The history of economics in the US prior to the twentieth century remains a distinctly under-explored subject—a lacuna that the present symposium seeks to fill, if only in part. Building on the articles that appear in the symposium, this essay takes up a small set of thematic issues related to the developments in American economics in the nineteenth century and points to the issues and challenges in writing the history of this important period.

Scholarship on the American Slave South generally agrees that John Eliot Cairnes’s The Slave Power provided a highly biased interpretation of the functioning and long-term viability of the southern slave economy. Published shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War, its partisanship is partly attributed to its clearly stated goal to shift British support from the secession states to the states of the Union. Thus, it is generally agreed, Cairnes sifted his sources to obtain the desired outcome. A more balanced use of the sources at his possession would have provided a very different outcome. This paper will challenge this general assessment of Cairnes’s book by examining in some detail two of Cairnes’s most important sources: Frederic Law Olmsted’s travelogues on the American Slave South and James D. B. De Bow's compilation of statistical data and essays in his Industrial Resources, etc., of the Southern and Western States (1852–53). By contrasting De Bow's use of statistical evidence with Olmsted's travelogues, my final purpose is to question the weight of evidence on the American Slave South. Cairnes aimed, I will argue, much more to balance the evidence than is generally acknowledged, but it is misleading to think that balancing a wide range of evidence washes out bias if this evidence itself is politically skewed, as is the rule rather than the exception.

From 1816 through to the end of the Civil War, the colonization of emancipated slaves in Africa and the American tropics occupied a prominent place in federal policy discussions. Although colonization has traditionally been interpreted as an aberration in anti-slavery thought on account of its dubious racial legacy and discounted for its impracticality, its political persistence remains a challenge for historians of the antebellum era. This article offers an explanation by identifying a distinctive economic strain of colonization in the moderate anti-slavery advocacy of Mathew Carey, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln. From the nullification crisis until the Civil War, adherents of this strain effectively integrated colonization into the American System of political economy. Their efforts were undertaken to both reconcile their respective anti-slavery views with a raw-material-dependent domestic industrialization program, and to adapt American System insights to an intended program of gradual, compensated emancipation.

Economic analyses of American Civil War causation typically focus on longue durée structural arguments neglecting specific context and contemporary observers’ predictions about disunion’s effects. This article suggests secession heightened concern about government solvency and intensified a conversation about the nature of American inter- and intra-national trade, one hinging on ideas about relative dependence and positioning within the world economy. Deep South secessionists rested their claims on a cotton-centric economic worldview, trusting that their coveted commodity could finance independence and attract foreign partners. Pro-compromise northerners greatly feared that possibility. Less compromising Republican political economists countered that secession would reveal northern economic superiority and the South’s underlying weakness, eventually leading to voluntary reunion. Though competing sides envisioned peaceful pathways towards their ends, the actions of insolvent central governments—who feared that any compromise on contested forts and revenue ports would undermine the confidence of underwriters—militated against these imagined peaceful ends.

The demise of the US central bank in the 1830s “Bank War” remains one of the most significant shifts in the history of American political and economic development. Traditional accounts frame the bank as the casualty of the inevitable clash of hard-money and soft-money interests and ideologies. This paper re-examines this shift through the lens of modern international relations theory. It argues that this “war,” like so many interstate wars, could have been—and very nearly was—averted. In the months prior to the outbreak of hostilities, the bank’s president (Nicholas Biddle) and the US president (Andrew Jackson) agreed to a set of reforms that both sides preferred to fighting. Jackson, however, came to believe that no amount of reform could curb the bank’s hegemonic ascent. Facing the logic of preventive war, Jackson issued a decisive veto that initiated a “total war.” His triumph in the 1832 election sealed the bank’s fate. This paper thus offers a novel interpretation of this key historical episode; and it demonstrates the value of using international relations theory to understand intrastate political dynamics.

Classical political economy in Great Britain was broadly supportive of education, but limited government’s role to modest assistance for charitable schools. The early classical economists in the United States, men like Thomas Cooper and Francis Wayland, in addition to supporting free trade, took this classical position with respect to education. But a more aggressive democratic claim was being advanced by the American common school movement and its supporters among Whig protectionists. The early economic tracts of William Jennison, Willard Phillips, Calvin Colton, and Henry Carey envisioned a larger role for government and advocated support for publicly financed common schools. Most notably, the leader of the common school movement, Horace Mann, built a defense for public financing based on a radical theory of property, derived from distinctly Puritan economic doctrine. If his radical positions received little support from post-Civil War mainstream economists, Mann’s practical advocacy of public taxation for public schools very much carried the day.

The American political economist Henry Charles Carey is generally thought of as a spokesman for industrialization due to his strident protectionism. In fact, his most original contributions came in his discussions of agriculture, the environment, and their relation to technological progress. Carey developed his ideas by drawing on the contemporary discourse of “scientific agriculture,” which enjoyed great influence, thanks to a widespread agricultural reform movement. This allowed him to argue effectively against Malthusian population doctrine and Ricardian rent theory by stressing the almost limitless potential of technological innovation, not only in manufactures but also in agriculture. Analogous views were also expressed by George Perkins Marsh, known today as the “father of conservationism,” indicating a broader contemporary engagement with questions of economic development and humanity’s relationship to nature, an engagement in some ways strikingly parallel to present-day concerns.

The core concepts underlying Jacksonian Democracy—equal protection of the laws; an aversion to a moneyed aristocracy, exclusive privileges, and monopolies, and a predilection for the common man; majority rule; and the welfare of the community over the individual—have long been defined almost exclusively by the Bank War, which commenced in earnest with the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828. Yet, this same rhetoric proved far more pervasive and consistent when one considers the ardent opposition to the protective system. Opponents of the protective tariff, commencing with the Tariff of 1816 and continuing unabated to the Walker Tariff of 1846, thus contributed directly to the development of Jacksonian Democracy, and, by introducing and continually employing this language, gave to the tariff debates in the United States a unique angle that differed from the debates in Europe.

This essay seeks to trace the many—and often conflicting—economic ideological interpretations of the transatlantic abolitionist impulse. In particular, it explores the contested relationship between free-trade ideology and transatlantic abolitionism, and highlights the understudied influence of Victorian free-trade ideology within the American abolitionist movement. By bringing together historiographical controversies from the American and British side, the essay calls into question long-standing conceptions regarding the relationship between free trade and abolitionism, and suggests new avenues for research.

In the spring of 1860, Henry C. Carey, the Philadelphia political economist and apostle of protectionism, offered a revision of his doctrine in hope of saving the Union. For several years, in such writings as The Slave Trade, Domestic and Foreign (1853) and The North and the South (1854), he had argued that reimposition of high protective tariffs promised material prosperity for the free population and gradual emancipation of the slaves. With secession looming he enlarged the argument. In a series of letters to the Memphis Daily Enquirer, he explained how the original error of liberal trade beginning in 1833 had interacted with climate and migration to produce economic crises and sectional conflict. Political economy not only pointed to the right course, it showed why the course was blocked from view. Prosperity, gradual emancipation, and preservation of the union all depended on the inhabitants of the central "Mineral Zone," from Pennsylvania to Tennessee, first seeing the blockage and then uniting to correct the combined policy errors of the northern "Trading Zone" and the southern "Planting Zone." Carey's neglected "zone theory" shows the direction and ambitions of an important strain of American political economy in the immediate antebellum period. It also merits attention as an early example of economic theories of geography and institutions akin to those claiming attention today.