Economic Motivations Behind the American Revolution

Introduction: Economics and the Revolution's Origins

Was the American Revolution motivated primarily by economic factors? To an observer in 2014, surrounded by economically oriented ideologues who have adopted the title of "Tea Party" for their movement, the interpretation seems inescapable. We must set aside the tendentious and flimsy view of history advanced by twenty-first century Tea Partiers, however, and look instead at the work of reputable historians. By examining the arguments of three scholars — Charles Beard, Richard Hofstadter, and Gordon Wood — this essay demonstrates the extent to which the Founding Fathers were motivated by economic circumstances.

Charles Beard and the Economic Interpretation

Any discussion of the economic factors motivating the American Revolution must begin with the work of Charles Beard. Influenced to some degree by Marxist analysis, Beard inherited a historiography that 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). He notes, for example, that 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 arose from four areas in which the Articles of Confederation had not been beneficial to the document's drafters: he identifies these as "money, public securities, manufactures, and trade and shipping" (Beard 324). Beard also points out that this did lead to a strong federal identity that superseded the interests of individual states, since these financial concerns were "truly national in their scope" (Beard 325).

Richard Hofstadter on Property, Trade, and Consensus

Richard Hofstadter came from the first generation of historians who learned from Beard's thesis. Although his own work is more interested in political organization — specifically in how disparate political interests manage to create consensus — Hofstadter also validates the basic elements of Beard's argument. Hofstadter notes, for example, that 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 observes that the central attitude toward America's natural resources was hardly one of unrestrained liberty. He points out that among the drafters of the Constitution "at least fourteen of them were land speculators" whose sympathies lay not with those who occupied unused land but with the "absentee landlord" who held the property rights (Hofstadter 69). His ultimate view 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.

Conclusion: Economic Pragmatism, Not Libertarian Ideology

The twenty-first century Tea Party is not entirely wrong that the American Revolution had an economic motive — although it certainly was not the Ayn Rand-infused libertarian free-for-all that today's ideologues pretend. The American colonies were simply in the position of all colonized countries, seen as basically a source of raw material and economic exploitation. The fact that they were able to organize sufficiently and advance enough in intellectual life to produce a city like Philadelphia and a polymath like Benjamin Franklin makes clear that, at the time of the Revolution, America had outgrown the position of an exploitable foreign outpost — like Madras or New South Wales — for a London government.