This article addresses the question, what role did the Constitutional Convention of 1787 and the creation of the U.S. federal government play in the making of American capitalism? It argues that although I am not the first to pose this question, the answer has slipped between the cracks.
The topic has been approached in different ways throughout the last several decades. First, historians of the era, including Terry Bouton, Woody Holton, and Michael J. Klarman, have convincingly shown that the Convention was the result of a fear of “excess democracy” by an elite group who built a new state partly to protect elite power, quell rebellion, and limit too much democratic participation in governance by the lower and middle classes.Footnote 1 While these discussions have highlighted the question of class, they have, with some exceptions mentioned later, generally not placed their analysis in the context of the role that state formation played in solidifying or supporting American capitalism overall.
Second, historians who have worked on the transition to capitalism in U.S. history have demonstrated that the country that became the United States after the American Revolution was not born entirely capitalist.Footnote 2 A snapshot of the United States in 1787 would show a society with a variety of intersecting or “articulating” modes of production. In the North, artisans still often owned their own tools and controlled their own workshops. Yeoman farm families owned their own land and engaged in “safety first” production, partly to satisfy their domestic needs and partly to trade for goods with neighbors or local country stores linked to broader chains of merchants. Coastal merchants can be classified as capitalist, as can those who engaged in land speculation. So can speculators who purchased government securities and owned private debt. In the South, capitalist plantation owners ruled over their personal empires of Black slaves, but in less fertile lands and pine barrens, small yeoman farmers produced primarily for their own households. In the context of a country on its way toward capitalism yet still in transition, Allan Kulikoff and Charles Post have both argued that the result of the American Revolution led to the formation of a new state that would play a key role in ossifying U.S. capitalism.Footnote 3 Yet these accounts have not looked in detail at the formation of the U.S. Constitution and have problematically viewed Southern plantation slavery as noncapitalist, rather than a form of racialized capitalism that the new state was designed to protect.
Third, the question of capitalism and slavery has in many ways been clarified by scholars working in the loosely defined area of the “new history of capitalism.”Footnote 4 Yet it has not always been clear what scholars working in this tradition mean by “capitalism.”Footnote 5 And this work has tended to focus on the history of slavery in the South and the history of business in the North, but it has not always systematically engaged with the older debate that raged in previous decades over capitalism, social property relations, and transitions in modes of production.Footnote 6 Scholars working in this area have tended not to try to solve the problem this article poses, nor has it been their objective to do so.
Fourth, scholars of American political development (APD), perhaps most significantly David Brian Robertson, have examined the Convention, demonstrating the goals and challenges the framers faced.Footnote 7 Robertson's book remains an unsurpassed detailing of the politics of the Convention in the context of the creation of the Constitution as a “durable shift in governing authority” and a central concern for APD scholars.Footnote 8 While he does contextualize the Convention in an economic sense, the level of abstraction used does not address the question of social relations of production, state form, and capitalism. Robertson argues that attendees at the Convention were “elite” and that they did not create a new state for personal reasons of economic gain, but rather to build a government that could support market forces and balance competing political and economic interests.Footnote 9 But he never broaches the question of the extent to which different social relations might or might not be considered “capitalist” or the extent to which the new state was built in an age of capitalist transition. Perhaps because of a broader intellectual trajectory in which much of the APD literature has focused more on institution building than the role of the state in relation to modes of production, this work has not answered the question of where the Constitution fits into the history of American capitalism.
In this context, this article returns to the tradition of historical materialism. I begin by asking these questions: What conceptual tools might be necessary to explain the role of the state in the history of the rise of capitalism? Is there such a thing as a specifically capitalist state? How do institutions and social classes relate? To what extent is state power “autonomous”?Footnote 10
In returning to these questions, this article sets up the basis for a reconsideration of the Constitutional Convention in the history of the development of American capitalism. First, I provide a snapshot of the state of capitalism in the United States in the late 1700s. This is painted with broad strokes to contextualize the Convention. Second, returning to the original records of the Convention, I examine the ways that the Convention occurred in a society transiting to capitalism and the extent to which the framers were building a capitalistic form of governance. Here, I argue that they worked to construct a relatively autonomous state that would support capitalist interests and, in the long run, capitalist development, but also provide space for noncapitalist or less capitalist relations of production to continue, bringing the lower and middling classes into the state. Elite interests, enshrined in the institutional structure of the state, would be presented as universal hegemonic interests for all social classes—something framers such as James Madison were very consciously attempting to achieve. The new government would also protect the interests of slave-owning capitalists through the compromises that led to the final draft of the Constitution.
Overall, the goal of this article is to contribute to debates and approaches within APD. As Karen Orren and Stephen Skowronek discuss, APD is concerned with continuity and change within American political history. This means, for example, that the temporal boundaries of a study might be established not only by setting dates, but by attempting to locate underlying historical processes that may overlap or conflict with others that are not always easily classifiable in exact months or years. The study of political development is the study of “a durable shift in governing authority.”Footnote 11 Capitalism is a central part of governing authority. This suggests that the rise of capitalism and the corresponding change in state form should be a central concern of APD, one this article hopes to put more centrally than it has been in recent years.
1. Returning to the Capitalist State
The relationship between the history of APD and historical materialism is complicated. While early scholarship, such as that of Theda Skocpol, engaged with Marxism and was in some respects a reaction against Marxist state theory, much recent APD literature has avoided Marxism, and, likewise, historical materialists have rarely engaged with APD. In Studies in American Political Development, for instance, a 2022 search for the words “Karl Marx” revealed only ten results, the most recent being in 2007.Footnote 12
Yet for understanding “durable changes in governing authority,” the state, and capitalism, Marx is key. The problem is that early APD scholarship moved away from Marx, and more recent studies have not turned back to contemporary discussions within historical materialism. By returning to both classic and contemporary Marxist debates, I argue, a framework can be constructed that makes it possible to explain the relationships between capitalist development and state formation. And this is consistent with the overarching goals of APD scholars.
In her classic account from the 1980s, written against “neo-Marxist perspectives,” Skocpol made the case for the autonomous state. She argued, for instance, that “virtually all neo-Marxist writers on the state have retained deeply embedded society-centered assumptions, not allowing themselves to doubt that, at base, states are inherently shaped by classes or class struggles and function to preserve and expand modes of production. Many possible forms of autonomous state action are this ruled out by definitional fiat.”Footnote 13 For Skocpol, the Marxist idea of the “relative autonomy” of the state was vague and underestimated the extent to which state actors can be autonomous from other social forces in society. It also overlooked autonomous state capacity.
Elizabeth Sanders put it more bluntly, stating that “in its Marxist-derived variant, state theory treats all state expansion as a response to the expressed needs of individual capitalists, a hegemonic capitalist class, or the structural requirements of the capitalist system.”Footnote 14 This is not to say these APD scholars viewed states as independent actors completely autonomous from class and other social forces by any means. The whole point of Sanders's book, for instance, was to show how popular social forces change state policy. But the result, one way or another, was the formation of a gap between APD discussions and historical materialism, setting a basis whereby more recent scholars have tended not to engage with contemporary Marxist debates.
In fact, though, the question of state autonomy has been a concern of historical materialism going back to Marx. In the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in his detailed analysis of the ebb and flow of political power and social class in mid-nineteenth-century France, Marx considered that “only under the second Bonaparte does the state seem to have made itself completely independent.”Footnote 15 He goes on to say that the state is not autonomous, after all, “and yet state power is not suspended in mid-air. Bonaparte represents a class, and the most numerous class of French society at that, the small peasants.”Footnote 16 What he is effectively discussing here is the relative autonomy of the state. While for Marx, at times, states could function as the “executive committee for managing the common affairs of the bourgeoisie,” to paraphrase, the relationship between class power and state power was contingent.Footnote 17 The level of autonomy that state actors have from social classes is dependent upon historical circumstance and shaped by the relationship between the state and class movements within and between modes of production.Footnote 18
Even Nicos Poulantzas, still the most significant reference point, next to Ralph Miliband, for Marxist discussions of the state, was not as reductionist as scholars like Skocpol and Sanders seemed to think Marxists were. Poulantzas was very critical of the German “derivation” school, which attempted to derive the general functions of the capitalist state out of a model of a capitalist mode of production. This, if anything, overlooked both the historical specificity of states in particular times, as well as the fact that states have relative autonomy. In defining relative autonomy, Poulantzas says, “such autonomy is indeed constitutive of the capitalist State: it refers to the State's materiality as an apparatus relatively separated from the relations of production, and to the specify of classes and class struggle under capitalism that is implicit in that separation.”Footnote 19 Here, there is an overlap between the historical materialist idea of relative autonomy and the idea Skocpol and others discuss of an autonomous state. The entire idea Poulantzas is putting forth is that relations of state and governance are not reducible to social class. In a capitalist society, there is a separation between the realm of the “political” and the “economic,” albeit one that is as much conceptual as material. It is, in fact, because state actors have autonomy—after all, a bureaucrat working up a governmental status hierarchy is different from a corporate CEO—that states in a capitalist society can regulate how capitalism operates, build institutions of government, and function as a state.
The major difference between Marxist and early APD state autonomy perspectives is that historical materialists give more weight and force to the power of processes of capital accumulation to shape all aspects of life and governance in capitalist society. Just as no one in capitalist society can live outside capitalism, including state bureaucrats, so, as Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin put it, “it is in these terms that we should understand the ‘relative autonomy’ of capitalist states: not as being unconnected to capitalist classes, but rather as having autonomous capacities to act on behalf of the system as a whole.”Footnote 20 These authors make a distinction between the “differentiation” and “separation” of state and economy. In other words, state and class power are different: one can conceptually separate the two, and in fact, needs to, in order to explain how they interact. But they are not separate. State workers do not live outside capitalism; state institutions are inevitably shaped by the flowing, circulating power of capital. And the pressures and contradictions of capitalism are reflected inside state institutions.Footnote 21
While in some regards, APD has moved on from these debates, although not completely, it has left open avenues that are ripe for reconsideration.Footnote 22 Representative of existing conceptions of the state, in the nearly 800-page The Oxford Handbook of American Political Development, Suzanne Mettler and Richard Valelly say that “another basic contribution of APD scholarship is its insistence that, like other polities, America has a state. By that we mean a coherently (though not necessarily tightly) connected ensemble of legitimate, stable, and resilient (but also evolving) national and subnational institutions of representation and legislation, governance, and jurisprudence building.”Footnote 23 The authors continue: “While responsive to social demands and public opinion the men and women in the state are therefore also ‘autonomous,’ that is, their views and behavior are rooted in intellectual worldviews, public philosophy, ‘reason of state,’ professional ethics, entrepreneurial visions of new roles for government, access to and dialogue with experts, and of course patriotism and public spirit.”Footnote 24
In fact, this perspective is perhaps closer to Marxism than the authors might give credit for. Marx was aware in The Eighteenth Brumaire, as noted, that mid-nineteenth-century French politicians acted based upon “reasons of state,” status, and power not reducible to class interests alone, although not entirely separated from them either. And by radically historicizing the state and placing political power in the context of modes of production, so “durable shifts in governing authority” might be located that current perspectives may be missing.
To expand, just as the history of the capitalism is the history of states, so the history of modern politics is the history of capitalism. And modes of production are not just economic. Forms of social relations of production and forms of state have historically, internally, co-shaped each other. And while Skocpol may have written that “properly speaking, there is no such thing as a generically ‘feudal state’ or ‘capitalist state.’ Rather there are variously organized states coexisting with various patters of economic production and exchange,”Footnote 25 there were certainly profound changes in state form that occurred with the rise of capitalism which might be considered uniquely capitalist in political form.
Perhaps more strongly than anyone else recently working in the Marxist tradition, Heide Gerstenberger has made the case for the centrality of the state to secure and support the development of capitalist relations of production in the history of capitalism. Gerstenberger argues that it was not simply that social relations changed first, and state form second. For the author, capitalism did not just rise out of feudalism. Instead, the development of the European ancien regime state form was central to the process.Footnote 26 In other words, it was this political form that made it possible for social relations below to change. While Gerstenberger's case study focuses on England and France, the question she poses raises a central concern for U.S. history as well: what was the role of the state in the rise of American capitalism? How did the form of state shape social relationships toward a more capitalist direction?
In the American case, this question has been taken up by Marxist scholars Kulikoff and Post. Kulikoff argues that “the American Revolution can be dubbed a bourgeois revolution because its dominant ideology meshed with bourgeois ideals, and the contingencies of war and state formation accelerated capitalist development.”Footnote 27 Kulikoff theorizes the revolution and after from a consequentialist perspective.Footnote 28 In this respect, a bourgeois revolution is not necessarily one in which a capitalist class leads the revolution or instrumentally builds a new state. Rather, it means that the long-term consequences of the revolution tended to have the effect of leading to the development of capitalism as the dominant mode of production within a given social formation. And Post argues, “in the US, however, class-conflicts during the post-revolutionary period created a very different type of state - one committed to and capable of enforcing legal claims on landed property in the countryside.”Footnote 29 For the author, “the new state-institutions allowed merchants and land-speculators to defeat independent household-producers in the cycle of class-struggles of the 1780s and 1790s.”Footnote 30
Yet, first, neither author details the Constitutional Convention. A historical materialist analysis of the creation of the U.S. Constitution remains undeveloped. And second, both authors also argue that plantation slavery was a noncapitalist mode of production, which precludes analyzing the extent to which the new state reenforced and supported slave capitalism.
Recent work in the “new” history of capitalism has challenged the idea of plantation slavery as noncapitalist. This work has shown that plantation slavery was a dynamic, expanding, profit-oriented, and, of course, violent and exploitative system of the mass production of goods such as cotton for the world market. Under plantation slavery, though, it is not just the workers’ labor power and labor time that is purchased, but the entirety of the workers themselves.Footnote 31 In this sense, if the general tendency of capitalism is to commodify and marketize all aspects of social and political life, so racialized plantation slavery was in some respects a uniquely pure form of capitalism, mediated by a specific Southern culture with values of honor, masculinity, and patriarchy. This raises questions for a historical materialist conception of the state. If plantation slavery was capitalist, an analysis of state formation should show how the class interests of slave owners were built into the “institutional materiality” of the state.
The United States would support the institution of capitalist plantation slavery by giving slaveholders representation in the state and by creating laws and institutions that would protect slave-owning capitalists. The power of master over slave was certainly personal, although slave owners also hired managers to control and enact violence against their property to enforce work discipline and quell resistance. But this power was made possible by a broader legal and state architecture that supported it. The rest of the article will ask, How was this built? To what extent was the U.S. federal government created as a “capitalist state”?
2. Was the United States Capitalist in the 1780s?
In the 1980s and 1990s, an outpouring of literature argued, in many variations, that the United States was not born capitalist. Rather, focusing on the North, scholars showed that the United States went through a transition to capitalism in which farmers and artisans were dispossessed of their means of production and a mass proletariat was formed.
This perspective has been criticized by Woody Holton, who has argued that “in the search for a useable past, many Marxist scholars have turned ordinary Americans of this era into protosocialists.”Footnote 32 Instead, for Holton, “far from fitting the Marxist caricature of farmers fighting a rearguard defense against the encroachment of bourgeois social relations, taxpayer advocates often employed rhetoric that was aggressively promarket.”Footnote 33
Holton is partly right: most rural American farmers were not anti-market. But just because they were not against some degree of market interaction does not mean they were capitalist either. Scholars such as Christopher Clark, whom Holton directly criticizes, were not arguing that farmers were “protosocialist.” Rather, Clark specifically argues that his interpretation finds a balance between “market” and “social” interpretations of the rise of American capitalism from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century.Footnote 34 In other words, depending on location, time, and context, farmers had different levels of integration with markets. But market exchange was not always capitalist exchange. Farmers who owned their own land and means of production and produced partly to take care of household needs, and partly to obtain some goods on the market (sometimes through barter, sometimes with money) were not capitalists, nor were they “protosocialist.” Post has distinguished these relationships as a transition from “independent household production” to “petty commodity production.”Footnote 35 Farmers in the American Northeast, over many decades, slowly became more incorporated into markets, but even in the mid-1800s, they still often owned their own means of production as petty commodity producers.
And while Holton has done admirable research—perhaps the closest recent work to problematizing what this article suggests—and written specifically about “the capitalist constitution,” because of a lack of engagement with the relationship between mode of production and state form, so his approach is problematic. The history of capitalism, from this angle, becomes a history of commerce, finance, and politics, but the history of capitalism as a history of a revolution in social life becomes hollowed out, as his focus is not the mode of production but the way the Constitution created a country safe for investors.Footnote 36
In other words, market integration is one key part of the history of capitalism, but a distinction needs to be made between market relations and capitalist relations. After all, markets have existed throughout world history, but capitalism as the dominant mode of social life has not. Small rural farm families—in some cases—may have been pro-market, but this did not necessarily make them pro-capitalist or anti-capitalist. One of the insights of these debates was to take notice of the fact that many rural farmers engaged in “safety first” or “composite” farming.Footnote 37 This meant farm families would produce partly for self-sufficiency and partly for the market. And their ideology was often built around the goal of obtaining “competency.” This did not mean living outside the market, nor did it mean being dependent upon it for all the necessities of life. Rather, it meant that a balance in which some market activity—from bartering with neighbors to purchasing select goods from the local country store—was part of life, but so was producing for subsistence.
This mode of production, with its gradations of degrees of market integration, makes it difficult to generalize about the state of U.S. capitalism in the post–Revolutionary War era. On one hand, some capitalist relations existed throughout the white-settler colony in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, from profit-driven plantation slavery, to a Northeastern fishing industry in which dispossessed workers operated under captains, to mining that used wage labor, and beyond.Footnote 38 Clark has recently argued that in the American countryside, there was no single path to capitalist development. It had “many faces.”Footnote 39 This was also shaped by geography, as those who were closer to waterways, merchants, and markets often participated in market activities to a higher degree. In the late 1700s, the newly formed United States was still as much a “society with capitalism” as it was a “capitalist society.”Footnote 40 In the North, the transition from rural independent production to petty commodity production was slowly in motion, as was the gradual process through which the artisan-journeyman-apprentice system began to incorporate wage labor and scattered putting-out relations of production formed unevenly.Footnote 41 It would also be early to speak of large-scale industrialism: after all, the first significant industrial production in the North, the famous Slater Mill of Rhode Island, would not start operating until the 1790s.Footnote 42 In the South, there existed social relations of production ranging from small farmers who owned no slaves to large plantations. And this complex and uneven set of articulating modes of production would shape the new state, which would create a structure to support capitalists, including merchants and financial and land speculators, as well as yeoman farmers and artisans, both classes in control of their own means of production.
The challenge of making sense of U.S. state formation in this complex class context is a question of layers of historical time. As Fernand Braudel discussed, history is more than a linear series of events. Of course, events matter, and individual personalities matter: history is, after all, contingent. But under the surface level of events, other structural processes may be at work.Footnote 43 The rise of capitalism is a process measurable in centuries, rather than years or decades. The transition to capitalism in the United States likely needs to be periodized as a two-and-a-half-century process, give or take. And by the late eighteenth century, while the speed at which capitalist relations were developing was starting to pick up, it is difficult to classify the United States, on the whole, as a “capitalist” or a non-“capitalist” country. Rather, a gradation of more capitalistic and less capitalistic relations existed at many scales with many gradations.
As the next section will demonstrate, I argue that the pressures of different relations of production played a role in shaping the institutional structure of the federal government. Focusing on the Constitutional Convention as a starting point, I argue that the new state would not be easy to classify as a purely capitalist state—although it did generally lean that way—as it also allowed space for noncapitalist relations to continue and even to have representation. On one hand, the framers worked to make sure yeoman and market-dependent, yet not exactly capitalist, artisans were represented. Independent artisans, in particular, were often big supporters of the Constitution, seen in their celebrations after it was created, as they viewed the new government as able to secure their economic futures.Footnote 44 Yet, on the other hand, aspects of the new state were capitalist. In particular, the federal government created the legal infrastructure to protect merchants and financial and land speculators, whose power would grow in the following decades. It also created a common market and trade policies that would support both the basic continued independent existence of the country, along with protecting the rising capitalist elite.Footnote 45 Capitalist slave owners would also be protected by the new government. And the creation of a standing army allowed the government to conquer land from indigenous peoples, as well as to punish Northern rural squatters who viewed land more as a use value than an exchange value. Overall, while various modes of production may have run through the state, the Convention worked to create what Antonio Gramsci called “hegemony.”Footnote 46 The interests of the elite would be presented as the universal interests of all social classes, under which consent for class domination could be forged, backed by military force and violence, if necessary.
3. The Constitutional Convention
Saying anything new about the personal politics of the framers or the day-to-day events of the Constitutional Convention is nearly impossible, given how many works have been published on the topic.Footnote 47 And this article does not claim to have any unique insights into the events or personalities of representatives at the Convention. Nor does it present a comprehensive, event-by-event summary. However, I argue that what still needs to be developed is perspective: what is yet to be written is an account of the Convention, and the larger state-building process afterward, including the complex and long ratification process, that situates early American state building in the context of the development of U.S. capitalism. What is highlighted in the narrative that follows is certain class aspects of the Constitution-building process and the Convention debates in relationship to class and capitalism.
In many ways, the question of the Constitution and capitalism is the question that Charles Beard addressed in his famous book An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States.Footnote 48 For Beard, the Constitution was ultimately a project built by the elite for the elite, specifically to protect their financial and speculative interests. This work was published over a century ago, of course, and has been criticized on many grounds, most systematically by Forrest McDonald, who showed that during the ratification process, support for and criticisms of the Constitution were not so easy to place into “class interest” boxes.Footnote 49 Holton has pointed out that while Beard was not completely wrong, as many of the Convention's attendees did hold securities, “Beard's interpretation does not explain the enthusiasm that the proposed national government inspired in men such as Madison and Alexander Hamilton…neither of whom was a major creditor and neither of whom owned government bonds.”Footnote 50
Recent works have shown, though, that the creation of the U.S. Constitution was an elitist project to protect against “excess democracy” from below. But the scholarship has not taken it one step further to ask, Where does the Constitution Convention fit, overall, into the history of the transition to capitalism? This is likely due to in part to the misrepresentation and dismissal, as noted earlier, from scholars such as Woody Holton, of the question of capitalist transition and a proper engagement with those debates. But without situating the Convention within the context of the rise of capitalism, “excess democracy” perspectives can only go so far in explaining the extent to which the Convention was a class project.
On May 29, with rules set and George Washington unanimously selected as head of the Convention, Edmund Randolph “commented on the difficulty of the crisis, and the necessity of preventing the fulfilment of the prophecies of the American downfal.”Footnote 51 Randolph followed this by listing the “defects” of the existing system under the Articles of Confederation. The fragile alliance of states lacked the ability to prevent foreign invasion, could not manage tensions and issues between states, could not manage a central state budget organized around voluntary state requisitions that often did not come, could not override state law that might conflict with national interest, could not control rebellion, could not contain states printing paper money, and could not make sure treaties were not violated.Footnote 52 On the whole, the United States was thought to be in a crisis of existence, as it lacked, for the most part, all the features a functioning government needed. The result was “anarchy from a laxity of government.”Footnote 53
He then introduced the famous Virginia Plan: a list of fifteen resolutions, masterminded by James Madison and other representatives who had met privately before the Convention's quorum was achieved, that could serve as the basis for the new state. The overall function of the government would be “common defense, security of liberty and general welfare.”Footnote 54 Participation in government representation would be based on either “quotas of contribution” or the “number of free inhabitants.” The legislature would consist of two branches. The first would be elected by the people, and the second branch chosen by the first. To avoid possible corruption, legislators would not be allowed to serve in other state-level positions while working as national representatives. Acts would be allowed to be introduced by either branch. Congressmen (given the patriarchy and racism at the time, it was not questioned that the government would be run by white men) would be paid a stipend during their time serving the country. The executive and judicial branches would be a check on the legislative. Those in the national judiciary would be chosen by legislators and hold office indefinitely based on “good behavior.” Laws would be created for the admission of new states. The federal government would guarantee the territorial power of each state. Rules would be created to allow for amendments to the new government. State governments would be bound by oath to support the central government. And the new central government would be submitted to states and the people to “consider & decide” on it.
The Virginia Plan famously set the contours of debate of the whole Convention: from the counterattack of the New Jersey Plan to the Connecticut Compromise. And from the start, one central overriding concern was, as James McHenry noted about Randolph's message, that “our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our constitutions.”Footnote 55 McHenry continued, “none of the constitutions have provided sufficient checks against the democracy.”Footnote 56
But what were these democratic forces the framers were so scared of, and what was their relationship with capitalism? Take the case of Pennsylvania, which Terry Bouton has detailed, although not explicitly in terms of a transition to capitalism.Footnote 57 Bouton shows that in the period between the end of the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, Pennsylvania farmers—those independent household and petty commodity producers—lived in a state of crisis. They owed taxes to the government and to private storekeepers, linked to private merchants, linked to the Atlantic trade system, that they could not afford to pay, especially given the scarcity of paper money, made worse by Britain's Currency Act, which prevented more colonial paper money from being printed. Artisans and merchants also struggled as, for instance, capitalist merchants laid off workers, who filled the poorhouses.Footnote 58 In this context, some Pennsylvanians began to criticize both the British Empire and the local wealthy elite, whom they saw as part of the cause their struggles.Footnote 59 When it was time to create the state's constitution, it was highly democratic and created space for noncapitalist yeoman farmers who owned their own means of production to have their interests represented. This entailed, for example, lowering property requirements so that any twenty-one-year-old man who had paid state or local taxes (about 90 percent of white men) could vote.Footnote 60
But for the framers of the U.S. Constitution, too much democracy would lead to instability and anarchy. The poor and middling classes were too unstable, too easily swayed by figures such as Massachusetts's Daniel Shays, who could incite rebellion and violence. Instead, many believed in the idea of a “natural aristocracy”—that because of natural differences, some people were smarter and superior to others, and these people tended to rise to the top of society. Wealth was often a sign of their superiority.Footnote 61 While yeoman farmers and poor workers and artisans should have some say in the federal government—after all, the framers did agree to the radical idea of government based on consent—their power needed to be controlled and limited.
Tension between more capitalist interests supporting the Constitution and less capitalist interests open to challenging it would also occur during the ratification process as states—most importantly, North Carolina and Rhode Island—were slowly pushed into joining the United States. Rhode Island, the pariah repeatedly mentioned during the Constitutional Convention, was in 1787 in the midst of pursuing a debt relief program for small farmers, against the will of the state's merchant capitalist class. During the Revolutionary War, small farmers increased market production by producing food for the war effort and expanded production by buying more land on credit. After the war, “the market for these crops disappeared as the armies left the state, but the farmers’ debts did not disappear, and the farmers faced bankruptcy and foreclosure proceedings.”Footnote 62 The state was divided by two political parties: the Mercantile Party, comprising the coastal merchants and creditors, and the Country Party, whose agenda was organized around printing money to relieve economically distressed indebted petty commodity producing farmers.Footnote 63 At the Constitutional Convention, the fact that a state government supported non-/less capitalist farmers over creditors and capitalists who “justly” deserved to be paid back fully outraged many of the framers of the Constitution. One central concern at the Convention would be preventing states from printing money for debt relief purposes: a class policy to favor capital over yeoman.Footnote 64
North Carolina, a state that would go on to resist ratification until it became the twelfth state to do so, was also a state in which the dominant mode of production was not exactly capitalist. With a population of 400,000, it was a large state, but it was also “a land of small farmers.”Footnote 65 In the territory, “small-scale subsistence farmers found a haven in North Carolina, while larger landholders, along with those engaged in business and the professions, discovered the going particularly rough.”Footnote 66 And while the lines were not entirely clear-cut, most leading Federalist politicians were large landowners and people of high status, while Anti-Federalist politicians were more popular with small farmers.Footnote 67 In states such as Rhode Island and North Carolina, those democratic forces opposed to the Constitution tended to be yeoman farmers, while those in support were often from the more capitalist-oriented classes.
As the Convention proceeded, then, the question underlying some of the issues at hand was how to build a state that would support the interests of merchants, speculators, and capitalists in a way that brought the lower and middling classes into the system but limited their power as so they could not challenge the power of the financial and merchant elite.
4. Class and Institutions of Governance
Early in the Convention, one central way the question of class emerged was in debates over the institutional form of the state, especially its heart: Congress. But class would shape, or overdetermine, practically all aspects of the Convention. This was also due to the class composition of the framers. On one hand, the middling, property-owning farmer population was the majority voting population. On the other, most of the framers were “gentlemen revolutionaries.”Footnote 68 And their class positions shaped their ideas. As Richard Beeman reminds us, those who gathered were the elite. At a time when it was rare to go to school, out of fifty-five, twenty-nine had college degrees and twelve had done postgraduate study. Many of the framers practiced law, many had high-up positions in the military during the Revolutionary War, and “fourteen of the delegates were merchants, three made their primary income through manufacturing, and ten were involved to some degree in the world of banking and finance.”Footnote 69 Many were involved in land speculation, owned slaves, and, like Abigail and John Adams (who was not present at the Convention), were financers who had purchased war debts and government bonds they wanted to make sure were paid back.Footnote 70 This is complicated by the fact that “the task of identifying any one delegate with a specific set of economic interests is not an easy one. The Founding Fathers lived in an age in which many men pursued multiple careers simultaneously, or, conversely, in which some gentlemen may not have felt any need to engage in the grubby pursuits of the marketplace.”Footnote 71 In other words, it was rare for one person to pursue a single profession, such as an investment banker or an industrial capitalist, yet many of the framers engaged in capitalist activity. Additionally, as the country was still going through a transition to capitalism, the legacy of the idea of merchants as lower in status than the gentlemen elite who did not have to engage in market relations may have persisted to some extent.
After the Convention began, the class politics of institutions emerged, for instance, in the question of who would vote for those who would serve in the federal legislature. On June 6, Charles Pinckney made a motion “that the first branch of the national Legislature be elected by the State Legislatures, and not by the people.”Footnote 72 He argued that “the people were less fit judges” and that state governments would be more likely to support ratification if they had this power. Elbridge Gerry also commented that, as seen in the Massachusetts state government, “the worst men get into the legislature.”Footnote 73 He agreed that one of the two branches should be chosen by the popular will to inspire confidence. But he also suggested, for the second, that it should not be state legislatures that chose, but people nominated in districts, “out of whom the State Legislatures shd. make the appointment.”Footnote 74
Debate on this subject continued for some time. In this context, James Madison stepped in. He was often the framer with the most sophisticated—at the time—class analysis, and he was very aware that they were creating a state led by an elite but based on popular consent. He started by agreeing that one branch of government should be elected by the people. This would make sure they chose representatives they supported, as well as avoid problems raised by the power of state governments. Democracy, for Madison, did have “inconveniences.” The challenge was to craft a state that had democratic elements, but within controlled limits.
The question of democracy and its limits was directly tied to the question of social class. For Madison, “All civilized Societies would be divided into different Sects, Factions, & interests, as they happened to consist of rich & poor, debtors & creditors, the landed the manufacturing, the commercial interests, the inhabitants of this district, or that district, the followers of this political leader or that political leader, the disciples of this religious sect or that religious sect.”Footnote 75 The challenge was that the majority tend to oppress the minority, and if they had too much power, class interests would not balanced. His terms “majority” and “minority” are also class terms: for example, merchants were a “minority” who could possibly have their interests overridden by other classes, given the size of their population compared with society as a whole. The role of the state for Madison was to manage these class tensions and different class interests. The state legislatures, and the state overall, he argued, needed to be designed in a way to prevent these tensions from turning into something larger: “In a Republican Govt. the Majority if united have always an opportunity. The only remedy is to enlarge the sphere, & thereby divide the community into so great a number of interests & parties, that in the 1st. place a majority will not be likely at the same moment to have a common interest separate from that of the whole or of the minority; and in the 2d. place, that in case they shd. have such an interest, they may not be apt to unite in the pursuit of it.”Footnote 76
In other words, Madison's goal in framing the state was to establish a hegemonic position between the upper and lower classes in a way that allowed enough democracy for the classes below to consent to the rule of the central state, while giving space for the elite to control the reins of the state. This, he thought, was the best way to build a state that could manage an unequal class society. He wanted to create a state with “relative autonomy”: one that was structured to protect the property and interests of the wealthy and powerful—a supposedly inevitable part of modern civilization—while at the same time give all interests enough representation to consent to governance. This would entail, for example, the creation of a strong Senate, which Madison saw as a “check” on democracy.Footnote 77 In this light, the question of the balance of the three branches of government was also a question of class balance. The legislature, driven partly by the people, might try to push policies that the elite classes might see as going against their interests or overextending their prerogative. But by creating a national legal system essentially standing above all, presented as unbiased or legitimate, the extent to which the entire legal structure would be structurally designed to support certain powerful class interests above others would not be questioned.
As class continued to shape the debates, the New Jersey Plan was not only about state size, but what sort of class state was being built. John Dickinson, for example, “wished the Senate to consist of the most distinguished characters, distinguished for their rank in life and their weight of property, and bearing as strong a likeness to the British House of Lords as possible; and he thought such characters more likely to be selected by the State Legislatures, than in any other mode.”Footnote 78 But the New Jersey Plan proposed a single house instead of two: something the state government of Pennsylvania, often said to be the most democratic state government, had. This plan also, of course, suggested representation based on states, rather than the population as a whole. This was sometimes posed as a class question. For instance, William Paterson asked, “What, pray, is intended by a proportional representation? Is property to be considered as part of it? Is a man, for example, possessing a property of £4000 to have 40 votes to one possessing only £100? This has been asserted on a former occasion.”Footnote 79 Paterson, who called Congress “the sun of our political World,”Footnote 80 spoke against the idea that larger states contribute more tax money and therefore should have more representation. He argued that “a rich State and poor State in same Relation as a rich individual and a poor one. 2. For the Sake of preserving the Liberty of the others 3. Wealth will have its Influence.”Footnote 81 If wealth was to have power over politics, as was inevitably the case in a class society, it would be those wealthy people in the big states that would have the most power in the federal government, and from this perspective even those wealthy people in small states would find their influence underrepresented in the Virginia Plan.
In the lead-up to the Connecticut Compromise, the question of social class would also shape the debates. On June 25, for instance, Charles Pinckney began his speech with a reexamination of the social structure of the country. Pinckney's analysis of the class structure suggested that he, like Madison and others, was aware of the challenge of creating a state that would have a class basis and would act, in turn, to represent or support specific class interests. He did not oppose those wealthy merchants and professional men, many of whom were delegates to the Convention. His goal was to build a state in which these codependent class interests could be balanced toward a common, general interest and build a government “best suited” to this class structure.Footnote 82
The day after Pinckney presented his class analysis, on June 26, Madison presented a class perspective of his own. In his analysis, he advocated the creation of a government that would limit the “fickleness and passion”Footnote 83 of representatives, arguing, “A necessary fence agst. this danger would be to select a portion of enlightened citizens, whose limited number, and firmness might seasonably interpose agst. impetuous counsels.”Footnote 84 For Madison, this enlightened elite would likely come from particular social classes, as “in all civilized Countries the people fall into different classes havg. a real or supposed difference of interests. There will be creditors & debtors, farmers, merchts. & manufacturers. There will be particularly the distinction of rich & poor.”Footnote 85 He then stated that he agreed with Charles Pinckney that the United States did not have the sort of hereditary distinctions as in Europe, or as high a degree of wealth inequality. But, he argued, “We cannot however be regarded even at this time, as one homogeneous mass, in which every thing that affects a part will affect in the same manner the whole.”Footnote 86 As the population increased, Madison argued, the size of the lower classes would increase.Footnote 87
Madison was also concerned with lower-class and farmer rebellions: “No agrarian attempts have yet been made in this Country, but symptoms of a leveling spirit, as we have understood, have sufficiently appeared in a certain quarters to give notice of the future danger.”Footnote 88 Democracy would lead to instability, as “democratic communities may be unsteady, and be led to action by the impulse of the moment.”Footnote 89 And people of different social classes would also have different perspectives on politics, as their material conditions shaped their ideologies: “There will be debtors and creditors, and an unequal possession of property, and hence arises different views and different objects in government.”Footnote 90 The new state would have to find ways to incorporate classes with a potential “leveling spirit” in a way that still ultimately protected the interests of the supposedly inevitable upper-class minority. Thus, he asked, “How is this danger to be guarded agst. on republican principles? How is the danger in all cases of interested coalitions to oppress the minority to be guarded agst.?”Footnote 91 Madison's solution was to create a government that was “sufficiently respectable for its wisdom & virtue, to aid on such emergencies, the preponderance of justice by throwing its weight into that scale.”Footnote 92 That virtue and wisdom would be embodied in the Senate, where those supposedly enlightened elite would sit for long terms, above the fickle and unstable movements of the people below.
5. Wealth and Class Representation
Struggling to find a compromise, the Convention finally formed a ten-person Grand Committee on July 2 and proceeded agree to reconvene on July 5.Footnote 93 The committee agreed to create one legislative house with one representative for every 40,000 people. States with fewer people would receive a single representative. And in the second house, states would have equal representation. On July 5, the Convention reconvened as a whole, and the committee submitted its report, which was read aloud and discussed. While some began to compromise over the state form, the elitist Gouverneur Morris still argued that “property ought to be taken into the estimate as well as the number of inhabitants.”Footnote 94 If property was “the main object of Govt.”Footnote 95 it should be reflected in the structure of the state. He also argued that Atlantic states should have more power, as newer states in the west would have less understanding of the overall public interest. John Rutledge agreed and put forward a motion “that the suffrages of the several States be regulated and proportioned according to the sums to be paid towards the general revenue by the inhabitants of each State respectively.”Footnote 96 But others did not agree, and George Mason noted that new states in the west should not be discriminated against.
As the debate over representation continued, some still argued that those states with more wealth should have more power in the government. Gerry argued “that Representation ought to be in the Combined ratio of numbers of Inhabitants and of wealth, and not of either singly.”Footnote 97 And Rufus King stated “that property was the primary object of Society; and that in fixing a ratio this ought not to be excluded from the estimate.”Footnote 98 Pierce Butler argued that basing representation on population size alone was faulty, and “He contended strenuously that property was the only just measure of representation. This was the great object of Governt: the great cause of war, the great means of carrying it on.”Footnote 99 But as the final result would show, others thought that basing representation on property and wealth would be impractical. Charles Pinckney thought that “the contributions of revenue including imports & exports, must be too changeable in their amount; too difficult to be adjusted; and too injurious to the non-commercial States. The number of inhabitants appeared to him the only just & practicable rule.”Footnote 100
Also discussed was the question of property and qualification for office. Given that the framers were creating a class state, and the executive was to be drawn from the higher classes, a resolution was put forward by George Mason that required “certain qualifications of landed property and citizenship in the United States for the Executive, the Judiciary, and the Members of both branches of the Legislature of the United States; and for disqualifying all such persons as are indebted to, or have unsettled accounts with the United States from being Members of either Branch of the national Legislature.”Footnote 101
Debate ensued. Gouverneur Morris thought it wrong to punish people with unsettled accounts: “What will be done with those patriotic Citizens who have lent money, or services or property to their Country, without having been yet able to obtain a liquidation of their claims? Are they to be excluded?”Footnote 102 And Morris also worried that it “was but a scheme of the landed agst the monied interest.”Footnote 103 From another angle, King “observed that there might be great danger in requiring landed property as a qualification since it would exclude the monied interest, whose aids may be essential in particular emergencies to the public safety?”Footnote 104 In other words, the state was to be dependent, to some degree, on creditors for financing, especially in a crisis or emergency. The government needed to be in good favor with financiers who might potentially be in debt.
John Dickinson also expressed a criticism that the Constitution was becoming too elitist and opposed qualifications such as landed property. He “doubted the policy of interweaving into a Republican constitution a veneration for wealth. He had always understood that a veneration for poverty & virtue, were the objects of republican encouragement. It seemed improper that any man of merit should be subjected to disabilities in a Republic where merit was understood to form the great title to public trust, honors & rewards.”Footnote 105 Gerry responded by arguing that, given they were building a state with a goal of protecting propertied classes, “if property be one object of Government, pro-visions for securing it can not be improper.”Footnote 106
Afterward, Madison made a motion to cut the word “landed” for qualification purposes. But his reason for this was not about empowering the people, so much as a skepticism that the best people chosen would be those whose wealth came specifically from landownership. He said, “Landed possessions were no certain evidence of real wealth. Many enjoyed them to a great extent who were more in debt than they were worth. The unjust laws of the States had proceeded more from this class of men, than any others. It had often happened that men who had acquired landed property on credit, got into the Legislatures with a view of promoting an unjust protection agst. their Creditors.”Footnote 107 In other words, it would be possible that a person who had bought land on credit, and was technically landed, might try to get elected and use their position of political power for self-protection and self-gain.
Following Madison's remarks, the Convention threw out the word “landed.” It then moved on to the question of debtors. Daniel Carroll successfully moved to strike the line about “unsettled accounts,” and Nathaniel Gorham backed him, stating “that it would put the commercial & manufacturing part of the people on a worse footing than others as they would be most likely to have dealings with the public.”Footnote 108 Luther Martin responded by saying that if “unsettled accounts” was taken out, but a term disqualifying “debtors” was left in, then those with unsettled accounts who, if settled, would be in debt would have a reason not to settle their accounts. And James Wilson argued that excluding debtors and those with unsettled accounts would “put too much power in the hands of the Auditors, who might combine with rivals in delaying settlements in order to prolong the disqualifications of particular men.”Footnote 109
Later, on August 10, the Convention returned to the question of property requirements to run for legislature. Charles Pinckney stated that he worried the committee that was supposed to set property requirement rules for politicians instead seemed to leave it to the legislatures. The problem was that if “it be left on this footing, the first Legislature will meet without any particular qualifications of property; and if it should happen to consist of rich men they might fix such qualifications as may be too favorable to the rich; if of poor men, an opposite extreme might be run into.”Footnote 110 To counteract this potential problem, it would be necessary for some federal regulations on property requirements for representation to be set in a way that did not give all power to the wealthy, nor too much power to the lower and middle classes. He even went so far as to suggest, “Were he to fix the quantum of property which should be required, he should not think of less than one hundred thousand dollars for the President, half of that sum for each of the Judges, and in like proportion for the members of the Natl. Legislature.”Footnote 111 But he also stated, “He would however leave the sums blank. His motion was that the President of the U. S. the Judges, and members of the Legislature should be required to swear that they were respectively possessed of a clear unincumbered Estate to the amount of - in the case of the President, &c &c-.”Footnote 112
Others, including Rutledge, supported this, while Oliver Ellsworth argued it would be too complicated: “The different circumstances of different parts of the U. S. and the probable difference between the present and future circumstances of the whole, render it improper to have either uniform or fixed qualifications. Make them so high as to be useful in the S. States, and they will be inapplicable to the E. States.”Footnote 113 And Benjamin Franklin “expressed his dislike of every thing that tended to debase the spirit of the common people. If honesty was often the companion of wealth, and if poverty was exposed to peculiar temptation, it was not less true that the possession of property increased the desire of more property - Some of the greatest rogues he was ever acquainted with, were the richest rogues.”Footnote 114 Eventually it was agreed that property requirements would be left to states, which already all had them in place. In other words, the framers compromised on the basis that, as states already had laws in place to make sure those without wealth could not vote, and it would be highly impractical to calculate such a thing on a national scale, the issue could be left to states.
6. Property and Slavery
The question of wealth and representation was also shaped by the perennial overarching question of slavery. James Madison, for one, was well aware that tensions in building the new state were not just about, for instance, small and big states, but the sectional imbalance between Southern states with large-scale plantation slavery and Northern states where slavery still existed, but in different forms, where pressure to ban it had been rising: “It seemed now to be pretty well understood that the real difference of interests lay, not between the large & small but between the N. & Southn. States. The institution of slavery & its consequences formed the line of discrimination.”Footnote 115 During the Convention, at times, Southerners threatened to leave unless their class interests were protected.Footnote 116 And while some delegates, such as William Paterson, hesitated about creating a new state that would protect slavery, Southern delegates, such as South Carolina's Pierce Butler, had the opposite fear: “The security the Southn. States want is that their negroes may not be taken from them which some gentlemen within or without doors, have a very good mind to do.”Footnote 117
The debate over slavery and representation had many sides. For instance, Gerry suggested that “the idea of property ought not to be the rule of representation. Blacks are property, and are used to the southward as horses and cattle to the northward; and why should their representation be increased to the southward on account of the number of slaves, than horses or oxen to the north?”Footnote 118 Or, as Charles Pinckney argued, the dilemma of taxes and representation was that calculating based on land values was “impracticable,” and if taxes were based on commerce, they would be unevenly burdened upon more commercial states. While Pinckney believed that Black slaves should count as full persons for purposes of representation, he agreed to the Three-Fifths Compromise.Footnote 119
Meanwhile, to take another position, William Paterson argued that if Black people were not to be treated as human, but as property, their lives should not count for representation at all, and that “he was also agst. such an indirect encouragemt, of the slave trade; observing that Congs. in their act relating to the change of the art: of Confedn. had been ashamed to use the term ‘Slaves’ & had substituted a description.”Footnote 120 Madison responded, suggesting (among other proposals) that the first house could count representation based on free inhabitants, and the second house could include slaves as a measure.Footnote 121 The result of all these discussions was the famous Three-Fifths Compromise, in which slaves would count as three-fifths of a person for representation in the house and for tax purposes.
While not all slavery was exactly “capitalist”—for instance, in some cases, yeoman patriarchal farm families included slaves in their mode of production—plantation slavery was a form of large-scale capitalism in which the commodities produced contained within them the labor power of the enslaved, and it was on this labor that the Southern capitalist class would reproduce itself.Footnote 122 By the time of the Convention, slavery in Northern states had already—very gradually—begun to be phased out, although it would persist for some time.Footnote 123 But if the foundation of government was the protection of private property—including the right to use slave labor to produce wealth—then how would this play into the Constitution and class structure?
Returning to Poulantzas, “We have to grasp the mode in which the class struggle, and especially political struggle and domination, are inscribed in the institutional structure of the state (in our case, bourgeois domination in the material framework of the capitalist State); this must be done in such a way as to explain the differential forms and precise historical transformations of the State.”Footnote 124 Part of this was explaining the political power of “fractions” of capital—those divisions within the capitalist class as a whole—often conceptualized (very generally) as industrial, commercial, and financial fractions of capital.Footnote 125 Different fractions of capital may push state policy in different ways and shape the institutional structure of the state toward their interests. In the case of the Constitutional Convention, while plantation slave owners like George Washington, who had invested in speculation in western lands, were not a pure fraction of capital, something that rarely if ever exists, they did tend to have a shared political interest in exerting slave power's hold on the state. And the way slavery was legally supported by the Constitution would make sure that the interests of Southern capitalists would be protected.
In this sense, law and class were inseparable. Law and class power and practice may be conceptually distinct, but in this case, their relative autonomy had strong limits. The state and law that protected slavery was not an “instrument” of a particular class, but law and class were built into each other. State and law were not built as autonomous processes that might be influenced by “outside” forces. Rather, slave owners exerted their class influence directly upon the creation of the legal architecture and “institutional materiality” of the state. Their class interests, in other words, became directly embedded in the state.Footnote 126
In addition to representation, the overarching question regarding slavery at the Convention was not, say, abolition. Even those uncomfortable with slavery thought this unrealistic and, besides, twenty-five of the delegates were slave owners themselves.Footnote 127 Rather, it was how to manage the question of empire building and westward expansion in the context of slavery. Even those at the Convention who had hesitations about slavery knew that it would be impossible to ratify the Constitution if it overly constricted slavery, and they were often more worried about the threat of a supposedly racially inferior Black population who would be freed than the persistence of slavery itself.Footnote 128 And Southerners such as Charles Pinckney pushed for the new Constitution to protect slavery. Regarding the slave trade, which even many Southerners considered terrible, for Charles Pinckney, South Carolina and Georgia were more dependent upon the slave trade than Virginia, which would benefit more from the value of banning the international slave trade, and disadvantage South Carolina and Georgia. On a personal level, “if the S. States were let alone they will probably of themselves stop importations. He wd. himself as a Citizen of S. Carolina vote for it.”Footnote 129 Thus, while in the long run, Southern states may support outlawing the international slave trade, he believed that states would not ratify the Constitution if the slave trade ban was included. Thus, “He contended that the importation of slaves would be for the interest of the whole Union. The more slaves, the more produce to employ the carrying trade; The more consumption also, and the more of this, the more of revenue for the common treasury. He admitted it to be reasonable that slaves should be dutied like other imports, but should consider a rejection of the clause as an exclusion of S. Carola from the Union.”Footnote 130
The combination of the basis of the Constitution as the protection of private property—including enslaved people—and the political maneuvering of slave owners to have their class interests built into state and law, along with hesitations about the moral guilt that some of the framers had about slavery, led to a result in which the Constitution protected slavery, seen in the fugitive slave clause, Three-Fifths Compromise, and policy toward the international slave trade, even if the political arrangement that formed placed some limits on its expansion. This also led to slaves being termed “persons held to service or labor” in the fugitive slave clause, so that the word “slavery” was left out of the Constitution.Footnote 131
Slavery would also be indirectly protected by the Northwest Ordinance, passed by the Confederation Congress during the time the Convention was occurring. By making slavery illegal in new states in the Northwest, this suggested that slavery would be able to expand in the Southwest, giving slave owners space they needed to keep the ever-expanding mode of production alive. When the issue came to debate, “those southern delegates present unanimously supported it. There was an implicit quid pro quo: Barring slavery north of the Ohio River implied permitting it in the territories south of the river, which Congress later explicitly did. It is likely as well that some southern planters favored excluding slavery from the Northwest Territory to suppress economic competition.”Footnote 132
7. Conclusion
Article I, section 8 of the U.S. Constitution would lay out many of the general functions of the new federal state. These included the power to lay and collect taxes and generate revenue from an impost, borrow money, regulate commerce, establish naturalization and bankruptcy laws, coin and regulate the value of money, build post offices and roads, secure patents, create federal courts, punish offenses on the seas and “against the Law of Nations,” declare war, raise a federal army and navy, call forth militias to crush rebellion, control the territory where the federal seat of government would be, and make laws to enforce, protect, and execute the federal government's powers.Footnote 133
These new powers would play a key role in the creation of a national state that would secure capitalist relations of production and support capitalist development in the long run. As Kulikoff notes, one key feature of the federal government would be the destruction of trade barriers between states as “the Constitution created a national common market.”Footnote 134 This allowed investment capital to flow through the country. And preventing states from printing money, along with a large increase in the number of banks in the country, created a credit system conducive to capitalist investment, as opposed to supporting small farmers, as “Bankers, often former merchants or merchant farmers, became key figures in capitalist development. They helped finance early textile mills and canals; frequently lent money to merchants and manufactures; but less often granted mortgages to farmers.”Footnote 135
Creating a system to manage federal debt and secure both domestic and international investment would also be famously ensured by Alexander Hamilton's machinations as George Washington's Treasury Secretary. Hamilton, more than any other framer, seemed to understand the importance of debt financing to the federal state's success, and he pushed for the First Bank of the United States to be formed.Footnote 136 Of course, the early “energetic” state constructed by the federalists was soon, to some degree, rolled back after Thomas Jefferson took power in the “Revolution of 1800.”Footnote 137 The result would mean, as Joyce Appleby mentions, that “when Jefferson came into the presidency in 1801, he worked swiftly to democratize Hamilton's accomplishments, dismantling the Federalist fiscal program, reducing taxes, and cutting the size of the civil service. The United States got the best of two worlds with Hamilton's and Jefferson's economic programs.”Footnote 138 While Hamilton's work secured capitalist investor confidence, Jefferson “distrusted financiers and wanted to liberate working-class white men from the condescension of their superiors. His belief in limiting government power also had roots in the slaveholders’ determination not to be harassed by the federal government.”Footnote 139
Overall, the Constitutional Convention created the outlines of a capitalist state, yet one not completely settled in time. Even after the Civil War, it would be hard to say that the capitalist transition was entirely “complete,” and the new government reflected this incompleteness. As Clark has argued, while capitalism spread west, from the rise of large scale capitalist farming in the Great Plains and California, to mining in Appalachia, to the rise of a national livestock industry and development of industrial capitalism, and massive grants of land to railroad companies, the Homestead Act of 1862 also provided land to small farmers: “land grants to railroads between 1850 and 1871 totaled some 180 million acres; actual grants of Homestead land to claimants reached 80 million acres by 1900, of which at least 73 million acres went to bona fide settlers.”Footnote 140 If aspects of American capitalism developed as early as the colonial age of the 1600s, yet were not necessarily the dominant mode production for some time, it may not be possible to talk about the relative “completion” of U.S. capitalism's transition until the later decades of the 1800s.
Somewhere in the middle sits the Constitutional Convention. On one hand, it did create the framework for a new imperial state that “sealed,” to use Perry Anderson's term, capitalist class interests by representing them and creating the outline of an institutional framework that would structurally support capitalist development.Footnote 141 On the other hand, it allowed enough space for social classes not fully “subsumed” by capital to continue. That being said, this mode of social life would gradually become more deeply emmeshed in market relations, decade after decade, and as land speculators were able to mobilize state power to crush squatters and rural rebellions. Ultimately, the Convention created the foundation of a new federal state that was internally shaped by contradictory noncapitalist and capitalist (or perhaps better stated as “less” capitalist and “more” capitalist relations) relations that, in the articulation of modes of production, would in the long run privilege those capitalist relations above all else.
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