Conclusion

Summarizing the developments in nineteenth-century academic economics, this chapter draws comparisons and discovers new connections between America’s first full century of economists. German historical economics is discussed in the context of nineteenth-century protectionism and industrial capitalism of the Gilded Age. Parallels are found between antebellum and post–Civil War expressions of opposition toward finance. And special attention is paid to the evolution of conservative economics during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, and ultimately the ascendancy of laissez-faire capitalism in the conservative economic mind.

The Crisis of Free Society

This chapter focuses on American conservative economic thought, concentrating on George Fitzhugh, George Frederick Holmes, Thomas Skidmore, and Langton Byllesby. Material and intellectual capitalism are described as revolutionary movements that American conservatives organized against. Antebellum conservatives rejected bourgeois capitalist values, further illustrating the absence of a Smithian-inspired laissez-faire consensus. Combining these thinkers into a single chapter offers a fresh perspective on what constituted economic conservative thought in the face of capitalist revolution. Southern conservatives like Fitzhugh and Holmes reserved special animus towards Smith’s Wealth of Nations, highlighting the moral and social perils of free labor, competition, and industrialization, while celebrating the benefits of paternal slavery. In Northern industrial quarters, socialists like Skidmore and Byllesby challenged the foundational principles of bourgeois capitalism, denouncing profits, private property, the maldistribution of wealth, and the social and psychological externalities of industrialization. Skidmore and Byllesby voiced a home-grown version of socialist ideology then emerging among America’s working class.

Henry Carey, Nature, and the Destiny of Man

This chapters argues that Henry Carey was the most important economist of the antebellum period. Carey united protectionism into a single, coherent economic ideology. His most significant theoretical accomplishment is the assertion of human agency in the natural economic order, as described by Adam Smith and the British classicists. Carey inverts the relationship between man and nature, making humanity sovereign over what the British economists described as an unbending natural order. For Carey, man is no longer subject to nature’s will; rather humanity controls the natural economic order, extracting from it an economics of affluence that is distinct to the American experience.

Progress and Poverty

This chapter further illustrates the split between American and British liberal political economy by analyzing the antebellum treatment of Thomas Malthus and David Ricardo. Important distinctions are shown between American liberals on population, and theories of rent and wages. American exceptionalism was the primary intellectual impetus behind liberal America’s apostasy from British classicism. This chapter showcases the various forms of laissez-faire ideology that circulated in the domestic discourse, with special attention paid to, among others, J. D. B. De Bow, George Tucker, Henry Vethake, Jacob Cardozo, and Thomas Dew. American exceptionalism, combined with the influence of regional social, political, economic and cultural attitudes, shaped Americans’ understanding of British liberalism.

Liberalism, Republicanism, and Finance

This chapter surveys the historiography on Jacksonian finance, emphasizing the literary association between finance and capitalism. Much of the chapter addresses early American opposition to financial institutions, but this chapter also discusses the advocates of finance who sponsored government intervention in state and national financial markets. This chapter argues for the reorganization of the conventional dialectic between finance and capitalism, highlighting critical nuances in the literature. Besides Alexander Hamilton, few Americans accepted finance as a desirable or necessary feature of capitalism. Most Americans believed that financial institutions were anathema to market economies, or they imagined that market competition could be employed to slow or prevent entirely the spread of finance. The chapter also connects the antebellum opposition to classical republicanism traced to England’s South Sea Bubble. Early American opponents of finance combined republican and laissez-faire values to oppose the spread of finance.

Introduction

The introduction situates the concept of hybrid capitalism in the historiography of American economic thought, as well as within the literature on the history of capitalism. The influence of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations is discussed. This chapter indicates that early American economists deviated from Smith and British classicism. Protectionism is introduced as the essential expression of the American economic mind. The theoretical distinctions between antebellum liberal and conservative economists are introduced. And the literature on antebellum finance is shown to have relied heavily on the dialectic between laissez-faire and republican ideology. The methodological advantages of discussing capitalism as a form of economic intellectual culture are illustrated with discussions of more recent historical analyses.

An American Political Economy

Beginning with a discussion of the historical criticisms of American protectionism, this chapter moves quickly into a systematic review of the origins and arguments of protectionist political economy. The popularity and political influence of protectionism is indicated by the emergence of America as a bastion of nineteenth-century tariffs. Protectionism dominated nineteenth-century American economic discourse and was the essential expression of antebellum hybrid capitalism. By incorporating American exceptionalism, encouraging industrialization, celebrating the harmony between capital and labor, and pursuing methodological and theoretical values that were accepted across American culture, protectionism is presented as the most authentic manifestation of the antebellum economic mind. The economic ideologies of Alexander Hamilton, Matthew Carey, Daniel Raymond, Calvin Colton, and Friedrich List are explored. Each emphasized a nationalist concern in political economy, connecting political independence, especially from Britain, to national economic sovereignty.

Laissez-Faire in the American Tradition

This chapter discusses liberal economic thought in the Southern and Northeastern discourses. Regional historical contexts account for the internal and trans-Atlantic divisions within antebellum liberal political economy. Southern free traders like John Calhoun and Thomas Cooper tied their brand of laissez-faire to a politically and economically inspired states’ rights and agrarian defense of slavery. In theoretically significant ways, Southerners divorced their version of free trade from Northeastern and British liberalism. Divisions widened as slavery was raised to the fore of domestic politics, and made permanent when British laissez-faire grew attached to industrialization. Northeastern free traders like Francis Wayland and John McVickar pursued a style of laissez-faire that comported with the Smithian tradition by focusing on the moral and theological benefits of free trade universalism. Northeastern liberals largely ignored the economic benefits of free markets. And the mid-century secular turn in economics, especially in British thought, completed the breach between American and European expressions of intellectual capitalism.