3030037320 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2018-11-27T03:58:17+00:00

6 THE GREAT DERAILMENT: PHILADELPHIA PUTSCH oF 1787 … 143

any political subjectivity and simply be remolded into an agglomeration

of individuals: “The confederacy is to make us one individual only: it is

to form us, like separate parcels of metal, into one common mass. We

shall no longer retain our separate individuality” (Adams 1850: 500).

Later on in 1785 James Wilson formulated a full-scale “argument” about

the confederation constitutionally preceding the states. The issue at hand

was the renewal of the Charter of the Bank of North America, of which

Wilson was an attorney and stockholder. The charter was given by both

the Continental Congress and the assembly of Pennsylvania. However,

the Pennsylvanian legislature, dominated by libertarians, revoked the

charter in 1785. Wilson argued that this was an illegal decision because

the authority of the Congress was older than that of the states, since it

was created before the Declaration of Independence. Hence, the acts

of the Congress trump the state laws, notwithstanding the Article III

of the Articles of Confederation, asserting exactly the opposite (Jensen

1943). Even more fantastically, Wilson argued that the formulation

“these United Colonies as free and independent states” did not refer to

the states severally, but rather to the Continental Congress as a supreme

legislative and executive body of the colonies (ibid.)! The time-honored

nationalist tradition of claiming that there was a union first, expressing

its will in the Continental Congress, which then created the states, 12

began as a self-serving attempt by Wilson, Gouverneur Morris, and

John Marshall to protect their bank profits from the legislature of

Pennsylvania.

economic nAtionAlism v liberAlism

All those piecemeal efforts in obliterating the subnational political

authorities and creating a sovereign and centralized government con-

spired with the economic doctrines of mercantilism and government

intervention espoused by the same circles. This surprisingly consist-

ent thinking of nationalists helps explain another phenomenon often

described in conventional historical accounts: the alleged “commercial

liberalism” of the nationalists, their “modern” economic ideas, their

devotion to classical liberalism and free markets, as opposed to the nar-

row-minded “agrarianism” of the anti-federalist and Jeffersonian forces.

12 This tradition includes Daniel Webster, Joseph Story, Abraham Lincoln, and the entire later nationalist political movement.

144

I. JANKoVIC

But, the real focal point of nationalist ideology was not “commercial”

or any other liberalism per se but rather mercantilist ideology which

only had commerce and manufacturing as its objects. Nationalists did not so much want to free the commerce as to manage it by the state. or

rather—to invoke the necessity of regulating commerce as a justification

for a strong central state that they wanted anyway.

When we study Alexander Hamilton’s economic doctrines and pol-

icies, it is quite clear that he did not support free markets and unbri-

dled capitalism but rather the conventional European mercantilist

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