Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789–1812 by John R. Nelson, Jr. (review)

386 Shorter Book Reviews claim that there was no market economy there until after the American Revolution is an absurd way for Agnew to escape his Puritans in America. To see a centurylong cultural lag between England and America is not plausible in any department of life; Boston newsman James Franklin was selling a paper modelled on Addison and Steele's The Spectator as early as 1721. This study is also severely crippled by the dense, inscrutable language made fashionable by some prominent practitioners of the history of ideas. Even an attentive reader cannot penetrate the theatrical elusiveness of the text. A glimpse of an exciting insight is immediately masked by metaphor, by terms like polymorphous and liminalities, by neologisms like "fatedness," "facticity," and by the invitation to "historicize." Entymology is a valued part of the evidence, but it too often leads to elaborate word-play that, although sometimes poetical, is a very ambiguous substitute for explanation. This book will intrigue literary scholars, and should invite further work which can reach more readers. Economic historians, Marxist or otherwise, will use the extensive notes and teasing notions, but are likely to mutter dismissively about lost opportunities and intellectual ''worlds apart.'' Ian K. Steele Department of History University of Western Ontario John R. Nelson, Jr. Liberty and Property: Political Economy and Policymaking in the New Nation, 1789-1812. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. xv + 221 pp. This book is a thoughtful and useful addition to the growing body of scholarship on the subject of political economy during the late Revolutionary era. Its central argument is that the architects of the policies that led to the economic expansion and industrialization of the United States in the nineteenth century were the great Republican Triumvirate of Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Albert Gallatin , and not Alexander Hamilton and the Federalists, as is so often supposed. To make his case John R. Nelson, Jr., surveys the key policy-making debates.on the national level between 1789 and 1812 with particular emphasis on the struggle over Hamilton's financial system, thebreak between the Secretary of the Treasury and Jefferson and Madison over foreign policy developments, the economic sources of the Republican coalition, and the role of Gallatin as an opposition leader and in the formulation of Jeffersonian views on political economy and especially the development of manufactures. Although the thesis is not really new, the book does have a number of virtues. Building upon the work of Merrill D. Peterson, Joyce Appleby and a number of other scholars who stress liberalism, individualism, commercial activity and Shorter Book Reviews 387 nationalism as important elements of Jeffersonian thought, Nelson offers a comprehensive altnerative to the interpretations associated with J.G.A. Pocock, John Murrin, Lance Banning and especially with Drew McCoy's The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (1980), which uses republicanism, with its roots in civic humanism, as a synthesizing concept, and stresses the fear of luxury, social decay and corruption as the dominant concerns of the Jeffersonians. The book also contains a careful critique of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures which helps explain why so many artisans, mechanics and other advocates of the development of manufactures moved into the Jeffersonian ranks. The interpretation offered by Nelson is not without its problems. His research into primary sources is limited almost exclusively to the writings of Hamilton, Jefferson, Madison and Gallatin, while the rest of his argument is based on the selective use of an uneven body of secondary sources. The interpetation also overemphasizes the political and economic influence of the manufacturing sector of the economy for the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. As a consequence , more significant issues such as the development of the West, federal and state land policy, and the growth of banks on the state level are ignored. Nor does Nelson deal adequately with the internal improvements question, involving as it did a complex interplay of ideological, constitutional and economic considerations. Perhaps the biggest limitation of Nelson's interpretation is that it simply has no room for the agrarian and Old Republican wing of the Jeffersonian party. Nelson gives all his attention to the commercial and entrepreneurial elements in the Jeffersonian...