any white man who could not become a small farmer would at least be an independent artisan, travelling from settlement to settlement freely exchanging his skills for wages. And Jefferson sought to ensure that as many people as possible could be small farmers; while he was President, he bought Louisiana from France, land which today forms the central third of the United States, partly to provide an agrarian overspill for America’s population growth. Not surprisingly, Jefferson also despised cities, refusing to live in Washington D.C., the new national capital, for some of his presidency (he referred to the city as ‘that Indian swamp’). In contrast to his love for rural America and his hope that its people would secure liberty in the future, Jefferson saw urban politics and the mobs of European cities as the tools of demagogues and tyrants and the enemies of good republican government. He conceded that in Europe farmland was in short supply and the development of urban manufacturing centres was therefore a reasonable outcome. In America, however, with huge tracts of land available on the Western frontier, Jefferson saw no reason for the United States to develop into an urban, industrialised country. 

Jefferson’s ideas were not uncontroversial at the time. Alexander Hamilton, who served alongside Jefferson in the cabinet of President George Washington, took exactly the opposite view and argued for the federal government to actively develop America as a manufacturing and trading power. It was, however, Jefferson who went on to become President but he was unable to direct the future course of the American economy. The early United States saw rapid expansion of cities and manufacturing with much of it, ironically, in the western lands that Jefferson had wanted to save for farmers. Chicago, the great city of the American Midwest, went from being a village of 350 people in 1833, to a town of 4,000 people in 1840, and boomed to reach 90,000 by 1857 becoming the largest city in the Midwest. While much of the West, even today, is farmland, the people there found that rather than being independent producers, growing their own crops and selling any surplus locally, their economic fortunes were determined by the operations of a distant and impersonal market. And thousands worked in the new industrial factories, not at all independent but completely dependent on their employers. Early labour protest in the United States often drew upon these Jeffersonian ideals in their material, arguing that wage labour was inconsistent with republicanism. They were particularly concerned about the effect urban industrial capitalism had on the distribution of wealth in cities. In what Jefferson had hoped would be an egalitarian society (at least among white men), by 1840 5% of the population of American cities owned 70% of the property, while the bottom half owned nothing. According to James M. McPherson, ‘ownership of property was becoming an elusive goal for Americans at the lower end of the economic scale’. Despite these concerns, free market urban capitalism came during the twentieth century to be synonymous with the United States, being the engine of its push to superpower status and underpinning the values it has sought to promote to the rest of the world.

← Back to Volume 1

← Back to Issue 4