The Heart of the Declaration by Steve Pincus

Author:Steve Pincus
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300216189
Publisher: Yale University Press

Epilogue

In his undelivered first inaugural address, George Washington outlined a remarkable vision for an energetic American government. It was a Patriot blueprint for governance. At the beginning of the conflict with Britain, Washington recalled, “money, the nerve of war, was wanting.” The “sword was to be forged on the anvil of necessity” by the fledgling American republic: “the treasury to be created from nothing.” And against all odds, from out of nothing, the Americans created a treasury and prevailed in the bloody conflict. Along with peace came the realization that the war had left the new American state with “a load of debt” that needed to be repaid. It was Congress’s inability to find means to repay this debt that led America’s first president to lament “the impotence of Congress under the former confederation.” He therefore called on the new Congress “to raise the supplies for discharging the interest on the national debt.” Washington knew that to build a flourishing new polity required Congress to levy new taxes. Washington was not, however, interested in balancing the books. He did not aim only to eliminate the wartime debt. Instead, he proposed a tremendously ambitious program for state-supported economic development. He called for the creation of “a grand provision of warlike stores, arsenals, and dockyards.” But Washington did not merely want to prepare the American republic for future wars. He wanted the government to create an economic infrastructure to promote long-term prosperity. “While the individual states shall be occupied in facilitating the means of transportation by opening canals and improving roads,” Washington continued, “you will not forget that the purposes of business and society may be vastly promoted by giving cheapness, dispatch and security to communications through the regular posts.” Washington knew that the United States was not yet prepared to become a manufacturing nation on the scale of Britain. Nevertheless he thought that “many articles” made of “wool, flax, cotton and hemp; and all in leather, iron, fur and wood may be fabricated at home with great advantage.” To that end, he hoped Congress would offer “encouragement”—presumably financial and legislative—to their manufacture. Above all, Washington concluded, Congress should “take measures for promoting the general welfare.”1

President Washington’s commitment to promoting the general welfare was not a postrevolutionary discovery. At an early age Washington, along with many North Americans, had imbibed Patriot views on the importance of state-supported development. Constantly reminded of his own Patriot commitments every time he signed his letters from his ancestral home of Mount Vernon, Washington made clear his support of a Patriot vision for a British imperial government that would financially support colonial development in the midst of the crisis of the 1760s. When he read the Declaration of Independence to his troops in New York in July 1776, he believed that that document embodied long-held Patriot support for the British constitution. That constitution, Washington knew, not only protected the rights of its subjects but also guaranteed their happiness through government support, through the privileges it granted its subjects.

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