William Hogeland — Why the Founding Fathers Loved the National Debt

Both the young Alexander Hamilton (savviest of the founders regarding finance) and his mentor Robert Morris (the wartime Congress’s superintendent of finance and America’s first central banker) believed that a domestic debt, supported by federal taxes collected from all the states, would unify the country. It would concentrate wealth, and yoke that wealth to a consolidated government. The goal was a nation capable of grand projects -- ultimately an economic empire to compete with England’s....

In letters written before the Constitutional Convention to George Washington, another supporter of sustaining federal debt via taxes, Madison made clear the nationalists’ shared desire to shore up public credit by throwing out the Articles of Confederation and forming a nation. Edmund Randolph opened the convention by charging the delegates to redress the country’s failure to fund -- not pay off, fund -- the public debt by creating a national government with the power to do so....

The founding alliance that made federal debt a supporter of nationhood, and nationhood a supporter of federal debt, came about in direct opposition to a radically egalitarian, communitarian movement that is in many ways the intellectual antecedent of modern social-contract liberalism.

The radicals of that movement -- evinced in episodes such as Shays’ Rebellion -- wanted to devalue the merchant class’s crushing loans to ordinary people; disconnect bondholders and bankers from government; prevent widespread foreclosures; more tightly regulate business; and disseminate, rather than concentrate, American wealth. 

Bloomberg | Echoes
Why the Founding Fathers Loved the National Debt
William Hogeland

How Big Finance Won the American Revolution – David V. Johnson Interviews William Hogeland

In his latest book, Founding Finance: How Debt, Speculation, Foreclosures, Protests, and Crackdowns Made Us a Nation, William Hogeland argues that America was born less from the fight between founding fathers and the British Crown, which we’ve all heard about, than from the fight between the founding fathers and American economic populists, which we haven’t heard enough about. The much-ballyhooed conflicts among John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton over the federalist project belie their unity against pro-democratic financial and economic measures that would benefit the indebted masses at the expense of financial elites allied with the founders. That we still fight today over similar issues shows how central they are to our national identity. BR Web Editor David Johnson asked Hogeland about who Herman Husband was, why Robert Morris would feel at home working for Citigroup, and how George Washington would greet the Occupy and Tea Party movements.

Boston Review
How Big Finance Won the American Revolution
An Interview with William Hogeland
David V. Johnson

Stephen C. Webster — ‘Historian’ David Barton’s book on Thomas Jefferson pulled from stores

David Barton, an evangelical activist and writer often cited as a “historian” by conservative political figures like former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA) and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, stirred up such a firestorm of controversy with his latest book “The Jefferson Lies” that his publisher now claims to have “lost confidence” in the text, opting Thursday evening to pull it from stores.

The announcement by Christian mega-publisher Thomas Nelson comes after readers of The History News Network at George Mason University elected Barton’s latest work as “the least credible history book in print.” It was also challenged by an assemblage of “10 conservative Christian professors” in the recently released book, “Getting Jefferson Right,” which accuses Barton of grossly misrepresenting the nation’s third president.

The author of “Getting Jefferson Right,” Warren Throckmorton, fact-checked Barton’s book and found a number of basic historical facts that Barton got wrong, like Barton’s claim that Jefferson invested in an American printing of the Bible, when in fact he only bought one copy. Barton also claimed that Jefferson was barred by law from freeing his slaves, but that too is objectively false. Professors sought out by Throckmorton — all of whom believe that America was founded as a Christian nation — said that Barton’s writing seems too eager to depict Jefferson as an adamant Christian, glossing over his less than conventional views of religion and the Christian deity figure.

Raw Story
‘Historian’ David Barton’s book on Thomas Jefferson pulled from stores
Stephen C. Webster

If you haven't been following this, non-historian David Barton books and lectures on the founding Fathers and the establishment of America as "a Christian nation" having been getting big play among fundies. I have been watching it as a rising trend. It is significant that the publisher has decided to pull the book. The push-back has come largely from Christian conservatives too. Apparently, there are some boundaries.

Thomas Jefferson & James Madison on Equality

I am conscious that an equal division of property is impracticable. But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care to let their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind. The descent of property of every kind therefore to all the children, or to all the brothers and sisters, or other relations in equal degree is a politic measure, and a practicable one. Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise. Whenever there is in any country, uncultivated lands and unemployed poor, it is clear that the laws of property have been so far extended as to violate natural right. The earth is given as a common stock for man to labour and live on. If, for the encouragement of industry we allow it to be appropriated, we must take care that other employment be furnished to those excluded from the appropriation.

Thomas Jefferson to James Madison
28 Oct. 1785 Papers 8:68-82
in The Founders' Constitution

19 June 1786  Papers 9:76--77
Volume 1, Chapter 15, Document 32

University of Chicago Press
The Papers of Thomas Jefferson. Edited by Julian P. Boyd et al. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1950
(h/t OccupyMarines)

Madison replied:

A certain degree of misery seems inseparable from a high degree of populousness. If the lands in Europe which are now dedicated to the amusement of the idle rich, were parcelled out among the idle poor, I readily conceive the happy revolution which would be experienced by a certain proportion of the latter. But still would there not remain a great proportion unrelieved? No problem in political Oeconomy has appeared to me more puzzling than that which relates to the most proper distribution of the inhabitants of a Country fully peopled. Let the lands be shared among them ever so wisely, & let them be supplied with labourers ever so plentifully; as there must be a great surplus of subsistence, there will also remain a great surplus of inhabitants, a greater by far than will be employed in cloathing both themselves & those who feed them, and in administering to both, every other necessary & even comfort of life. What is to be done with this surplus? Hitherto we have seen them distributed into Manufacturers of superfluities, idle proprietors of productive funds, domestics, soldiers, merchants, mariners, and a few other less numerous classes. All these classes notwithstanding have been found insufficient to absorb the redundant members of a populous society; and yet a reduction of most of those classes enters into the very reform which appears so necessary & desireable. From a more equal partition of property, must result a greater simplicity of manners, consequently a less consumption of manufactured superfluities, and a less proportion of idle proprietors & domestics. From a juster Government must result less need of soldiers either for defence agst. dangers from without or disturbances from within.

James Madison to Thomas Jefferson
The Founders' Constitution

Volume 1, Chapter 15, Document 33


University of Chicago Press
The Papers of James Madison. Edited by William T. Hutchinson et al. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1962--77 (vols. 1--10); Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977--(vols. 11--)