Beard, Hofstadter, Wood: Economic Analysis of the US Constitution

Economics in the American Revolution Was the American Revolution motivated primarily by economic factors? To the observer in 2014, who is surrounded with economically-oriented ideologues who have adopted the title of "Tea Party" for their movement, the interpretation is inescapable.

We must ignore the tendentious and flimsy view of history advanced by the twenty-first century Tea Parties though (reminding ourselves that the former vice presidential candidate who styles herself one of their leaders could not correctly identify in 2011 what Paul Revere had actually done during the American Revolution) and look at the view of reputable historians. I hope by examining the work of three historians -- Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and Gordon Wood -- to demonstrate the extent to which the Founding Fathers were motivated by economic circumstances.

Any discussion of the economic factors motivating the American Revolution must begin with the work of Charles Beard. Beard, influenced to some degree by Marxist analysis, received a historiography which had whitewashed the vested interests of the drafters of the U.S. Constitution. Beard argued that the document was "not the product of an abstraction known as 'the whole people' but a group of economic interests which must have expected beneficial results from its adoption" (Beard 16).

Beard notes, for example, that the opposition to the document came largely from "farmers and debtors" who would not stand to benefit from its provisions (Beard 17). In particular, Beard argues that the specific economic motives came from four areas in which the Articles of Confederation had not been benefician to the drafters of the document: he identifies these as "money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping" (Beard 324).

However Beard points out that this did in fact lead to the strong federal identity above the interests of individual states, as these financial areas were "truly national in their scope" (Beard 325). Richard Hofstadter came from the first generation of historians that learned from Beard's thesis, and although his own work is more interested in political organization -- hinging on the idea of how disparate political interests manage to create consensus -- Hofstadter also manages to validate the basic elements of Beard's thesis.

Hofstadter notes, for example, that (contrary to the ideas of the twenty-first century Tea Party) the founders were not interested in "freedom of trade in the modern sense" and felt that "failure to regulate [trade] was one of the central weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation" (Hofstadter 69).

Moreover Hofstadter notes that the central attitude towards America's natural resources was hardly one of unrestrained liberty: he points out that among the drafters of the document "at least fourteen of them were land speculators" whose sympathies lay not with those who occupied unused land but the "absentee landlord" who held the property rights (Hofstadter 69). His ultimate opinion is that the Constitution was intended to regularize economic life, preventing conflict in trade among the states and strengthening the basis of a national currency.

In other words, its protections were oriented toward the propertied class. If Hofstadter's essential view is that the U.S. Constitution was conservative in character, Gordon Wood emphasizes (even in the title of his book) the radicalism of the American Revolution. But for Wood, the notion of this radicalism lies in its transformative power: his notion is that the Revolution and the founding generation "released powerful entrepreneurial and commercial strategies that few realized existed and transformed the economic landscape of the country" (Wood 8).

Yet it is crucial to note that Wood's thesis does not fundamentally undercut the arguments by Beard and Hofstadter. To suggest that overthrowing government by the British crown -- which had viewed the colonies primarily as something to exploit financially -- unleashed, in a brief anarchic burst, all possibilities for economic re-organization is certainly credible. But we must note that, in terms of what government would replace the crown, the revolutionary generation found it necessary to replace the Articles of Confederation fairly rapidly with the Constitution.

In other words, this burst of economic productivity and reorganization would fairly soon require a rule of law that would protect its interests, and the Articles were inadequate for this purpose. The twenty-first century Tea Party is not entirely wrong, then, that the American Revolution had an economic motive -- although it.