The Two Pictures: Or, On Becoming America

Picture One: The Closed Society

*Note to Readers:

In our two previous essays (see here and here), we introduced the idea that the American Founding was revolutionary. The two obvious implications of this claim are, one, that what came after the American Founding was different from what came before; and two, that what came after the Founding was, broadly speaking, intended by the Founding generation. Of course, no one particular event after the Founding was intended or envisioned by the Founders, but they did create a revolutionary moral-constitutional-legal-political-social-economic system the purpose of which was to protect individual rights and to promote freedom. A revolution, by definition, means change, and revolutionary change means to revise, improve, or reject the past and to imagine and create a new future. This the Founders did, but they revolutionized American society in a way different from French revolutionaries.

Our goal in comparing pre- and post-Founding America is to better understand the nature, meaning, and consequences of the American Founding. 

This two-part essay provides two pictures of life in America, one before and one after the Founding essay. Part One on what I shall call the “closed society” is published below and Part Two on what I shall call the “open society” will be published in a couple of weeks. (I got the idea for this essay from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s little essay “The Two Altars; Or, Two Pictures in One” published in 1851.)

Each of these two portraits is worthy of multi-volume tomes, which means that what I’m presenting in them are two highly selective, condensed, and essentialized snapshots. The primary focus of these two pictures will be on things cultural, political, and economic. The two portraits that I am painting are organized around how the subjects of the two portraits viewed social organization, order, power, freedom, the good life, and the interplay between them.

Embedded in each of these still pictures, however, is movement and therefore change, which suggests not a snapshot so much as a moving picture. And yet these two portraits are not quite full-length movies with a beginning and an end. Instead, to continue the analogy, we may think of these two portraits as movie trailers or shorts. The more important point, however, is that when played back-to-back or put side-by-side, we see two different worlds.

Readers are then left with an obvious question: how did we get from the one to the other?

PICTURE ONE: THE CLOSED SOCIETY

In 1607, 1620, 1630 and many times thereafter, England began to settle the eastern seaboard of North America. Many of the first Anglo-American settlers were rebels, adventurers, dissenters, second- and third-born sons of aristocrats, and religious nonconformists. Many who went to Virginia arrived in search of honor and fortune, while those who went to New England were in search of eternal salvation.

Naturally, the new settlers at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Massachusetts-Bay brought with them many of the customs and folkways that they’d inherited from their Albionic ancestors dating back hundreds of years. The colonies were English outposts, and English ways of living were brought to America and planted there. Part of our story is to examine how the English way of life was transformed into the American way of life.

It is also important to note that these Anglo-American colonists were consciously leaving behind certain traditions, patterns of living, and manners and mores that were either not appropriate for life in the New World or that they simply rejected for any one of several reasons. Certainly, in the case of the New England settlers, most were escaping or fleeing England as much as they were simply leaving it, which means they were spurning certain elements of their former lives in the mother country. Those who had been victims of tyranny and persecution were coming to find a new kind of liberty and freedom. Nay, more: they were coming to America to start over, to create a new kind of community. They came to build a “Bible Commonwealth” that might serve as a “City upon a Hill” for the rest of mankind.

Life in seventeenth-century America was therefore simultaneously a mixture of old and new. English colonists from Massachusetts to South Carolina brought with them and institutionalized many of the old political forms and formalities and cultural folkways of the mother country. There was great overlap, for instance, between the way of life in an Old England village and the way of life in a New England village during the seventeenth century. It is also true and important to note that the Anglo-American colonists developed over time many new political forms and formalities and cultural manners and mores that were different from those of the old country.

The colonists clearly kept one foot planted in the Old World and one in the New World. The sought to meld their new aspirations with a social order familiar to them.

The first settlements at Jamestown, Plymouth, and Boston were followed by wave after wave of migration during the century and a half before Great Britain’s American colonists declared their independence from the mother country. Most of the immigrants to what would become Britain’s thirteen American colonies were obviously mostly from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, but not insignificant numbers also came from the Netherlands and the German states. There was also a smattering of immigrants from France, Sweden, Finland, and the Italian states. Spanish settlements dotted the southern and southwestern borderlands. And, of course, there were non-emigrants taken from Africa and brought to the New World in chains.

With time, though, life in the New World became significantly different from life in the Old World. The new settlers had to adjust and adapt the way they lived to the reality of their physical surroundings. Their speech patterns, architecture, food, and dress all evolved over time. The story of the early thirteen colonies is one of high ideals meeting hard realities. Nowhere was this truer than in New England, where the Puritans attempted to convert their deeply held religious values into action.

American Utopia

The first Great Migration to New England’s rocky shores (1629-1640) began with a vision for a new kind of society, one that would strictly adhere God’s word as laid out in the Bible. Some of the emigrants who came to New England first on the Mayflower in 1620 and then the Arbella in 1630 did so in part to escape persecution at home, but they all came to pursue a form of primitive Christianity and a life of spiritual purity. Their sense of divine mission led them as God’s chosen people to seek a community based on His divine will so that they could purge their wicked thoughts and passions on the road to sanctification. New England was a tabula rasa for the Puritans on which they planned to build their non-heavenly, second-best utopia.

The builders of the Bay Colony constructed their political-religious society based on a synthesis of medieval and Calvinist principles. The founding principle of the Puritan community was the idea of a covenant, which was meant to mirror God’s covenant with Abraham. The Puritans’ covenant was a community-wide covenant that took the good of the community under God’s commandments as the primary unity of moral and political value. Among the Puritan founders of the different New England colonies, Church and State were viewed as serving the same end and the community was seen as a living organism greater than the sum of the individual parts. The Puritans’ leading theologians and statesmen promoted the idea that a good, just, and holy community was a unified whole dedicated to a common purpose. According to Thomas Hooker, leading theologian of the Connecticut colony, the covenant served as the “sement that sodders” the community together to “promote the good of the whole.” The new settlers viewed themselves as the custodians of God’s will and the public interest. The Puritan mind did not and could not separate a man’s spiritual life from his communal life, which meant Church and State were seen as partners in a common project.

The medieval component of Puritan social organization concerned the need for hierarchy, rank, and order. During their Atlantic crossing on the Arbella, John Winthrop, the first great political leader of the Puritan community, sermonized to his fellow passengers about hierarchy and social rank. “God almighty,” he told them, “in his most holy and wise providence, hath so disposed of the Condition of mankind, as in all times some must be rich some poor, some high and eminent in power and dignity; others mean and in subjection.” Solomon Stoddard, one of the last great Puritan divines, argued that a community and a church are “not a confused body of people; but they that are brought into order, and each must observe his proper station: it is compared to a natural body, wherein there are diverse organs appointed to their peculiar services.” The Puritan’s body politic was viewed as a living, communing whole, and each part had a role to play in the natural division of social labor.  

If the Puritan social organism was hierarchical, it was held together as a cohesive unit by the Christian notion of charity or love, which meant selfless service in the name of the suffering and the common good. Puritan minister John White suggested in his The Planters Plea (1630) that the Massachusetts Bay Company was much more likely to succeed if its members practiced “justice and affection to the common good.” John Cotton, New England’s leading theologian, admonished his flock to practice “brotherly love” and that which comes with it, namely, “brotherly unity,” “brotherly equality,” and “brotherly communion.” If they could do that, he continued, they could “be perfectly joyned together in one mind and one judgement in one truth.”

The Puritan covenant bound each man and woman to the other before God in a pledge to practice Christian love day to day. Consider, for instance, the Dedham, Massachusetts town covenant, which identified the moral glue holding this community together. The first principle of the town covenant said: “We whose names are here unto subscribed do, in the fear and reverence of our Almighty God, mutually and severally amongst ourselves and each other to profess and practice one truth according to that most perfect rule, the foundation where of is everlasting love.” Christian love—the idea of sacrificing oneself for the sake of others—was the moral core of the Puritan community.

The classic statement of the Puritan view of Christian love was found in John Winthrop’s lay sermon on the subject. In “A Model of Christian Charity,” Winthrop declared that the Golden Rule expressed in Luke 6:31 (i.e., “And as ye would that men should do to you, do ye also to them likewise”) and Matthew 7:12 (i.e., “Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets”) is the prime moral directive of the Puritans’ Bible commonwealth.

Christian love, claimed Winthrop, is the “bond of perfection” that unites the community and makes it “perfect.” Winthrop’s moral-political vision for this New Canaan promised that “the care of the publique must oversway all private respects.” To achieve this end, Winthrop told his fellow Puritans that they must be ready and willing to “sell all and give to the poore as they did during the Apostles times” and to “give beyond theire ability.” Shifting to the first-person plural, Winthrop implored his fellow Puritans to spread the love:

Wee must bring into familiar and constant practice, as in this duty of love wee must love brotherly without dissimulation, wee must love one another with a pure hearte fervently we must beare one anothers burthens, we must not looke onely on our owne things, but allsoe on the things of our brethren, . . . Wee must be knit together in this worke as one man, wee must entertaine each other in brotherly Affecion, wee must be willing to abridge our selves of our superfluities, for the supply of others necessities, wee must uphold a familiar Commerce together in all meekness, gentleness, patience and liberality, wee must delight in eache other, make others Condicions our owne, rejoice together, mourne together, labour and suffer together, always having before our eyes our Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same body, soe shall wee keepe the unitie of the spirit in the bond of peace. [spelling original]

Winthrop’s was the clearest statement of the core moral principle that guided the leaders of the Bay colony. Puritan divine John Cotton likewise told his followers to selfishness in England to come to New England “with a public spirit, looking not on your own things only, but also on the things of other.” The Puritans took their commitment to self-sacrifice and charity so seriously that one man in Salem, Massachusetts was commanded “to be set by the heels in the stocks for being uncharitable to a poor man in distress.” The Puritan’s new moral order promoted a communitarian ethic that rejected self-interest and individualism.

The Puritans also had a curious view of liberty, which bore no relationship to the understanding of liberty developed by their descendants in the second half of the eighteenth century. On the one hand, the Puritans came to America to escape the oppression and prosecution of Charles I and Archbishop William Laud. In his sermon on The Way of Congregational Churches Cleared, the famed New England Puritan, John Cotton reminded his flock that they had come to America “to breath after greater liberty and purity.” But Cotton understood liberty in a way very different from its twenty-first century definition; in fact, his definition was different from even the Founders’ eighteenth-century understanding. For Cotton and the Puritans, liberty was not total or without constraints. Cotton and the Puritans attempted to thread the needle between political authority, individual liberty, and church purity. According to Cotton, “Purity, preserved in the church, will preserve well ordered liberty in the people, and both of them establish well-ballanced authority in the magistrates.” Notice that church purity is, however, necessary and the precondition for “well ordered liberty.”  In other words, liberty must be channeled by purity and submission to God’s will. Puritan divine, Richard Mather, chose to come to New England so that he could be “free” to impose discipline up “those that ought to be Censured.” This is not the view of liberty held by Ben Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson.

In his famous speech on the nature and meaning of liberty delivered in 1639, John Winthrop declared that there were two kinds or forms of liberty. The first, that which he called “natural liberty,” is the freedom of a man “to do what he lists: it is a liberty to evil as well as to good.” Winthrop thought this form of liberty to be the freedom to do whatever one wants at any time. It is the freedom to lie, cheat, steal, and worse. It is the liberty to satisfy one’s basest desires and passions. Winthrop thought this kind of liberty to be that of the beasts rather than that of the saints. It is “incompatible and inconsistent with authority” and it “makes men grow more evil” the more it is exercised. The second form of liberty, that which he called “civil,” “federal,” or “moral” liberty, “is the property end and object of authority, and cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to that only which is good, just, and honest.” It is the freedom that can only be achieved under the watch and control of civil and religious authority. It is the liberty to submit and obey to a higher power and to order one’s own thoughts and actions in a godly way. The rights of the individual were as nothing compared to the good of the whole, and herein lies the problem.

America’s Founding Fathers would not have accepted the Puritans’ definition of freedom. As we shall in forthcoming essays, the Founders devised a third definition of liberty different from Winthrop’s two definitions.

Old England’s seventeenth-century colonists in New England defined the function of the State as serving the “common good” of the community. This common good was thought to be greater than the sum of the individual parts. (For my discussion of the collectivist foundings of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, see my essay “When Communism Came to America”) The Puritans frequently spoke of the “body politic” as a figurative expression for the natural and necessary relations between the different parts of the community. The Puritan view of the community was neatly summed up by one of their sixteenth-century English theoreticians, Robert Crowley, who told his followers, “You are not only naturally members of one body with the poor creatures of the realm, but also by religion you are members of the same mystical body of Christ, who is the head of us all (his members).” In practical terms, this meant the body politic must use its liberty to defend the community from external enemies, maintain order, and police morals. Ironically, this meant, in the words of Nathaniel Ward, that “all Familists, Antinomians, Anabaptists, and other Enthusiasts shall have free liberty to keep away from us.” Dissenters from New England orthodoxy, such as the Quakers, were typically exiled from Puritan colonies on pain of death if they returned. And such was the fate of three Quakers who returned to Boston in 1659.

The Founders of Puritan New England believed that the common good and Christian love required government coercion to correct man’s fallen nature and original sin. Corporate and coercive government was necessary precisely because of Adam’s apostasy. Men’s lusts must be controlled by godly magistrates. Order—psychological, moral, religious, social, political, and economic—depended on various institutional supports to promote good behavior and firm controls to police every form of deviant behavior.

The Puritans believed that political rulers should have full power to coerce and enforce obedience and to inflict violence upon individuals who deviated from the norm. Puritan magistrates were assisted by tithingmen (i.e., assigned in each Massachusetts town to watch over the morals of ten families of a particular neighborhood) and the townspeople who practiced a communal function known as “holy watching,” which taught that community members bore a moral and civic responsibility for the souls of their neighbors. Residents were encouraged to report their neighbors to church or government officials for infractions of community standards. Troublemakers, fornicators, and evildoers of various descriptions were to be punished and sometimes severely, otherwise the corruption would spread the community.

The Puritan notion of the common good elevated doctrinal purity and subservience as the primary moral and political virtues. Deviationism could and would not be tolerated, and obedience must be compelled. There was no freedom for error in the New England colonies. Their mission was too important to let things slide. Order must be always maintained. The question for the Puritans was, how would all of this holiness be policed?

The Puritans viewed government as naturally and necessarily coercive for the sake of discipline, order, and unity. They created authoritarian governments to reward the holy, the righteous, and the regenerate and to punish the unholy and degenerate. Rebellious servants, political dissenters, Quakers, Catholics, witches, and sexual deviants could be burned at the stake, while criminals of other descriptions could be crushed to death with heavy stones, hanged, amputated, maimed, branded, publicly humiliated by standing in the stocks and pillories, or banished.

At the more comical end of the Puritans’ obsession with what people thought and did were their sumptuary laws, which forbade the manufacture, sale, and wearing of fancy or decorative clothes. A 1636 statute, for instance, ordered that “no person, after one month, shall make or sell any bone lace, or other lace. . . . neither shall any tailor set any lace upon any garment.” Forty years later in Northampton, thirty-six young ladies were indicted criminally for “overdress chiefly in hoods.” H.L. Mencken was not far off the mark when he famously defined Puritanism as “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.”

The seventeenth-century New England way was a universe apart from the eighteenth-century way of life adopted by American revolutionaries. What came to be known in the post-Founding period as American-style rugged individualism would have been looked upon with horror by the Puritans. John Cotton, for instance, believed “Society in all sorts of humane affaires is better than Solitariness.” They would have shuddered at the Jeffersonian-Thoreauan idea that that government which rules least rules best; they would have rejected the idea of government as a neutral arbiter or as a laissez-faire Night Watchman.

In sum, the Puritan community was a closed, static, hierarchical, corporate, organic being, the purpose of which was to provide the rest of the Christian world with a model for communal deliverance, glorification, and salvation. Nothing could be more different from the Founders’ view of society and government.

Utopia Meets Reality

Despite the various religious motivations of those who created the different social experiments up and down America’s Atlantic seaboard, the different settlers all had to confront a very hard reality: they were creating new societies out of a foreign wilderness. Those British and other European emigrants who came to America, no matter their socio-economic background, were required by necessity to engage in the daily manual labor required for mere survival. Life was hard for everyone.

The early colonial period was plagued with chronic labor shortages, which meant that everyone—including those of aristocratic stock—had to work to stay alive. The new arrivals—including those who came with servants and later slaves—cleared forests, tilled the soil, planted and harvested crops, spun their own cloth, made their own clothes and furniture, and with time they built homes, villages, churches, schools, colleges, workshops, mills, warehouses, roads, bridges, docks, and boats. They relied on beasts of burden, wind, and occasionally fast-moving water for energy, wood for heat, and candles for light.

Most colonial families during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were, to one degree or another, economically self-sufficient. The first few generations of settlers had to build almost everything from scratch, and of course that was always the case for those who lived on the frontier for the next two hundred and fifty years. The difficulties of life for these European transplants were exacerbated by climates they’d never really experienced before—by bone chilling winters in the North and debilitatingly hot and humid summers in the South.

These new settlers were attempting to create a new civilization in the wilderness de novo. No one escaped the need to work. Life on the eastern borderlands of North America, particularly in the early years of the seventeenth century or wherever people lived on the frontier, was simple and rustic at best and rude and primitive at worst. Most colonial Americans were desperately poor and struggled to feed and clothe themselves.

Day to day existence for many was often somewhere between barbarous and a struggle for survival. Life was exacting and full of daily toil. Men, women, and particularly children died with regularity from diseases, such as consumption, typhoid, scarlet fever, diphtheria, yellow fever, and malaria. Indeed, life outside the small population centers was primitive and could be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” as the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes described his state of nature. Life in colonial America was trying at best, especially for those who lived even a few miles outside of the established settlements. Most seventeenth-century Americans did the work of two men compared to their European counterparts.

In many ways, the earliest Americans were living and working in a subsistence economy that was considerably more backward and less sophisticated relative to the world of European cosmopolitanism. Britain’s American colonies were almost entirely rural and agrarian. Up to the 1760s, there were only three cities in the colonies with populations of more than 20,000 residents—Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. (By 1860, there were sixteen cities with populations greater than fifty thousand.) Even by the end of the eighteenth century, over ninety percent of colonial Americans still lived on farms or plantations. Initially, there was little in the way of markets in colonial America, banks did not exist, and there was a scarcity of specie or paper currency. Manufacturing, certainly in the seventeenth century and well into the eighteenth, was largely non-existent.

When nature was not challenging and punishing the settlers, various man-made conventions and laws restricted their freedom to produce, trade, and accumulate wealth. In addition to the challenges of creating an economy and wealth out of a wilderness, England’s American colonists were also restricted in their economic activities by their own internal laws and regulations and by the mother country’s external economic control of the colonies via the mercantilist system, both of which were major obstacles and all-around depressants for the colonial American economy.

Economic Central Planning: Internal

England’s seventeenth-century Anglo-American colonists were inhibited in their economic activities by their inherited English customs and laws and by their own views on the role of government in the economy. The first communities dotted along the eastern seaboard from Massachusetts to Virginia were beholden to traditional, Old-World assumptions that gave to local political rulers the authority to monitor and control production and trade, particularly wages, prices, and profits. The claims of Max Weber to the contrary notwithstanding, the Puritans were not the inspiration for the spirit of capitalism.

Traditional folkways usually derived from European experience, not economic incentives, guided the way people thought and acted relative to economic production and trade in the seventeenth century Anglo-American colonies. Moreover, one’s socio-economic standing was not determined by individual talent, ability, and effort. Individuals did not and could not choose their role in the socio-economic order. Instead, their tasks were assigned to them by their inherited social statuses as father, husband, son, mother, wife, daughter, landlord, tenant, laborer, and servant. These customary societies inherited their manners and mores from Europe, which meant they were based on hundreds of years of tradition. The political-economic system that was first established in England’s New-World colonies was not set up for growth, change, innovation, creative destruction, and wealth creation. Instead, the first colonies were defined by inherited folkways, prescription, usage, order, hierarchy, status, deference, and stasis.

The economic development of the colonies was further stunted by many of the internal regulations and laws passed by colonial governments. In seventeenth-century Virginia, for instance, local political elites granted themselves hundreds of thousands—maybe even millions of acres—of the best lands and monopolies over some of the most lucrative commodities, such as timber and fur. This was even truer for the proprietary colonies such as Maryland and Pennsylvania, which were given entirely to the Calvert and Penn families. In New England, the Puritans brought top-down controls and regulations to economic activity based on medieval and religious principles. For the first generation or two of New England’s various “Bible Commonwealths,” profit-making trade was considered ethically suspect and therefore to be watched, regulated, and controlled when necessary. The traditional medieval idea of the “just price” (i.e., the notion that the value of all commodities should be determined by the amount and quality of labor required to produce it) still influenced economic thinking and practice in the colonies. New England political elites regulated the prices of various commodities such as furs, taxed income from trade, and benefited from licensure requirements.

Throughout the seventeenth century, the Puritans also regularly imposed wage and price controls of various kinds as well as compulsory service requirements during harvest season. They even tried to regulate profits. In 1639, for instance, Robert Keayne, a successful Boston merchant, was found guilty of gaining “excess” profit and fined £100, which was a large sum of money in the early seventeenth century.In his account of the affair, Keayne noted that some of his fellow Bostonians wished “corporal punishment was added” to the fine, “such as . . . standing openly on a market day with a bridle in his mouth, or at least around his neck.” So serious was Keayne’s violation of moral propriety that he was also threatened with excommunication from his church. In the end, it was determined that Keayne had not been motivated by false intentions (i.e., covetousness) but by “false principles” and was therefore admonished rather than being excommunicated. The Puritans were always willing to find work arounds when necessary.

In 1639, in the wake of the Keayne case, John Cotton, the leading divine in the Massachusetts-Bay colony, expressed the Puritan’s anti-capitalist attitude by setting down in a sermon a strict moral code for merchants that combined a medieval and Calvinist view of profit and prices. John Winthrop, the colony’s elder statesman, recorded Cotton’s admonitions in his Journal. Cotton first listed “some false principles” of business, which included:

1.     That a man might sell as dear as he can, and buy as cheap as he can.

2.     If a lose by casualty at sea, etc., in some of his commodities, he may raise the price of the rest;

3.     That he may sell as he bought, though he paid too dear, etc., and though the commodity be fallen, etc.

4.     That, as a man may take advantage of another’s ignorance or necessity.

5.     Where one gives time for payment, he is to take like recompense of one as of another.

Cotton then laid down four rules for trading:

1.     A man may not sell above the current price, i.e., such a price as is usual in the time and place, and as another (who knows the worth of the commodity) would give for it, if he had occasion to use it; as that is called current money, which every man will take, etc.

2.     When a man loseth in his commodity for want of skill, etc., he must look at it as his own fault or cross, and therefore must not lay it upon another.

3.     Where a man loseth by casuality of sea, or, etc., it is a loss cast upon himself by providence, and he may not ease himself of it by casting it upon another; for so a man should seem to provide against all providences, etc., that he should never lose; but where there is a scarcity of the commodity, there men may raise their price; for now it is a hand of God upon the commodity and not the person.

4.     A Man may not ask more for his commodity than his selling price, as Ephron to Abraham, the land is worth thus much.

The Puritan ethic, rather than being the source of the capitalist spirit, was its enemy. Cotton’s anti-capitalist mentality and command-and-control business ethics demonstrated a profound ignorance of market processes (e.g., supply and demand, price signals, etc.) and the conditions of morality. It is, of course, absurd to suggest that merchants should assume that losses at sea are God’s judgment of their sins and must not therefore be passed on as price increases to the customer. Seventeenth-century colonial officials had virtually no conception of how the price system works in unregulated markets. The discovery of the economic laws of nature was still a century away. Until then, most colonial Americans believed that government should play some role in regulating production, selling, and trade either to enhance the State or to enforce the principles of a “just” economy.

Economic Central Planning: External

The colonial economy was also depressed by England’s mercantilist system. Mercantilist theory and practice was grounded in certain mistaken assumptions about economic production and trade. In theory, the system taught that the world’s wealth is fixed and largely static, which meant that economic activity was necessarily a zero-sum game and inspired therefore a dog-eat-dog attitude toward the acquisition of limited resources. In practice, the system promoted the use of centralized government power to control the economies of various colonies to increase the wealth of the mother country. England’s mercantilist system used the colonists to produce and ship their natural resources to the mother country, which in turn were returned to the colonies as manufactured goods.

Beginning in 1660, England began issuing a series of Navigation Acts, which put the colonies in an economic straitjacket. These top-down economic laws required that all goods exported to or imported from the colonies had to be carried in British-built or British-owned ships, and all foreign merchants were forbidden from trading directly with the colonies. The colonies were never free other than via black market smuggling to produce and trade at their own choosing and for their own benefit. They were also barred from manufacturing and selling certain goods, such as wool, woolen goods, and beaver hats; they were required to purchase molasses, sugar, and rum from the British West Indies; and they were prohibited from erecting new iron mills for making finished goods in the colonies for their own use. The Iron Act of 1750, for instance, forbad the colonies from manufacturing certain goods such as steel and various machines and tools. There is no question that the economic development of the colonies was retarded by the meddling hands of English mercantilism.

In all, the system repressed and depressed colonial American economic activity.

Economic Liberalization

Still, despite all these internal and external regulations and restrictions, Anglo-American settlers turned what was largely a wilderness (at least up to the Appalachian Mountains) into a civilization in the century and a half between 1607 and 1763—even if only a relatively simple and sometimes rustic civilization. The country was obviously abundant in natural resources. Rich soil, whale oil, and timber were aplenty, and game, furs, fish, and minerals seemed limitless. The only thing needed to convert America’s abundant resources into useful commodities and wealth were freedom, ingenuity, and hard work.

What can’t go on forever, won’t, and the Puritan experiment in control and command economy was doomed to fail because it cut against the grain of human nature. Necessity, survival, hope, and reality compelled people to explore, to improvise, to work, to save, and to improve their lives in the here and now. It turns out that men and women want their lives in this world to be flourishing and prosperous. The human spirit for freedom and happiness could not be repressed by the nattering nabobs of righteousness.

By 1763, the colonists had become, relatively speaking, the freest people in the world. Despite the irritation of the Navigation Acts, which they mostly evaded via smuggling and bribes, the colonists were assisted in their growth by the absence of British authority in the colonies via the home government’s policy of “salutary” or “benign neglect.” Largely forgotten or abandoned by their rulers at home, the colonists were mostly left alone throughout the first 60 years of the eighteenth century from interfering parliamentary politicians and meddling royal bureaucrats. Relatively free to labor, experiment, produce, and trade, the settlers worked hard and they transformed the natural world with their work ethic and entrepreneurial mindset. Astonishingly, over the course of 150 years or so, from the first settlement at Jamestown to the end of the Seven Years’ War, the colonies enjoyed a remarkably fast growth rate that more than doubled that of the mother country.

The Return Political of Tyranny

By the 1760s, the residents of the settled areas of the thirteen colonies finally started to reap the financial benefits of their ancestors’ labors. The colonies were booming economically, and, not surprisingly, the British Parliament and the King wanted a cut of the take. When the colonists objected to the Sugar and Stamp Acts and refused to pay what they considered to be an unjust tax, the British Parliament told them that its authority and power extended to the colonies in “all cases whatsoever” (i.e., the Declaratory Act), which meant that the colonists must submit to a higher power. Parliament then passed more taxes, sent its navy and army to America along with hundreds of new bureaucrats and tax collectors, and prorogued or relocated colonial legislatures (e.g., the Townshend duties). Eventually, the British Parliament passed a series of punitive laws that closed ports and disbanded town meetings in Massachusetts (e.g., the Coercive Acts). Finally, His Royal Majesty withdrew his defense of the colonies (e.g., the Prohibitory Act) and then hired and sent German mercenaries to the colonies to enforce the government’s diktats.

With their back against the wall, the Americans declared independence from their King and mother country. They fought a largely guerilla war against the world’s greatest military force, and eventually they won everything the revolution was for. His Royal Highness, George III, agreed that his former thirteen colonies would now be “free, sovereign and independent states.” The world would never be the same again.

The Americans of course paid dearly for their independence. Almost seven thousand American soldiers died in battle, while no fewer than 17,000 died of starvation, disease, and exposure. The war badly damaged America’s still fledgling and fragile subsistence economy. Production and trade plummeted, towns and homesteads were stripped of bare necessities, crops were neglected, and the male working population went to war. Fiat money produced by the Continental Congress to fight the war naturally led to inflation, which was an indirect tax on the already suffering American people. Even the wealthiest Americans were forced to live a life of hyper frugality, whilst most others lived in a state of penury during and immediately after the War of Independence. As it came out of the war, the national income of the American people dropped by 30 percent, the combined war debt of the national and state governments totaled $76 million, and, to top it off, the Articles of Confederation denied to the Continental Congress the ability to raise tax revenue directly to pay off the nation’s war debt.

But life in America was about to change forever. The times were difficult, to be sure, but the enveloping and crushing deadweight of the past was to be lifted from the American people, and a new spirit of freedom was about to be liberated and unleashed.

Within a decade after the end of the War for Independence, the new United States of America recovered its financial legs and launched a political and economic revolution unlike anything ever seen in the world before. With the British and their mercantilist restrictions and taxes gone and the manners and mores of the old colonial aristocracy fading away, ordinary Americans were now much freer to choose their own life goals, and they could pursue them in a largely unregulated, laissez-faire economy.

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***A reminder to readers: please know that I do not use footnotes or citations in my Substack essays. I do, however, attempt to identify the author of all quotations. All of the quotations and general references that I use are fully documented in my personal drafts, which will be made public on demand or when I publish these essays in book form.