If you think the Declaration of Independence, the founding document of the United States, was not only an indictment of an overbearing, coercive British fiscal-military state, but also a plea for a much more limited government in America, Steve Pincus has news for you. His message, based on a close reading of eighteenth-century political-economic thought as well as both the Declaration and the Articles of Confederation, the first U.S. constitution, Pincus's message is that the founders, or most of them, actually believed in an energetic, activist government that would partner with and support the private sector in promoting economic development and the pursuit of happiness. His short text, 156 pages, is buttressed by 46 pages of fine-print endnotes. The book is based on deep scholarship into primary sources for eighteenth-century Europe and America. And it has obvious relevance to recent works of economic historians on why some places since that era achieved high levels of economic development while most did not. It is also relevant to today's polarized politics, which feature deep divisions about the proper role of government in the economy.
From the Glorious Revolution to George III's ascent to the throne in 1760, Pincus argues, British governments pursued the right policies of protecting their American colonies from other European powers and encouraging their development as consumers of British manufactures and producers of vital raw materials for the mother country. The colonies expanded rapidly in population and prospered under these policies, and they had few if any reasons to think about separating from Britain.
That all changed after 1760 when the new King appointed ministers obsessed by the huge debts the British government had accumulated in its various wars from the 1690s to the 1760s. These ministers changed the right policies of promoting colonial trade and development to the wrong policies of “austerity and extraction” (p. 23). Austerity and extraction meant reduced government spending and higher taxes, both in Britain where most people were not represented in Parliament and America where none were, all in the name of reducing the British national debt.
This is fairly standard historical interpretation. What Pincus adds to it is an extended account of a Whig Patriot movement on both sides of the Atlantic, which argued that the pre-1760s policies of promoting trade, infrastructure, and development were a much better strategy for expanding the economic and tax bases, and therefore a more enlightened plan for reducing the national debt. The Whig Patriots opposed Walpole's “establishment Whigs” of the 1720s and 1730s, who favored cutting the taxes of rich landowners and raising them on the poor and middle classes and on commerce and industry. Patriots also opposed policies of austerity and extraction after 1760. By then the Whig Patriots in America included most of the people who would become the founders of the United States.
The Committee of Five who drafted the Declaration, according to Pincus, had three main gripes against post-1760 British ministries: First, British policies suppressed colonial trade with Spanish America, “cutting off our trade with all parts of the world,” as the Declaration stated. Second, they suppressed immigration to America, “to prevent the population of these states.” Third, the British supported chattel slavery; the draft Declaration of the Committee of Five—left out of the final version in the interests of unity after some southerners objected—excoriated George III for promoting the slave trade and slavery, and for striking down colonial laws aimed at ending the slave trade.
Pincus makes a good case for the Declaration favoring an energetic government actively promoting economic development in collaboration with the private sector. His case, incidentally, would make Washington, Hamilton, the Federalists of the 1790s, and later the Whigs and their American System into mainstream heirs of the Revolution instead of subversive of its true meaning, as Jefferson, Madison, the Democratic Republicans of the 1790s, and some historians later would charge. At the same time, he seems to assume that if the founders said, as they did, that “Government was instituted to promote the welfare of mankind and ought to be administered for the attainment of that end,” it meant the Declaration “was a call for the creation of a powerful state that would actively promote the welfare of the people” (p. 134). Proponents of laissez-faire could just as easily contend that it endorsed their preferred policies of limited government.
Pincus says (p. 126) that there was a broad-based antislavery movement at the time of the Declaration, and identifies Jefferson as clearly a member of it. Why then did Jefferson, Madison, and their followers switch in the early 1790s, after Pincus cuts off his account, from favoring a strong, energetic government to a position of states’ rights and removal of slavery from the list of legitimate issues that Congress might debate? Was it because they had decided for high-minded reasons that limited government was now to be preferred to energetic government? Or was it because, as antislavery South Carolinian John Laurens in 1776 described the self-interested reasoning of slavery's supporters (p. 123), “Without slaves how is it possible for us to be rich?”
