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The Political Economy of Commercial Associations: Building the National Board of Trade, 1840–1868

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2015

Cory Davis
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Abstract

This article argues that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the American merchant community created local commercial organizations to propagate a vision of economic development based on republican ideals. As part of a “business revolution,” these organizations attempted to balance competition and cooperation in order to promote and direct the expansion of national markets and commercial activity throughout the country. Faced with the crisis of divergent sectional political economies and committed to the belief that businessmen needed a stronger political voice, merchant groups banded together to form the National Board of Trade, an association devoted to creating a unified commercial interest and shaping national economic policies.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 88 , Issue 4 , Winter 2014 , pp. 761 - 783
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2014 

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References

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2 Ibid., 710.

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4 The political scientist Richard Bensel has highlighted the importance of this forty-year period (1840–1880) as key to the uneven regional economic development of the nation. See Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 19–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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34 Boston Board of Trade, Eighth Annual Report of the Government, Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1862), 18.

35 Boston Board of Trade, Ninth Annual Report of the Government, Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1863), 16–23.

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39 “The Essence of Envy,” Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1863.

40 “The Commercial and Canal Convention,” Chicago Tribune, 30 May 1863.

41 Proceedings of the National Ship-Canal Convention, 8–9.

42 Philadelphia Board of Trade, Thirty-First Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1864), 9, PBTAR 1835–1864.

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45 Ibid.

46 Ibid., 26.

47 Ibid., 27.

48 The characterization of the Constitution as a capitalist document is an old one, prevalent among merchants in the nineteenth century and historians in the twentieth. Probably the most famous example of this idea is the Beardian interpretation of the Constitution as the product of the economic interests of its authors. This interpretation has been modified or abandoned by many scholars, but interest in the commercial roots of the convention of 1787 remains high. For more recent studies of the commercial interpretation of the Constitutional era, see Matson, Cathy D. and Onuf, Peter, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence, Kan., 1990)Google Scholar; Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crowley, John E., The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar; McNamara, Peter, Political Economy and Statesmanship: Smith, Hamilton, and the Foundation of the Commercial Republic (DeKalb, Il., 1998)Google Scholar; and Pisani, “Promotion and Regulation.”

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50 Ibid., 116–17.

51 Ibid., 196.

52 Ibid., 196–97.

53 “The Detroit Convention,” Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1865.

54 “Commercial,” New York Observer and Chronicle 43, no. 29 (20 July 1865): 230.

55 Member Meeting Minutes, 14 Dec. 1865, 468, Box 398, 1858–1868, Series VIII, 1768–1973, New York Chamber of Commerce Records, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York, N.Y.

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57 Ibid.

58 Ibid., 2.

59 Ibid., 121.

60 Ibid., 127–33.

61 Ibid., 83.

62 Ibid., 209.

63 “The National Board of Trade,” Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, 1 July 1868, 40.

64 Ibid., 41.

65 Ibid., 46.