One Nation Under Debt: Hamilton, Jefferson, and the History of What We Owe (review)

My expectations for this book may have been too high. Robert Wright, the curator for the Museum of American Finance, promises the story of the first American debt, that great and dangerous innovation of Alexander Hamilton's that was the engine of the early Republic's growth. A story so central to the history of the country and to our understanding of economics should be captivating and enlightening—something like Steven Weisman's The Great Tax Wars (2002) which popularized fiscal history in an absorbing series of vignettes of the policy decisions at the main junctures of the development of taxation.

Wright is not up to the task, but it is not really his fault. As he quotes an eighteenth-century British writer: "It is a happy talent, to be able at once to please, and to instruct: but there are cases that will not admit of such gentle treatment. The public debt is of that nature" (p. vii). In an attempt to enliven the material, Wright has padded the book with tangential discussions on almost every page and details that do not add anything to the story (e.g., a list of every single one of the thirteen toasts made at New York's ratification convention, the life story of the sloop Experiment, a description of a completely unrelated riot in which a medical student waves the arm of a cadaver, and much more about beet sugar than you ever wanted to know). In an attempt to let the voices of the time speak, he dumps unrelated quotes and material throughout, for example in a rehash of the origins of the Federalist Papers that could have been much more concise and focused on the issue at hand. And when he does describe events in his own terms, the results are desultory: "[Gouverneur] Morris made love to the written word the way he made love to the ladies in his prime, with sweet verbal caresses interspersed at appropriate intervals with deeply probing prose" (p. 90); "Easily the most divisive issue in the convention, slavery exuded paradoxes from its pores" (p. 108). Most of the book is neither well told, nor is it particularly new.

Where the book comes to life is in Chapter 7 where Wright presents a fascinating set of stories of the lives of early American bondholders based on little examined primary material. Alongside the stories of the lawyers, politicians, doctors, minor functionaries, and the well born, this chapter also features the remarkable stories of poor schoolteachers ending up as large landowners, tobacco planters cursed with the deaths of children in their personal lives but thriving financially, the ups and downs of merchants, reluctant slave owners, a smuggler who becomes one of Virginia's richest men, and a dissolute orphan who makes a fortune in the Caribbean—all of their lives playing out against the background of the Revolution, immigration from Europe, the struggling young economy, and slavery. Startlingly, Wright finds that over ten percent of South Carolina's bondholders were female (p. 317) as were over eight percent of federal bondholders (p. 307). While most of this ownership seems to have been inherited, Wright finds a few tantalizing clues to women who were more actively engaged in economic activity (p. 214). The unusual prism of bondholding is very successful at showing us early Americans struggling to understand and master their lives with this new instrument—trying to get rich quick or simply trying to balance the vicissitudes of life in Revolutionary times.

Wright has posted his materials online and for that, scholars are in his debt. While this is not a book for syllabi, it does pave the way for scholars of early American financial history.