Vol 1 Part 1 Chapter 1 Colonial/Articles of Confederation America and the Federalist Founding Fathers: (A) Intro and Context

Welcome

The opening two modules on George Washington and his role as America’s “First Economic Developer” is meant to trigger both interest and questions as to whether this rather strange mixture of topics can present a viable historical approach to the study of economic development, but also policy studies and even American history itself.

The two modules set the stage for a view of Washington and his role in all three, and prepare the reader for what lies ahead. This module lays out a intro road map of what lies ahead: the key themes we develop in the book, both short-term and long-term, and presents a different view of history from the bottoms-up, from the perspective of states and local communities using economic development policy as a filter to understand change and our evolution since 1789.

In the two Washington modules, I develop a perspective on our First Founding Father that is far from typical–precisely because I view him from a different angle, and wind up seeing different things and asking different questions.

In my view Washington was primarily an early American businessman who became a real estate developer before he ever inherited Mount Vernon, a plantation “farmer”, who turned general, and then became a full-time politician. He was reputed to be America’s richest man when he died, and our modules convincingly demonstrate he not only combined economic development with personal profit, but did it to advance a national vision. He was as we shall see not unique, but he was exceptional. In my view he well-deserves to be our First Founding Father. Why?

Washington was a real estate developer, more than a plantation farmer who owned slaves, but more a farmer than a general, and amazingly was a better general than he was a professional politician or political thinker. He was America’s first and only businessman/general President who may arguably have been America’s best chance for sustained national independence with a veneer of unity and common purpose. The most interesting question that follows, for me at least, was why him for our First President? The general who led the Revolution certainly accounts for his mass appeal, but not necessarily for his appeal among the very divided elites of America. It was the elites that selected him. It certainly wasn’t his sense of humor, charm or personal charisma–he was incredibly remote, formal and taciturn, or his public oratory, but it is evident to me that his character, his ability to transcend the Mason-Dixon line regional divisions, and the reality he was not a professional politician with inflexible political principles, such as Adams, George  Mason, Patrick Henry, or Jefferson that made him the best choice.

He was a blend and balance of successful competence in his chosen field, land development and infrastructure, and a vision of how America’s independence could be best preserved–by opening up the continent’s interior and projecting America’s economic strength to drive out foreign competitors on our borders and generated domestic loyalty if not political unity from its population. But in the end, his defective personality, was overwhelmed by his character and integrity. For economic development that character and integrity created a role model for how public-private partnerships could work. More critically, he forged, almost uniquely, America’s first major economic development nexus by combining land development, population migration into the interior forming new states, economic bases, and policy systems, and accessing them all with the installation of developmental transportation infrastructure, made possible by venture capital and the establishment of a national financial system. The visible symbol for all that was his building, personally, of Washington D.C.–which in his mind was also destined to be Virginia’s chief port city, and gateway of Virginia’s hinterland to the world. Talk about moving parts!

And now comes the segue way.

Unlike much of current day popular histories, based on one Founding Father’s personality, this is a history that brings in a lot more. There are many moving parts in our history: political culture/values and competing ways to think about economic development; a recognition that economic development does not descend from heaven as did Moses carrying the Ten Commandments of Professional Economic Development, but rather is defined, formulated into approaches, strategies, specific programs that use critical economic development tools such as eminent domain, tax abatement, and public-private partnerships, then approved by something we call a policy system, and then implemented by some thing else we label as an EDO (economic development organization). It my language, economic development policy is an output generated by a policy system, a policy system that is grounded in political cultures of our communities and states. The United States is the aggregation of the state and local variation as expressed in the policy structures of our national government. Thank you Tip O’Neil–all (realistically a lot) national politics originates and is carried to DC by states and sub-state policy systems. Or at least it should be. We are constitutionally a federal republic.

The great joy is that when we test that approach by looking from the bottom up–from what cities, hinterland small towns and rural areas, counties and states–we depart from the Washington D.C., everything is always political, where there is one best approach that can be rationally ascertained around which an infallible plan can be constructed (there’s got to be some tension in that line of thinking, don’t you think?). From the bottom-up we see how people matter, individual personalities like Washington are critical, and how each geography in America has its own peculiar combination of different kinds of people that in some way come together to form a policy system that carries out their distinctive form of economic development. As many policy systems as there may be, we have the potential for its own version of economic development. The logical culmination of that line of thinking puts special value in understanding the role of American states, the formation of distinct state and regional economic bases that develop a two-hundred and fifty year tradition of distinctive policy systems and distinctive paths in pursuing economic development. That is our starting point in this history. There is (sadly more–we do not lack for moving parts), but let’s get started with the most important moving parts first.

In Chapter 1, the first moving part is how we managed our inheritance from our nearly two-hundred years of colonial history, and how we used the American Revolution to bring thirteen individual colonies, who viewed themselves as actual separate nations, into a somewhat coherent whole, we call the United States.

OUR COLONIAL AND REVOLUTIONARY WAR INHERITANCE

How and Why the Politics That Led to the Revolutionary War Affected Early Republic Policy Systems and American Economic Development

Our approach to understanding current and contemporary American ED is that what it is today follows from its past. Today’s ED is the logical progression of what has occurred since we became a nation in 1783 when the Articles of Confederation achieved independence from Great Britain and then “updated or reformed” itself with a new Constitution that established our 1789 Early Republic.

First things first, our initial dilemma is that 1783 is a bit arbitrary in that some States enjoyed a colonial history that reached back more than 175 years, and most started during the 1600’s. The unmentioned reality is that all American states did not toss out their colonial experience and begin with a blank slate when they entered into the Articles or the Early Republic. They inherited a great deal from their colonial past–and in their efforts to mobilize and achieve American independence as a fledgling nation-state from Great Britain, they invented some things that were adapted and carried over to the Early Republic. Most are still evident today–which is why you might want to read what they are.

The simple starting “truth” from my perspective was that the thirteen colonies in 1775, 1783, and 1789 were significantly different from one other, in ways we shall discuss. They entered into their national union in 1783/1789 as very different entities. If you want to know why each of the fifty states are today different, the easiest and simplest answer is they never were the same–ever. Simply put, much of the foundations of American policy systems and our contemporary ED were poured during the colonial period. These foundations are now covered over with the dirt and dust of history and time, and are so embedded in our thinking they go unnoticed and their fundamental importance simply part of our unseen heritage, of little or no consequence.

But Massachusetts has towns, the Midwest has townships, and the South has counties. The South did not urbanize: the North did. In 1783 the American North America had two very distinct economic bases–both based predominately on agriculture, but still radically different from each other. These are but a small handful of “the ED foundation” that had been poured before 1783. My sad fear in writing this history is that most of my potential readers simply don’t care about this “deep” history–and can’t with any stretch of their mind see how it is relevant to them. Belonging to the “Church of What’s Happening Now”, their search for their unique heritage and how their identity came to be formed is very limited indeed–usually to the smush that is taught in college textbooks and the one history course the reader stumbled upon.

Showing how history shaped today has a tough time demonstrating the past really does matter, that history does more than rhyme, it offers explanation of why thing are as we see them today. The crap we see as we look outside our windows, as well as the silly truth that we sit in the planet’s most powerful nation, with its strong economy, and now the oldest Constitution and democracy on the globe are part of that meaningless heritage that history offers some understanding. Some of us are not proud of our heritage; others of us are (I am–on the whole). But that means we do acknowledge in our own individual ways that our history does matter. I cannot understand how we can run away from it, nor can I understand how we can fear it and hide from it.

This history, filtered by its filter of topics and dynamics relevant to economic development, is a bottoms-up history, viewed from our cities, counties, hinterlands, states and geographic regions–with the national government a powerful external force, is quite unique today. Looking up results in a different view and different questions and dynamics emerge. We talk about people and events that are never discussed when we look from the top down. What the reader will read in this history is almost certainly “new”–and the change that has occurred since 1783 would look quite different because in many ways the 1783 past still continues today–dressed in new modern clothes and given different names for the identical or at least functional behaviors. Has the values system changes> You can figure that out for yourself–the raw material for that critical thinking is the substance of this history. The practice of economic development reflects a choice among values and priorities of values. Values, expressed and embedded in our political cultures, are an inescapable factor in our economic development history. So is individual character, propensity to risk-take, and to act. Individuals, for good and bad, can produce long-lasting consequences.

But enough of the lecturing.

Our initial dilemma is when to start our history, in view of the reality we inherited a great deal of really important stuff from our colonial past. I decided to begin officially with our Early Republic which was born in 1789. That is Chapter 2 in this history. This prologue as briefly and succinctly as possible culls out several interesting and salient features of the post-1763 drive to American Revolution/Independence (Did you know that some forms of contemporary Community Development can be traced to the Sons of Liberty, a colonial era ACORN or Antifa?). Chapter I  (1) provides a brief contextual introduction to the ancient history-challenged reader as to what the Articles’s relevant external and domestic environment looked like to policy-makers in Philadelphia; (2) precis our colonial economic heritage (migrations, policy system and economic bases, and (2) selects out several ED-relevant drivers and legacies as experienced by three critically important states: Pennsylvania, Virginia, and Massachusetts (Did you know that Alexander Hamilton established the Second National Bank?). Chapter 2 then discusses the formative period that was the Articles of Confederation. This prologue and the first two chapters are our feeble attempt to capture the colonial and pre-1789 inheritance to the Early Republic. From Chapter 3 on, we are in the Early Republic.

PROLOGUE: ED IMPACTS FROM THE POST-1763 DRIFT TO THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION

First: the Big Picture

All thirteen colonies existed prior to 1763–although South Carolina was ruled directly from London and the Barbados, and Georgia and North Carolina were practically new-born. They each enjoyed different policy systems, their own style of politics and possessed their own variant of a political culture. When Britain beat the crap out of France in the 1756-63 French and Indian War, and literally kicked it out of North America, its victory was so total that it seriously crippled one of the major reasons why the thirteen colonies were colonies in the first place. By 1763 most of the colonies had their own versions of an economic base, and had developed a colonial policy system. Most had some urban areas–by 1750 standards–and all were for various reasons ready to strive for political adulthood from their mother (country).

The major reason, I argue, they stuck around as a colony was self-defense; they were too small to defend themselves against hostile French armies and more importantly, Native American military alliances with the French that had been a dominant feature of colonial history. When the French and Indian Wars was over, the common enemies of the thirteen states, the single most important pillar of 1760 British colonial rule, the need for a British Army for their protection, was obliterated. With the French gone in 1763, the Native Americans (Indians) were on their own–and Britain inherited the double-edged sword of figuring out what to do with them, while integrating the French regions, Quebec for example–the entire Mississippi Valley east of the Mississippi into the newly-established British Empire. The French and Indian War was the first birth of the British Empire. North America (and West Indies) were the first geographies colored as red for the new British Empire.

Britain wanted to offer a generous peace to the Former French residents of North America, and also wanted to protect Native Americans from the hostile intentions of the residents of the thirteen colonies, who were, (1) none to happy with most North American tribes, and (2) very happy with the future potential of living on Indian lands. Clumsily in 1763, the British created a Proclamation Line, beyond which residents of the Thirteen Colonies could not go. That Proclamation Line was the key defense line of Native Americans, and west of that line was viewed by the British as some unspecified “two nations” wilderness in which sovereignty was held by both, as specified and regulated by agreed-upon treaties. The Proclamation Line was wildly popular (sarcasm in the extreme) in the Thirteen Colonies–it sort of rendered both elites and masses rather mad, at Great Britain of course. This was a rather bad first step.

The Second Step, probably even “more bad”, was to start a series of “sales taxes” on key goods and necessities, and to begin to regulate global commerce and trade with Great Britain. This as the reader no doubt knows wound up with tea being tossed by white Bostonian “Indians” into Boston Harbor in 1773. Things really went south after that, and by 1775 the thirteen states were meeting in Philadelphia engaged in their first formal collective debate to be in some way independent. That period which we concentrate on in this Section, is the period between 1763 and 1775: the Drift to Revolution and Independence.

The Proclamation Act got it started, but the real trigger for independence was the Stamp Act of 1765. That unleashed the “we had enough and ain’t going to take it anymore” horde. In true academic style we could describe the various events and how they led to 1775 First Continental Congress, but we prefer to refer the reader watch, the HBO John Adams series, based on David McCullough’s biography. The HBO series is horrible history (McCullough, if read precisely, is fine, but it sees a national uprising through the eyes of one man (and his wife) only). My version totally smushed into a few paragraphs is likely to be even worse. So I take the liberty, that’s what they period was all about after all, liberty, of culling our a few observations and takeaways so we can move on to our larger purposes.

Second Big Point: the Two Major Currents Relevant to ED History in this Period

There are two major currents evident in the events, personalities and ideas generated in this period which are salient to our ED history:

First, we concentrate on those elements which affected the formation of Articles/Early Republic state and local policy systems–which after all are the entities that define, formulate, approve, implement any ED strategy, program and tool. In so doing we call attention to the importance of “taxes” and “without representation” which mildly underscore that critical notions and expectation of what a policy system was supposed to be, and what it was not supposed to do are evident. Quickly on in Chapter 1 the reader will see economic development itself, in the form of non-importation of British goods (a sort of upside down Buy American movement) spread across the nation. How they defined tyranny will also be interesting and will carry over into Early Republic economic development, in fact it underscored Jefferson’s distrust of Hamilton’s (Second) National Bank.

The second major current which will carry over into the Articles and the Early Republic is the transition from a colonial policy ultimately ruled by a King, to the world’s first modern experience with something called democracy–and as a tertiary them how that democracy could co-exist with a rapidly emerging, still evolving economic system we call capitalism. Today every American’s DNA contains genes that produce the only acceptable and politically correct definition of just what a democracy is, or what it is supposed to be. The trouble is American revolutionaries and our Founding Fathers did not have those genes–and so they had to write their own versions of an instruction manual on what democracy meant and how it should be installed in the thirteen states. Sad and deficient as they were, they heavily influenced our history, and so we cannot ignore the economic development and policy system implications of the various state (and local) policy systems that formed during Early America before the Civil War.

The first eight years of the Revolutionary War, until 1783, when the Articles were formally ratified by the thirteen states, each state was a sovereign nation and that formed its own version of democracy, expressed in their first state Constitution. One of these versions, expressed in the Massachusetts state constitution was written and approved in 1780. It still remains Massachusetts only Constitution and as amended is in effect today. The oldest Constitution in America, the Massachusetts Constitution, is the principal reason I believe the New England (Boston) Patriots won so many super bowls. But Massachusetts if the last state we discuss in this chapter, the first, Pennsylvania, expressed the version developed by our largest urban center at the time, a center that housed the Continental Congresses that forged the Declaration of Independence and the hap-hazard first national government, the unapproved Articles of Confederation. The second state examined is Virginia–the state that led the United States for nearly fifty years, and attempted, hap-haphazardly it turns out, to implement Washington’s drive to the interior hinterland. The reason for its ultimate failure, one gather lies in a deficient policy system created by its domestic political cultures. Oh well, not everything turns out wine and roses.

In any case, after we won the American Revolution in 1783, we had to formally establish our first state-level policy system. That is when and why we incorporated our separate and distinctive colonial inheritances into our contemporary policy systems. There these inheritances largely go unnoticed and ill-understood, much like the steel bars encased in our cemented foundations.

Take Aways to look for in Chapter 1

There is lots to look for in this chapter, but recognizing that much of it is subsumed into one or both of the two currents that flow through it may be a small help. It facilitates categorization and constructs a fragile coherence. Within these two dynamic currents, one may discern several important eddies and whirlpools, rocks and rapids that are important to the themes in our history.

• One is to identify and describe the colonial inheritance, the steel bars, that were incorporated for one reason or another into our first state policy systems. If history repeats itself, colonial history is repeated into our Early Republic state policy systems. In this we will flesh out the rudiments of three distinct political cultures: the Midlands, the Tidewater, and the Yankee Puritan. One will hear about key colonial era leaders, like William Penn, John Winthrop, and George Berkeley, and George Mason and the reader will sense how these folk personalized the formation of the three distinctive political cultures of each state. One will also see how and to what degree the so-called colonial political culture, the Deference Culture, was reshaped, modified, but surprisingly continued–a powerhouse even today.
• We focus on states in this chapter, seldom mentioning major cities. Why? Because sub-state communities and governments are an element of a state constitution. As Casey Stengel’s uncle once said three years after the Civil War ended, “cities are creatures of the state“. Fear not, in future chapters urban areas will become really, really important. In fact a major thrust is how “Big Cities” took the lead in developing a new stage of industrial capitalism–but that is after how cities are first “built”. City-building will be a real obsession in this book. In fact, by the third chapter our narrative will be filled with the tales of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson (Richmond) as city-builders. Something called land development companies will be on the tip of your tongue. They are the first private/public EDOs in America. Be especially alert and compare them to Elon Tesla’s Space X and his Tesla Corporation.
• So will the first economic development nexus, land development and development transportation infrastructure (DTIS), the strategy that linked population centers and economic bases so to penetrate the trans-Appalachian interior. If I promise nothing else, it will be an obsession with developmental transportation infrastructure, the public-private partnerships that installed it, and the divisiveness it generated within the several political cultures and the policy systems that reflected them.
• Speaking of economic bases (?) it is hoped the reader will quickly recognize the 1775 United States had one predominant economic base, agriculture, with two very radically different approaches: plantation or mass production agriculture meant principally for export, and yeoman household that was primarily intended for household and domestic consumption, the excess of which could be exported. The distinction between these two forms of agriculture–and the nature of the agricultural workforces (free or slaved, voter or nonvoter) was the major cause of a pre-1775 multi-state regionalism. Not evident in this chapter is that each of these “regions” will follow its own distinctive path to economic development–and a Civil War. That these regions, and several others, still exist today suggest this dynamic will be on the top of this book’s take aways.
• What will be apparent in this chapter, however, is that capitalism in 1775 is not even close to be fully developed. In fact, Adam Smith wrote his famous capitalist tome only in 1776. Readers should resist making the stuff in this book an exercise in pro or anti capitalism. In reality, it is intended to describe, somewhat loosely explain, how capitalism developed and matured in the United States–and urbanization and urban economic bases, contrasted with hinterland agricultural bases, each with their distinctive-shaped political cultures will be fascinating, I promise.
• All this will come together in the hugely diverse policy systems that congeal during the Early Republic. The battleground will be between economic (and political) elites and the masses of average folk that are non-elites. Who controls policy systems matters because distinctive economic development policies, strategies, programs and tools will follow. The reader will probably be amazed at how central economic development issues are to policy-making structures/institutions and policy system configurations. Arguably the great political divide that created two rival political tribes, Washington’s Federalists, and Jefferson’s Democrat-Republicans was in large measure shaped by differing approaches to economic development. By the end of this chapter we will stumble into the dread topic of populism–what is it in our view, and equally important how does it affect ED.
• What will only be hinted at, however, is that the drift to partisanship and political party systems will also affect the conduct, goals and practice of American ED. That topic will be evident more after 1800 when American ED splits into two approaches: Mainstream ED (MED) and Community Development (CD). That will be a dominant stream in Part II of this book. That divide is arguably today’s most important characteristic of American ED. In this chapter I will talk about folk like Thomas Young, Sam Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Rush, Trent Coxe, Daniel Shays, and contrast them with the likes of George Washington, Robert Morris, Benjamin Franklin, John Hancock, and John Adams. You will also see colonial, Revolutionary War, and Early Republic Think Tanks and Policy Institutes. See in that contrast the foundations for the split in American ED.

There is an awful lot to take away from just this first chapter. So pour yourself a bourbon and settle in.