Whither the Early Republic: A Forum on the Future of the Field

The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith

The Vexed Story of Human Commodification Told by Benjamin Franklin and Venture Smith DAVID WALDSTREICHER In the pages of this journal and elsewhere two of our most accomplished historians, Joyce Appleby and Gordon S. Wood, have depicted qualms about capitalism in the early republic as figments of historians ’ fervid imaginations. They associate the rise of capitalism with democracy and freedom, not with its more disturbing and, arguably, ubiquitous results: human commodification. While Appleby especially takes pains to distinguish this early liberal capitalism from later industrial , rapacious varieties, the impression given is that ordinary people did not view the spread of market relations or the cash nexus as a problem. On the contrary, they embraced it as their salvation, an alternative to empire and aristocracy. Republicanism, with its anti-commercial upraising of political man, was for Wood at best a halfway house with diminishing significance in the nineteenth century. Economic and political factors combined to create a democratic society of relative equals whose very free and democratic spirit are sufficient to explain the entrepreneurial zeal with which people in the new nation took up all manner of causes from abolitionism to evangelical religion.1 David Waldstreicher is Professor of History at Temple University and the author of In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (1997), Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery and the American Revolution (2004), and Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004), which he has coedited with Jeffrey L. Pasley and Andrew W. Robertson. 1. Gordon S. Wood, ‘‘The Enemy Is Us: Democratic Capitalism in the Early Republic,’’ Journal of the Early Republic, 16 (1996): 293–308; Joyce Appleby, ‘‘The Vexed Story of Capitalism Told by American Historians,’’ ibid., 21 (2001): THE VEXED STORY • 119 Much, in their accounts, rests on the testimony of eyewitnesses who made good, such as Benjamin Franklin. Franklin serves in Wood’s Radicalism of the American Revolution and his more recent work on Franklin as a kind of prophet who does not get to see the promised land. In Appleby’s revolutionary generation, he is the father everyone can embrace , the author of the model memoir or how-to book for a do-it-yourself generation. In his defining statement about the new nation written for an international audience, ‘‘Information to those who would Remove to America’’ (1782, 1784), Franklin did indeed depict the quintessential American as a freeholder who works for himself, with his own hands. Wages paid to immigrants, some of whom first come over bound for a period of years to pay their passage, translated directly into their ownership of landed property: in Franklin’s words, ‘‘Multitudes of poor people from England, Ireland, Scotland and Germany, have by this means in a few Years become wealthy Farmers.’’ The ‘‘commodity’’ of ‘‘high birth’’ was worth next to nothing in the United States: what mattered about a man was ‘‘What can he DO?’’ It was the very opposite of an old world order based on the aristocratic extraction of all agricultural profit. For this reason, European nobles could not take their rank—their property in themselves—to a ‘‘worse market.’’2 1–18; Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992); Appleby, ‘‘The Popular Sources of American Capitalism,’’ Studies in American Political Development, 9 (1995): 437–57; Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000). Of course, much turns on how capitalism is defined; and while I do not have space to explain why I think that neither customary conflation of markets and capitalism or the narrow stress on wage labor as capitalism’s essence are sufficient for U. S. history, I would point out that one increasingly promising definition—promising because it makes it possible to understand better the place of modern slavery in the history of capitalism, and to come to grips with contemporary ‘‘hypercapitalism’’—stresses how capitalism tends to commodify everything, including human relations, for the purpose of building capital reserves, i.e., liquid profits. This tends to economic (and political) compulsions that force people into the marketplace on terms often not of their own choosing; it also tends toward geographic expansion in search of cheap labor and new markets. For useful recent accounts, compare Immanuel Wallerstein, Historical Capitalism, with Capitalist Civilization (1983; rev. ed., London, UK, 1995), esp. 13–16, 39; Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origins of Capitalism: A...