On the Elusive Republic

Some major takeaways from McCoy’s writing: although we’re often told, as writers, to connect individual chapters to our main argument, this is not the way to do it—it comes off more like endless repetition by a parakeet than a way to drive the point home. Jefferson and Madison would be outed as anti-American in today’s political discourse over trade and economics. In spite of McCoy’s repetition, it’s also a bit hard to understand what he’s trying to say.

Ultimately, this work examines the evolution of “political economy” from the American Revolution to the War of 1812 from a republican perspective. “Political economy,” in McCoy’s view, is the relationship between the state and society/economy. Essentially, political economy consists of decisions made by the state that influence the shape of socio-economic conditions in a given place. Many revolutionaries during the 1770s and 1780s effectively wanted to transplant values from the classical republican years to the 18th century United States. However, they also wanted the United States to be a modern country, and this produced a tension between classicism and modernity.

To resolve this, Jefferson and Madison sought to minimize the role of manufactures in the United States, instead choosing to aggrandize agriculture. The logic for this is that manufactures foster dependence to market forces. As a result of this dependence, manufacturing societies descend into corruption and vanity. Agriculture, however, permits a people to sustain themselves while maintaining their independence. By maintaining independence, they can become virtuous and model citizens. I’m not sure the connection between dependence and corruption or independence and virtue, but it appears to have been widely held in the eighteenth century. Although agriculture can foster dependency on export markets, I think Jefferson and Madison are mostly thinking of small, subsistence farming here.

This all sounds grand in theory, but as a result of both American demography and European policies, having a heavily agricultural society was actually a liability. Americans were very productive farmers, and the massive amounts of them farming produced huge surpluses. These surpluses then must be sold on export markets, or laborers working on farms would be superfluous, hurting American farmers. However, European mercantilism minimized the size of export markets by placing large protective tariffs on imports from the United States. As a result, good republicans fought for free trade, while Federalists aimed to follow in the European protectionist model.

Free trade was something that nobody else was willing to accept, and with the embargo of American goods by the British before the War of 1812, republicans came to recognize that their ideal agricultural republic was impossible to achieve (some might say “elusive”). While there were huge successes in accomplishing their ideas of political economy during republicans’ time in office after 1800, British embargoes made clear how quickly the economic situation can shift, and that any “classical republican” success would be fundamentally ephemeral.

McCoy is right, of course, but the logic is a bit convoluted and hard to follow. Nevertheless, the text clarified a lot of questions I had about Jefferson and Madison’s world views.