Tom Paine's America by Seth Cotlar

Author:Seth Cotlar [Cotlar, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775)
ISBN: 9780813931067
Google: oRgIWcDKcycC
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Published: 2011-03-29T16:05:21+00:00

The bloody arm of a soldier…a continental colonel's widow with six children dining on a salted herring and two potatoes…a continental major begging his bread with his family on his way to Kentucky…a speculator driving his carriage over a soldier on a pair of crutches, in the streets of Philadelphia…a speculator galloping thro' the remote counties of every state and cheating the farmers out of their certificates…a Coffee house crowded with speculators (instead of millers and merchants) attending the sale of stock…[and] a sceptre, a crown, and a throne.58

What to Alexander Hamilton were the paper signs of a mature and responsible nation, to democrats were symbols of exploitation. Refusing to accept the abstract logic of finance capitalism, democrats insisted on drawing attention to the unequally distributed human hardship that accompanied the funding of the debt. The carriages that some acquired came at the expense of those they were now symbolically driving over. As foreclosed-upon farmers left their families and friends to start over in unfamiliar locales, the speculators who had defrauded them sat comfortably in their coffee houses striking deals to make even more money. Even worse, democratic editors pointed out, those ordinary citizens who lived and worked outside the “sphere of speculation” would now be obligated to pay the taxes that would repay the war debt. Despite their best efforts, the democratic editors had failed to thwart, or even substantially shape, federal policy on a matter that resulted in the “transfer…[of] the public wealth” into the hands of a small, “highly favored class” of investors.59

Over the first few years of the 1790s, democrats developed and then refined an analysis of why their new government had assented to Hamilton's inegalitarian economic policies. This analysis was summed up in one phrase—“the funding system”—that quickly became a shorthand way to refer to the multiple sources of ordinary Americans' economic woes. The critics of the funding system regarded it as a “British funding-system, americanised,”60 “a system as unjust in its operation on individuals, as it has been ruinous in its effects on the public.”61 This mysterious system, designed secretively by Alexander Hamilton, an unelected official who admitted his admiration for all things British, could hardly be expected to further the cause of equality. Indeed, those who advocated this new system openly scoffed at the idea that ordinary citizens or their elected representatives should shape the nation's economic policy, for the levers of the new nation's political economy were supposedly “capable of being moved by none but experienced hands, and subject to fall to pieces by the slightest attempt at improvement.”62 What began with democratic criticism of Hamilton's funding of the debt in 1790 quickly matured into a broad-based critique of Federalist economic policy. By the time Hamilton proposed an excise tax, in 1793, democrats had become convinced that he had in mind for America an economic system that resembled the contemporary British system that perpetuated and even exacerbated that nation's gulf between the rich and the poor. Hamilton imagined a future of large-scale

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