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Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism pp 165–189Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

The American Road to Capitalism

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Part of the book series: Marx, Engels, and Marxisms ((MAENMA))

Abstract

This chapter challenges the notion that North America was capitalist from the beginnings of English colonial settlement in the seventeenth century. While English colonialism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century was fuelled by the dynamics of capitalism, the inability to establish a social monopoly of land led to the establishment of two distinctive non-capitalist forms in colonial North America—independent household (“peasant”) production in the North and plantation slavery in the South, bound together and with England through the activities of sea-board merchants. The unintended consequences of the American Revolution transformed Northern agriculture into petty-capitalist farming through the establishment of a competitive market for land, while preserving and reviving Southern plantation slavery. Over the course of the nineteenth century, the expansion of Northern petty-capitalist agriculture provided a growing “home market” for industrially produced capital and consumer goods. The expansion of plantation slavery after c. 1844 would have gravely restricted this home market. The contradictions between the expanded reproduction of plantation slavery and Northern capitalist agriculture and manufacturing set the stage for the political conflicts that culminated in the US Civil War.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Robert P. Brenner, Merchants and Revolution: Commercial Change, Political Conflict, and London’s Overseas Traders, 1550–1653 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), Part I; Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern (London: Verso, 1997), Part I; Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso Books, 2003), 37–43, 61–88.

  2. 2.

    Percy Bidwell and John I. Falconer, History of Agriculture in the Northern United States, 1620–1860, Volume I (Washington, DC: Carnegie Institution, 1925), Chapter 5; Cecil Lewis Gray, History of Agriculture in the Southern United States to 1860, volume I (Washington, DC: The Carnegie Institution, 1933), Chapter VXII.

  3. 3.

    Russel F. Weigly, History of the United States Army (Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press, 1984), Chapter 2.

  4. 4.

    Gray, Southern Agriculture I, 21–22; Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: W&W Norton, 1975), 110–115.

  5. 5.

    Gray, Southern Agriculture I, 213.

  6. 6.

    Evsey D. Domar, “The Causes of Slavery and Serfdom: A Hypothesis,” Journal of Economic History 30 (1970): 18–32; Russell R. Menard, “From Servants to Slaves: The Transformation of the Chesapeake Labor System,” Journal of Southern Studies 16 (1977): 335–390; Morgan, American Slavery, Chapter 5.

  7. 7.

    David W. Galenson, White Servitude in Colonial America: An Economic Analysis (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

  8. 8.

    Morgan, American Slavery, Chapters 6–8.

  9. 9.

    Ibid., Book III.

  10. 10.

    Ibid., 220, 223.

  11. 11.

    Ibid., 246–247.

  12. 12.

    Barbara J. Fields, “Slavery, Race and Ideology in the USA,” New Left Review I, no. 181 (1990): 95–118.

  13. 13.

    Claire Priest, “Creating an American Property Law,” Harvard Law Review 120, no. 2 (2006): 385–459.

  14. 14.

    The following paragraphs draw upon Marx’s discussion of capitalist social property relations in Capital I (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976) and discussions of slave social property relations in Dale W. Tomich, Slavery in the Circuit of Sugar: Martinique in the World Economy, 1830–1848 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), Chapter 4.

  15. 15.

    Robert P. Brenner, “The Origins of Capitalist Development: A Critique of Neo-Smithian Marxism,” New Left Review I, no. 104 (1977): 36–37.

  16. 16.

    Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998),118–119; Gray, Southern Agriculture II, 215–217, 545–546; Alan Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves: The Development of Southern Culture in the Chesapeake, 1680–1800 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 324–325, 384–386, 408–412.

  17. 17.

    Gray, Southern Agriculture I, 213–214.

  18. 18.

    Susan A. Mann, Agrarian Capitalism in Theory and Practice (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), Chapter 2.

  19. 19.

    Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 412.

  20. 20.

    Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 337–340, 392–393, 411–413.

  21. 21.

    Bidwell and Falconer, Northern Agriculture, 49–62, 115–117, 126–133; Phillip J. Greven, Four Generations: Population, Land and Family in Colonial Andover, Massachusetts (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1970).

  22. 22.

    Henretta, “Families and Farms,” in American Capitalism; Gregory H. Nobles, “Breaking into the Backcountry: New Approaches to the Early American Frontier, 1750–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 3, no. 46 (1989): 647–650, 654–661.

  23. 23.

    Lemon, Poor Man’s Country, 49–61.

  24. 24.

    Lemon, Poor Man’s Country, 150–176.

  25. 25.

    Clarence H. Danhof, Changes in Agriculture: The Northern United States, 1820–1860 (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1969).

  26. 26.

    Robert P. Brenner, “Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-Industrial Europe” and “Agrarian Roots of European Capitalism,” in The Brenner Debate, ed. T.H. Aston and C.H.E. Philpin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 54–63, 284–319.

  27. 27.

    Greven, Four Generations; Lemon, Poor Man’s Country, 74–92.

  28. 28.

    Bidwell and Falconer, Northern Agriculture, 54–59; Greven, Four Generations, Part III.

  29. 29.

    Kenneth Lockridge, A New England Town: The First Hundred Years (New York: W.W. Norton, 1970), 141–142.

  30. 30.

    Brenner, “Agrarian Roots,” 305.

  31. 31.

    Wood, Empire of Capital, 107.

  32. 32.

    Margi Mayer and Margaret A. Fay, “The Formation of the American Nation State,” Kapitalistate 6 (1977): 41–84.

  33. 33.

    Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, Chapter XII; Kulikoff, Tobacco and Slaves, 122–131; Gray, Southern Agriculture I, Chapter XVII; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

  34. 34.

    Cathy Matson, Merchants & Empire: Trading in Colonial North America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

  35. 35.

    Mayer and Fay, “Formation,” 53–55.

  36. 36.

    Henretta, “The War for Independence,” in American Capitalism, 231–241; David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of An Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 19–23.

  37. 37.

    Lawrence D. Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and the Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), Chapter 2; Weigly, History of the Army, 75–84.

  38. 38.

    Richard H. Kohn, The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: The Free Press, 1975), Chapters 2–4.

  39. 39.

    Kohn, The Federalists, 55.

  40. 40.

    Cress, Citizens in Arms, 95–96.

  41. 41.

    Robert W. Coakley, The Role of Federal Military Forces in Domestic Disorder, 1789–1878 (Washington, DC: Center of Military History-US Army, 1988), Chapter 1; Cress, Citizens in Arms, Chapter 6.

  42. 42.

    Coakley, Federal Military, Chapters 2–3; Cress, Citizens in Arms, 69–77, 101–103.

  43. 43.

    Robert W. Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery (Boston; Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 203–204.

  44. 44.

    Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode, Creating Abundance: Biological Innovation and American Agricultural Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Chapter 4.

  45. 45.

    Olmstead and Rhode, Creating Abundance, Table 4.2, 117–118. This table lists three hybrids other than Petit Gulf introduced before the Civil War: Cluster/Dixon (1843), Semicluster/Peerless (1847) and Eastern Big Boil/Truitt (1857). The former two were characterized as “difficult, trash” to pick. Only Eastern Big Boll/Truitt, introduced on the eve of the War, was characterized as “easier” to pick.

  46. 46.

    For a discussion of differential soil productivity in the Antebellum South, see James D. Foust and Dale E. Swan, “Productivity and Profitability of Antebellum Slave Labor: A Micro-Approach,” Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (1970): 44–45; Franklee Gilbert Whartenby, “Land and Labor Productivity in United States Cotton Production, 1800–1840” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1963), Chapters II, V.

  47. 47.

    Ralph V. Anderson and Robert E. Gallman, “Slaves as Fixed-Capital: Slave Labor and Southern Economic Development,” Journal of American History 64, no. 1 (1977): 29–32; Sam Bowers Hilliard, Hog Meat and Hoecake: Food Supply in the Old South, 1840–1860 (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972), 95–102.

  48. 48.

    John Campbell, “As ‘A Kind of Freeman?’: Slaves’ Market-Related Activities in the South Carolina Up Country, 1800–1860,” in Cultivation and Culture: Labor and the Shaping of Slave Life in the Americas, ed. I. Berlin and P.D. Morgan (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1993), 245–246; Hilliard, Hog Meat, 172–185; Joseph P. Reidy, From Slavery to Agrarian Capitalism in the Cotton Plantation South: Central Georgia, 1800–1880 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 60–61, 67–70.

  49. 49.

    William N. Parker, “Slavery and Southern Economic Development,” Agricultural History 44, no. 1 (1970): 115–125; Stephen F. Hahn, The Roots of Southern Populism: Yeoman Farmers and the Transformation of the Georgia Upcountry, 1850–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), Part I.

  50. 50.

    Paul W. Gates, The Farmers’ Age: Agriculture 1815–1860 (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1960), 7–8, 10–11; Gray, Southern Agriculture II, 893–907.

  51. 51.

    Matthew B. Hammond, The Cotton Industry, An Essay in American Economic History, Part I, The Cotton Culture and Cotton Trade (New York: Macmillan, 1897), 59–61, 74, Appendix I.

  52. 52.

    Alan G. Bogue, “The Iowa Claims Clubs: Symbol and Substance,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 45, no. 1 (1958): 231–253; Robert P. Swierenga, Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1968), 11–17, 214–215.

  53. 53.

    Clarence Danhof, “The Farm Enterprise: The Northern United States, 1820–1860s,” Research in Economic History 4 (1979): 129–133.

  54. 54.

    Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, 142.

  55. 55.

    Jeremy Attack and Fred Bateman, To Their Own Soil Agriculture in the Antebellum North (Aimes, IA: University of Iowa Press, 1987), 202–207; Gates, Farmers Age, 48–50.

  56. 56.

    Gates, Farmers Age, 54–57, 67–69, 71–75; John Opie, The Law of the Land: Two Hundred Years of American Farmland Policy (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press 1991), Chapters 1–35.

  57. 57.

    The following is upon A.H. Cole, “Cyclical and Seasonal Variations in the Sale of Public Lands, 1816–1860,” in The Public Lands: Studies in the History of the Public Domain, ed. Vernon Carstensen (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1963); Opie, Law of the Land, Chapters 4–5.

  58. 58.

    Swierenga, Pioneers and Profit, 48–50, 100–123.

  59. 59.

    Allen G. Bogue, From Prairies to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa Prairies in the 19th Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963), 169–170.

  60. 60.

    Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, Chapter 8; Bogue, Prairies to Corn Belt, Chapter IV; Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, Chapters 4 and 5; Jonathan Levy, “The Mortgage Worked the Harvest: The Fat of Landed Independence in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. M. Zakim and G.J. Kornblith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); Swierenga, Prioners and Profit, 107–123, 215–216.

  61. 61.

    Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, 202–204, 208–253.

  62. 62.

    Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, Chapters 9–10; Clark, Roots of Rural Capitalism, 295–309; Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, 144–153.

  63. 63.

    Rolla M. Tyron, Household Manufactures in the United States, 1640–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1917), 308–309; Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, 205.

  64. 64.

    Mary Beth Pudup, “From Farm to Factory: Structuring and Location of the US Farm Machinery Industry,” Economic Geography 53, no. 3 (1987): 203–222.

  65. 65.

    Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, 188–194; Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, 251–277.

  66. 66.

    Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, 142–144, 189–203, 206–217; Gates, Farmers’ Age, 280–282.

  67. 67.

    Atack and Bateman, To Their Own Soil, 194–200; Danhof, Changes in Agriculture, 221–249.

  68. 68.

    Computed from Manufactures of the United States in 1860: Compiled from the Original Returns of the Eight Census (Washington DC 1865), clxxvii, ccxvi; Ninth Census, 1870 Volume III: The Statistics of Wealth and Industry in the United States (Washington 1872), 588–589, 614–615.

  69. 69.

    For a more detailed discussion of the “agro–industrial complex,” see Pudup, “From Farm to Factory”.

  70. 70.

    Louis C. Hunter, “The Influence of the Market Upon Technique in the Iron Industry in Western Pennsylvania up to 1860,” Journal of Economic and Business History I (1929): 241–281.

  71. 71.

    Sven Beckert, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 89–97; Frederick J. Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848–1854 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973).

  72. 72.

    William L. Barney, The Road to Secession: A New Perspective on the Old South (New York: Praeger, 1972)

  73. 73.

    Beckert, Monied Metropolis, 78–93, Chapter 3; Philip Foner, Business and Slavery: The New York Merchants and the Irrepressible Conflict (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1941).

  74. 74.

    Bruce Levine, The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (New York: Random House, 2012).

  75. 75.

    Roger L. Ransom and Richard Sutch, One Kind of Freedom: The Economic Consequences of Emancipation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Jonathan M. Weiner, “Class Structure and Economic Development in the American South, 1865–1955,” American Historical Review 84, no. 4 (1979): 970–992.

  76. 76.

    Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), Chapter 1; Paul W. Gates, “The Homestead Act in an Incongruous Land System,” American Historical Review 41, no. 4 (1936): 652–681.

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  1. Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Charles Post

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  1. University of Québec in Montréal, Montréal, QC, Canada

    Xavier Lafrance

  2. Graduate Center and Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York, New York, NY, USA

    Charles Post

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Post, C. (2019). The American Road to Capitalism. In: Lafrance, X., Post, C. (eds) Case Studies in the Origins of Capitalism. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-95657-2_7

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