Conceived in Liberty, Volume 5: The New Republic: 1784–1791
Preface by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.
I have lost track of how many volumes of new material by Murray N. Rothbard have been released since his death in the early days of 1995. Rothbard has achieved in death more scholarly output than many scholars can hope for in a lifetime.
The reader can learn about the background to this volume and the Conceived in Liberty series as a whole in Patrick Newman’s capable introduction. How this book finally came to light after its recovery had seemed hopeless—Rothbard’s indecipherable handwriting an apparently insuperable stumbling block—makes for a delightful story.
When I got my hands on the manuscript for volume five of Conceived in Liberty, I did something unusual: I skipped ahead immediately to Rothbard’s treatment of Shays’ Rebellion. Historians got this one wrong for a very long time. The correct understanding had to wait for 2002, with the release of Shays’ Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle, by Leonard Richards.
For obvious reasons, most people who participate in political rebellions do not go out of their way to keep records of their involvement. It turns out that Shays’ Rebellion was a rare exception: participants were required to sign loyalty oaths, which were kept on record. Richards found these records, and used them to learn about the people involved: their towns, their families, their debt level (if any), and so on.
What he found: historians’ standard morality play of Shays’ Rebellion—that it was a revolt of desperate debtors against their creditor tormentors—was false. More than anything else, the Rebellion had been a tax revolt.
So I had to know: what was Rothbard’s interpretation of this event?
Answer: Rothbard managed to intuit the true nature of Shays’ Rebellion even without the benefit of this later research. It was not a revolt of debtors, he declared, but rather a tax revolt—precisely what everyone else had to wait until 2002 to discover.
I was astonished—though, having read Rothbard for decades now, not altogether surprised.
Rothbard found that the program of the rebels was, for the most part, a libertarian one. He likewise observed that a great many wealthy people, not in debt, took part in the rebellion, which further undermined the cartoon version that was to be found in school textbooks.
So when readers encounter in these pages Rothbard’s treatment of this episode, I hope this historiographical background will enhance their appreciation of the author’s cogency and insight.
This was hardly unusual for Rothbard, I might add, who had a knack for seeing through the cartoonish narratives that dominate the standard tale of American history. In his work on nineteenth-century monetary history, for example, he was aghast at scholars who thought the fight over money and banking could be reduced to agrarians who hated banking per se versus wise industrialists who understood and appreciated it, or that it was “capitalists” who favored national banks that enjoyed government privilege.
A glance at the treatises of the great opponents of national banks made clear that they were supporters of hard money who favored as little government involvement in money and banking as possible. It wasn’t that they opposed banking per se. They opposed inflationist banking, which they (correctly) believed led to the boom-bust cycle. These, and not the cronies who wanted privileged, inflationist banks, were the genuine capitalists. Hence it was the hard-money, sound-banking Jeffersonians, and not the special-privilege, often inflationist Hamiltonians, with whom supporters of laissez-faire should sympathize —the very opposite of how the uncomprehending textbook treatment (which portrays Hamilton as the very embodiment of “capitalism”) would have it.
In the present volume, therefore, we should not be surprised to find Rothbard berating historian Bray Hammond for falling precisely into this error in his coverage of the Bank of North America, and failing even to consider the economic arguments of the bank’s opponents. For Hammond, it is enough to describe them as “agrarians,” and leave the impression that their complaints about the bank were merely political rather than economic.
Of course, a substantial portion of this book involves the drafting and ratification of the Constitution, which the eminent Judge Napolitano, in his foreword, commented on. Instead, allow me simply to point out how rare it is to encounter a volume in which the ratification of the Constitution is treated as something other than a great triumph, with the events leading up to it carrying a glorious inevitability.
Schoolchildren are duly informed that the situation under the Articles of Confederation was untenable, and that the Constitution established a superior system in its place. This is obviously a matter of opinion, but it is presented essentially as fact in every textbook and classroom in America.
Of course, even if every accusation against the Articles were true, someone might still note that the Constitution has had its own share of problems. It has allowed (as in, been unable to prevent) such overwhelming enormities in the ensuing two and a half centuries, as government has grown to levels unimaginable to everyone at the ratification debates and positively unthinkable under the Articles, that perhaps by comparison the Articles may not have been so bad after all.
No such arguments are to be heard, except from the occasional libertarian gadfly.
I once heard Rothbard say he never earned much money from his books. Unlike the right-wing radio hosts who earn small fortunes year after year churning out volumes of no significance at all, Rothbard wrote for the ages. He was building an intellectually fulfilled libertarian movement. For Rothbard that meant foundational works of economics, history, and philosophy.
The release of volume five of Conceived in Liberty, assumed to be lost to the world forever, is an occasion for rejoicing, if somewhat surreal: Rothbard’s familiar voice here returns to us from beyond the grave. May it not only inform us, but also inspire us, especially our rising young people, to carry on the libertarian project Rothbard began.
Thomas
E. Woods, Jr.
Orlando, Florida
April 2019
Conceived in Liberty, Volume 5: The New Republic: 1784–1791
Introduction by Patrick Newman
The prolific Murray Rothbard (1926–1995) worked on four major treatises during his life. The first, Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market, was a three-volume work on economic theory written in the 1950s and published in 1962 and 1970. The second, Conceived in Liberty, was a four-volume series on early American history largely written in the 1960s and published throughout the 1970s (1975, 1976, and 1979). The third, The Ethics of Liberty, was a single volume on the political philosophy of natural rights libertarianism written mainly in the 1970s and published in 1982. The final treatise, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, was a projected three-volume work (only two were completed) on the history of economics written in the 1980s and published posthumously in 1995.1 Each project covered a massive amount of material and was influential in the Austrian and libertarian movement of the mid-to-late twentieth century and cemented Rothbard’s status as a legitimate scholar in the respective field of research. However, the project that had the least impact in both the aforementioned community as well as the broader academy was undoubtedly Conceived in Liberty.
Conceived in Liberty analyzed early American history up to the end of the American Revolutionary War from a libertarian perspective. Volume I—A New Land, A New People: The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century covered everything from the discovery of the New World up to the early 1700s. Volume II—“Salutary Neglect”: The American Colonies in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century carried the narrative of the thirteen colonies through the French and Indian War (1754–1763). Volume III—Advance to Revolution, 1760–1775 described the tumultuous events that brought about the American Revolution (1775–1783), and Volume IV—The Revolutionary War, 1774–1784 engaged in a military, political, and economic analysis of that secession from Great Britain. The project grew out of a research grant awarded in the 1960s to write a text on American history. The four volumes totaled over 1,600 pages in length and remarkably covered only a fraction of Rothbard’s output and research interests. What makes it even more astonishing is that Rothbard not only wrote the four published volumes, but also an unpublished fifth volume that finished the series. While the fourth volume ended with the American Revolution and the unshackling of the thirteen colonies from British mercantilism, Volume V—The New Republic, 1784–1791 carried the narrative through the adoption of the U.S. Constitution when the thirteen states were shackled with a new domestic mercantilism.
To paraphrase a statement from Rothbard’s preface to each of his four volumes: “What! Another Rothbard book? The reader may be pardoned for wondering about the possibility of another addition to the seemingly inexhaustible flow of books and texts from Murray Rothbard.”2 Rothbard was an enormously productive writer and published extensively during his life, but since his sudden death in 1995 there has been a stream of new Rothbard books and papers, the most recent being an unpublished and unfinished work from the late 1970s on late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century American history titled The Progressive Era.3 Unlike that book, Rothbard actually finished the fifth volume of Conceived in Liberty. However, also unlike that book, Rothbard largely handwrote the fifth volume, and since his handwriting is largely indecipherable for most people, it remained dormant. At long last, it is published here for the first time to complete the series.
This editor’s introduction provides the important background and context for Volume V—The New Republic, 1784–1791. It describes Rothbard’s historical approach and the themes he emphasized, and a brief narrative of the Conceived in Liberty series. This is done in order to explain why Rothbard’s history is unique and what is important in the fifth volume as well as Conceived in Liberty as a whole.
1. The Rothbardian Approach to History
Murray Rothbard was an expert American historian who often constructed an overarching narrative that not only presented the important facts but also analyzed the motivations and ideologies of relevant individuals. This was because Rothbard was both a formal student of the noted institutional economist Joseph Dorfman and heavily steeped in the works of Ludwig von Mises. Rothbard adhered to Mises’s economic analysis (praxeology) and his historical analysis (thymology). Whereas praxeology refers to the logical implications of human action, thymology refers to understanding human motivations behind individual actions. In the science of history, or the study of past human actions, understanding motivations is crucial. The good historian needs to not only unearth unknown and neglected facts and use them to craft a narrative, but also to understand why humans behaved the way they did. This is especially relevant when it comes to investigating the history of government policy where a serious understanding of the motives of the relevant actors (e.g., policymakers and politicians) is often neglected by assuming that they act in the public interest.4 Rothbard went beyond Mises by applying the thymological approach to a wide range of empirical topics, particularly in American history. In fact, Rothbard’s vast theoretical writings were actually a smaller fraction of his output than his historical work.5
There are two common characteristics that underlie Rothbard’s American history, which, when combined together, make it unlike any other. They are his rich detail and his libertarian perspective. Regarding the first, Rothbard never shied away from presenting a vast array of unknown facts about individuals, organizations, and events that are significant for understanding motivations and consequences of important human actions. Anyone who has read a Rothbard history can attest to the sheer mass of information presented and how Rothbard always had some important and underappreciated detail for the topic at hand. Rothbard always wanted these oft-neglected facts—such as an individual’s familial and business history, unknown and obscure libertarian thinkers, or new information on an overrated historical figure—to be known and speak for themselves. “Unearthing” these details was an important motivation for Rothbard when it came to writing history, as explained in the prefaces to Conceived in Liberty:
… the survey studies of American history have squeezed out the actual stuff of history, the narrative facts of the important events of the past. With the true data of history squeezed out, what we have left are compressed summaries and the historian’s interpretations and judgements of the data. There is nothing wrong with the historian’s having such judgements; indeed, without them, history would be a meaningless and giant almanac listing dates and events with no causal links. But, without the narrative facts, the reader is deprived of the data from which he can himself judge the historian’s interpretations and evolve interpretations of his own. A major point of this and the other volumes is to put the historical narrative back into American history.
At the end of the first volume of Conceived in Liberty Rothbard continued:
It is rare these days to find a general work on American history that retains the richness of narrative and the vital factual record. Instead, while historians have written excellent monographs on specific areas, the more comprehensive works have either been brief essays presenting the author’s point of view, or textbooks remarkable for the increasing skimpiness of their material. Perhaps college students these days are expected to know less and less actual history in their courses. The result is a series of unproven, ad hoc dicta by the historian; such a product fails to present the student or the reader with the factual data that support the historian’s conclusions or that allow the reader to make up his own mind about the material.6
Rothbard’s selection, collation, and synthesizing of facts directly relates to the second characteristic common in his historical writings: his overarching libertarian perspective. Rothbard’s five-volume history of early America is unique in that it is from such a perspective, as opposed to most historians who are either of a conservative or (more likely) liberal point of view. The central theme underlying his narrative, which Rothbard emphasizes more than any other historian, is the eternal battle waged between Liberty and Power. Rothbard argues that Liberty, or consensual agreements between individuals regarding their private property rights, is a moral good responsible for all human flourishing and modern civilization. On the other hand, Power refers to invasive actions of one individual over another that interferes with those aforementioned private property rights and is a moral evil responsible for mankind’s setbacks. Liberty comes from the decentralized actions of individuals freely and peacefully interacting with each other, while Power generally resides in the centralized engine of coercion known as the State. Throughout human history these two forces have always clashed in a titanic struggle, with the forces of government coercion generally in a dominant position over the forces of the voluntary society. To make matters worse, all too often when the individuals of Liberty succeed and take the reins of a government with a goal to dismantle it, they become corrupted and start to soften their radical stance and even use government intervention for their own policy goals. This was especially prominent in early American history, from colonial America to the Antifederalists, and from the Jeffersonian Democrat-Republicans to the Jacksonian Democrats.7 As will be shown below, while Rothbard attributed the founding, growth, and desire for independence of the American colonies to Liberty, he considered the adoption of the U.S. Constitution as a triumph for Power.
Rothbard’s iconoclastic desire to present a wide range of underappreciated facts and interpret them from a libertarian perspective explains why many of his history projects grew in length, such as Conceived in Liberty and The Progressive Era. In fact, in a neglected public interview in 1981, Rothbard explicitly linked the growth and development of both projects together. When asked by an audience member about the status of The Progressive Era, Rothbard replied:
The status is I’m in the middle of it. … What happened with [it], as [what] happens with all my books, [is that] they get longer as I get into it. The way I got started with my history book was that I got a small grant to write a two-volume history of the United States. Somebody came to me and said “Murray, we want you to write a two-volume history of the United States. Take the usual facts that everybody agrees on, like Lincoln was elected president, something like that, and write the libertarian interpretation of it, right? It should be a lead-pipe cinch.” Okay, great, [I] could get it done in a year and a half. What happened was, unfortunately, I found out that two-volume textbooks leave everything out. You can’t just take the facts and put a new interpretation on them, because the facts were all left out. So I started bringing in the facts. I’d find tax rebellions in colonial New Jersey. I can’t leave that out, right? So the thing starts getting longer and longer, and I wind up with a five-volume book on the colonial period and the rest of it dropping out.8
It is now time to turn from Rothbard’s unique historical approach to his equally unique history of early America.
2. The Rothbardian Perspective on Early American History: From Jamestown to the Constitution
It is an extremely tall order to publish the fifth volume of a five-volume series on early American history forty years after the fourth was published in 1979 and expect the reader to be able to start right where the previous volume ended. Although the latest volume can be read as a stand-alone book for someone well-versed in Revolutionary War history, the book was meant as a continuation of previously published material and should be treated as such. With that being said, it is an even taller order to expect the reader to first plow through over 1,600 pages of early American history in order to be able to properly read and understand the fifth volume. It is for this reason that the remainder of the introduction will provide an overview of all five volumes of Conceived in Liberty. Space will naturally be devoted to later volumes and especially to Volume V.9
Volume I—A New Land, A New People: The American Colonies in the Seventeenth Century describes the founding and initial development of all the original thirteen colonies except for Georgia, beginning with Jamestown in Virginia (1607) and Plymouth in Massachusetts (1620). English settlements soon spread throughout New England and the South, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, the Mid-Atlantic region was conquered from the Dutch and brought under English control. Although many settlers made the difficult journey across the Atlantic in search of greater freedom and escape from European statism, it was only a happy accident that the colonies were allowed to grow and prosper. This was due to several reasons. First, the sheer abundance of unsettled land and distance from the mother country made it extremely hard to establish feudalism (although it was certainly not for lack of trying). Colonists recognized that they were the true appropriators, and thus owners, of the land, and this fueled them with a rudimentary libertarian understanding of private property. Second, while the English did impose many mercantilist restrictions called Navigation Acts (e.g., subsidies and monopolistic privileges to English shipbuilders and manufacturers intended to enrich England at the expense of her colonies and other nations), they were generally not enforced due to internal strife in England and English wars with other European countries, such as France, the Netherlands, and Spain. In the mid-seventeenth century England experienced its own Civil War (1642–1651) between supporters of the monarchy and those in favor of a limited representative democracy, and in 1688 underwent the bloodless Glorious Revolution whose effects were in many respects similar to the American Revolution nearly one hundred years later.10 The third was that whenever elements of mercantilism and feudalism were coercively imposed on the colonies, a revolt soon followed, such as Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia (1676), Leisler’s Rebellion in New York (1689), and Morris’ Rebellion in New Jersey (1699). While sometimes partially inspired and motivated by anti-libertarian goals, Rothbard considered all of these revolts manifestations of Liberty:
All of these revolutions may be classified as “liberal” and popular; in short, as essentially mass movements in behalf of libertarian objectives and in opposition to the tyranny, high taxes, monopolies, and restrictions imposed by the various governments. … Through subsidies, taxes, privileges, monopolies, land grants, etc., the royal or proprietary governor and his Council formed an allied oligarchy, against which the people and their representatives in the lower house rebelled. … But when these colonies rebelled, they did so not against England per se, but against the oppressions of the state, dominated by the English government.11
These rebellions mainly failed because their leaders too often succumbed to Power and became tyrannical, and as a result the English crown could successfully dismantle them and prop up the existing government institutions.
Volume II—“Salutary Neglect”: The American Colonies in the First Half of the Eighteenth Century carries the narrative through the middle of the eighteenth century and describes the continuing libertarian progression of the colonies. Here Rothbard engages in a sectional analysis of the colonies and how they each individually and uniquely progressed. There are, however, several important common themes that bear emphasizing. The first is the enormous religious liberalization that emerged as a new rationalist Enlightenment fought back against the dominant Calvinist tradition. The Enlightenment’s emphasis on man’s reason and ability to discover natural law and the inner workings of the world around him led to a desire to obtain greater freedom and improve one’s condition. Second, libertarian ideology spread and prospered in the colonies, with the formal theories of John Locke presented to popular audiences through the Englishmen John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon’s Cato’s Letters. It was through these writers that the bulk of the colonists learned of natural rights, the social contract, state tyranny, and the battle between Liberty and Power. Third, the political system of the colonies developed into a constant battle between the royally appointed governor and Council (the upper house) on one side and the democratically elected Assembly (the lower house) on the other. This friction made the colonists suspicious of entrenched oligarchy and inclined toward democracy and greater political representation. Thus, on the contemporary political spectrum, while the Right represented conservative oligarchs who wished to maintain the traditions of mercantilism and feudalism, the Left represented the radical forces who desired greater freedom and independence from state depredations.
In addition, while Great Britain—formed out of the 1707 union between England and Scotland—was beginning to establish herself as a European superpower and enjoyed stable government at home, she still did not adequately enforce the Navigation Acts in the growing colonies. This was due to the conscious policy of “Salutary Neglect” practiced by the liberal Whig leaders, the Prime Minister Robert Walpole and the Secretary of State for the Southern Department the Duke of Newcastle (Thomas Pelham). Against a recalcitrant and easily corruptible Whig Party, Walpole and Newcastle realized that the best way for the colonies to grow and prosper (which in turn would benefit Great Britain) was to practice a hands-off approach and let the colonies spontaneously develop. This extremely beneficial policy ended, however, with the French and Indian War (1754–1763). “New France,” in the present-day Midwest and Canada, was always (and still is, by many historians) portrayed as an aggressive power that could not peacefully coexist with the English colonies. In reality, with its far greater population and alliances with the hostile Iroquois, the English were the true aggressors and imperialists. When Walpole died in the early 1740s and Newcastle’s power gradually eroded, the aggressive War Party in England and their colonial agents were able to force a costly war and impose conscription and the quartering of soldiers on a reluctant and resistant public. By the end of the war Great Britain was the undisputed superpower in both North America and Europe and was all too eager to foist upon their hapless colonial subjects the previously unenforced Navigation Acts along with new taxes.
Volume III—Advance to Revolution, 1760–1775 furthers the study through the tumultuous years after the French and Indian War. Great Britain, unchallenged in its hegemony and covetous of funds to maintain its imperial dominion and “protect” its ungrateful colonists, could finally enact its “Grand Design.” With the liberal Whigs out of power and the warmongering Tories in control, Great Britain, supported by the new King George III, would station its troops in the colonies during peacetime, enforce the Navigation Acts, restrict western settlement to stunt growth, and institute new Parliamentary taxation. While many historians view Great Britain’s demands as reasonable tributes to pay for the eradication of the French “menace,” Rothbard dismisses such arguments and recognizes the Grand Design for what it was: a statist attempt to suffocate and control the increasingly liberty-minded and independent colonies. Great Britain proceeded in rapid fashion: the Proclamation Line of 1763 restricted western settlement, the 1764 American Revenue Act enacted taxes on sugar and increased customs enforcement, and the 1765 Stamp Act raised new taxes on paper products. The Stamp Act was especially hated and produced a storm of protest. While Rothbard cheered mass movements in support of Liberty, he never lost sight of the importance of radical intellectuals to teach and motivate the people in a revolution:
Ultimately, revolutions are mass phenomena, and cannot succeed without the support—indeed the active and enthusiastic support—of the great majority of the population. … Otherwise it will not even make a respectable showing, much less take and keep the reins of government. But the masses will not move, will not erupt, if they lack aggressive leaders to articulate their grievances and to point the path for them to follow. The leaders supply the necessary theoretical justification and analysis of the revolution’s short- and long-term goals. Unaided by leaders, the masses tend to accept each act of tyranny, not out of willing agreement, but from failure to realize that successful opposition can be mounted against the status quo. The articulation by the leaders is the final necessary spark that ignites the tinderbox of revolution.12
Who were these libertarian leaders who rose to the cause in early 1765 upon hearing the news of the Stamp Act? They included Patrick Henry and Samuel Adams, who respectively wrote the Virginia Resolves and Massachusetts Resolves. Sam Adams also established a resistance group known as the Loyal Nine, which soon expanded into the colony-wide Sons of Liberty. A Stamp Act Congress was called for late 1765 to unify resistance, and colonists across North America participated in mass civil disobedience by not recognizing the taxes. Great Britain, realizing that open rebellion was imminent, quickly repealed the measure in 1766.
While this seemingly resolved the crisis, problems still continued, particularly in Massachusetts after the passage of the tax-increasing Townshend Acts in 1767. British troops soon occupied Boston and colonial assemblies were dissolved. The colonies responded to this increasing coercion with mass nonimportation protests that severely hurt British commerce. The result was that the Townshend Acts were partially repealed in 1770. But despite the uneasy lull, matters reached a fever pitch with the Tea Act of 1773 that extended the British East India Company’s tea monopoly to American shores. Colonists were fearful that this would soon extend to other imported goods, and they responded accordingly with the famous Boston Tea Party of December 1773. Great Britain responded with the Coercive, or “Intolerable” Acts of 1774, which provoked the assembly of the First Continental Congress in late 1774. Here the radicals, led by Massachusetts’ Sam and John Adams and Virginia’s Patrick Henry and Richard Henry Lee, battled the conservatives and decided upon a colony-wide boycott of all British products. In the spring of 1775, the British responded by trying to arrest Massachusetts radicals John Hancock and Sam Adams, who were currently near military supplies in Concord. Paul Revere traveled to nearby Lexington to warn of the impending British, and colonial minutemen confronted the approaching British troops. The showdown led to the famous “Shot Heard Round the World,” and the American Revolution began.
Volume IV—The Revolutionary War, 1775–1784 brought the original series to a climax with the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and the founding of the United States of America. In this volume, Rothbard engages in a military, economic, and political history of the nation’s most important conflict. It was with managing the war that the forces of Liberty faced their most difficult challenge, since war is naturally a coercive event that leads to death and destruction. A problem immediately presented itself: how to conduct the war effort? The solution to this question would prove momentous and led to the emergence of the U.S. Constitution more than a decade later. In contrast to contemporary wisdom, Rothbard utilized the insights of new historians who showed that the Patriots’ greatest military strength lay in their guerrilla warfare tactics (ambushing armies, sneaking behind enemy lines, disrupting supply chains, etc.) and he argued that the only libertarian method of fighting a war is through such guerrilla warfare. This is because it is relatively inexpensive since there is no standing army, soldiers are better motivated because they are close to home, and there is far less need for a stifling and oppressive military bureaucracy. On the other hand, the traditional way of fighting a war, with professionally conscripted and trained armies that are sent across a territory to fight other standing armies in costly and often pointless pitched battles, requires extensive government intervention to plan, coordinate, and finance the war machine.
The Second Continental Congress, which met in mid-1775, faced the two options and chose the conventional and conservative military commander George Washington of Virginia over the guerrilla strategist and liberal military commander Charles Lee of Great Britain. Rothbard, much like he did earlier with Benjamin Franklin in Volume II, criticized Washington’s importance and also his capabilities as a military leader and argued that the Patriots’ military successes were due to their idiosyncratic guerrilla warfare strategies and commanders. To make matters worse, Rothbard also realized that the decision to fight the war conventionally led to enormous government intervention in the economy through paper-money inflation, debt financing, price controls, and confiscation of goods (it would also require the foreign aid of France and Spain, who were still smarting over their earlier defeats to Great Britain).
Despite this, the emergence of the conflict pushed the Patriots to a highly radical and libertarian goal: secession and independence from Great Britain. During the war new highly liberal and democratic governments were formed to replace the old colonial systems, and liberals on the Left fought with conservatives on the Right over a problem that would plague the new nation in its infancy: the problem of “home rule.” Whereas many colonists wanted to reduce British mercantilism, they were fine with domestic mercantilism so long as it was controlled by Americans, and many even opposed independence so long as Americans had representation in Parliament. It was due to the radical Thomas Paine and his explosive pamphlet Common Sense (1776) that many colonists were persuaded to abandon the conservative cause and break off their former relations with Great Britain. In July 1776 many of the esteemed “Founding Fathers” signed the most libertarian document of the nation: the Declaration of Independence. Drafted by the radical Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration was grounded in a fiery Lockean, natural-rights philosophy and proclaimed American independence. But shortly thereafter, conservatives drafted the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, which would ultimately be unnecessary to win the war and whose long-term effects would be highly conservative:
The myth abounded that formal confederation was necessary to win the war, although the war would be virtually won by the time confederation was finally achieved. The war was fought and won by the states informally but effectively united in a Continental Congress; fundamental decisions, such as independence, had to be ratified by every state. There was no particular need for the formal trappings and permanent investing of a centralized government, even for victory in war. Ironically, the radicals were reluctantly pulled into an arrangement which they believed would wither away at the end of the war, and thereby helped to forge an instrument which would be riveted upon the people only in time of peace, an instrument that proved to be a halfway house to that archenemy of the radical cause, the Constitution of the United States.13
Finished in late 1777, the Articles were sent to the states and only ratified unanimously in 1781. Its centralizing provisions included the prohibition of state armies, requirements that states supply Congress revenues in proportion to land values (though it could only request funds), and provisions that made Congress the final court of appeal with the sole power to establish post offices and appoint high-ranking military officials. The Articles also assumed all of Congress’ old debts and paper money. Important benefits, however, were that it established a unicameral legislature whose representatives were annually elected by state legislatures on a rotating basis, and that unanimity was needed to enact the Articles and to make amendments (most other policy matters required the approval of nine states).
After conservatives in New York and Pennsylvania were thrown out of power during the war, they switched to supporting a strong national government. These conservatives wanted to enact a national tariff to pay off the war debt and a central bank to better reap the personal benefits of an expanding money supply. Conservatives took over the state governments of Massachusetts and Virginia and proceeded to enact their nationalist desires. In 1781, the Continental Congress created numerous executive departments, the most important being the Department of Finance headed by Robert Morris of Pennsylvania. Aided by his allies Gouverneur Morris (no relation) of Pennsylvania and Alexander Hamilton of New York, Morris quickly proceeded to institute the nationalist dream: the Bank of North America, plans to assume state debts, and a federal impost to finance the new government. By this time most of the radicals (such as the Adamses and Thomas Paine) had shifted rightward and were in no position to stop the new leviathan. It was only with the heroic resistance of Rhode Island that the impost plan was defeated and Morris and his allies consequently lost their influence.
Although the Revolution was enormously costly and resulted in the near destruction of the economy (through hyperinflation, military confiscation of goods, British pillaging of infrastructure and supplies, and the flight of British loyalists), the war was worth it since it led to the achievement of highly libertarian goals of inestimable value. Rothbard explains that the American Revolution was radical and led to the restriction of slavery in many areas, the end of feudalism, the emergence of religious freedom, democratic constitutions with increased suffrage, and revolutions in European nations. It was only in America, however, with its relatively limited feudalism and adherence to British liberalism that the revolutionaries succeeded in implementing a libertarian program.
Volume V—The New Republic, 1784–1791 takes the Conceived in Liberty series to its climactic conclusion: the triumph of Power in the adoption of the U.S. Constitution. Rothbard picks up right where the fourth volume ended, in 1784, and it is in this book that his radical analysis contrasts the most with conventional historians of the era. For many, including libertarians, the U.S. Constitution is a holy document that deserves to be respected and revered. Whenever any political party is against the actions of its opponents, they wear the mantle of a noted “constitutionalist” (only to conveniently forget constitutionalism when they are in control). Every student in school learns its fundamental and inviolable importance, and historians and legal scholars wax eloquently about its wisdom and how it was essential and saved the nation from the brink of total and utter destruction. They learn that it was only with “The Wise Men,” or the Founding Fathers, that the country managed to rise above the chaos of the decentralized and limited Articles of Confederation and institute a far stronger central government that could properly control the states and its subjects. Rothbard shares none of these scruples and no cherished myths are left unturned.
“Part I—The Economic Legacy of the American Revolution” explains how many of the new nation’s difficulties were not caused by too little, but rather by too much government during the 1780s. Trading patterns were altered because of changes in the American economy and retaliatory legislation by other countries. In the 1780s trade disruptions and bank credit expansion led to a depression that hit an already weakened and war-ravaged economy. Unfortunately, the states and the Confederation Congress did not repudiate their debt, but instead had an almost irrational desire to service it. This was despite the fact that the debt passed out of the original hands of soldiers and farmers and into mostly wealthy northern speculators who bought it at severely depreciated prices. Repudiation would have removed the need for most taxes, including a federal tax, and would have permanently weakened the states and federal government. States tried to partially fund the debt by raising taxes and printing money, both of which caused problems of their own and delayed economic recovery. Attempts by both the state and federal governments to impose tariffs and navigation laws failed due to interstate competition and the ironclad unanimity requirement of the Articles.
“Part II—The Western Lands and Foreign Policy” goes through America’s relationship with its neighbors. Unlike many historians, Rothbard sees no fundamental and urgent need to drive the British out of their forts in the Northwest and the Spanish from the Southwest Mississippi River, and even supports secession of the western territories and a fracturing of the Confederation. For the nationalists— proponents of big government who wanted a unified empire, a strong standing army, and federal taxation and regulation—this was simply too much.
“Part III—The Nationalists Triumph: The Constitutional Convention” describes the conspiratorial drive toward the bloodless coup d’état. Capitalizing on the 1786–1787 tax revolt in Massachusetts known as Shays’ Rebellion, largely through the impetus of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton were the nationalists able to secure a convention in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 for the sole and express purpose of revising the Articles of Confederation. By this time since the libertarian Left was so conservatized, the radical leaders who remained declined to attend, and the famous Constitutional Convention was able to scrap the Articles and devise a new system of government.
In “Part IV—The Nationalists Triumph: The Constitution,” Rothbard shows his skill as a constitutional scholar and breaks down the fateful arguments made at the convention, which was dominated by conservatives who largely quibbled over details but agreed on the basic goal. Although there was some notable resistance, particularly by Luther Martin of Maryland, the nationalists succeeded in establishing a strong central government with the power to tax and regulate, maintain a standing army, and weaken the states. Far from creating a limited government with “enumerated” powers, Rothbard shows that the Constitution was designed to be broad and was filled with enough loopholes to not actually be restrictive.
The narrative escalates with “Part V—The Nationalists Triumph: The Constitution Ratified,” where Rothbard goes through a fascinating and informative state-by-state analysis of the ratification of the Constitution. For many political theorists, States originate through a “social contract” where the people unanimously agree to restrict their liberties and place some power in a coercive government. For Rothbard, States historically originate through conquest and were imposed on a recalcitrant public, who only grudgingly acquiesced to the new dispensation after years of propaganda and patriotism. Rothbard shows that although the U.S. Constitution did not emerge through a bloody war, it was still coercively imposed on the majority of the public. The nationalists, who by now cleverly called themselves Federalists, allowed no compromise and said the Constitution would have to be accepted as it stood. They also castigated their opponents as Antifederalists, who were the true radical liberals and torchbearers of the American Revolution and supporters of real decentralized federalism. The Federalists managed to win the majority of delegates in each state convention through newspaper propaganda, bribery, malapportionment of delegates, threats of secession, hostile retaliatory trade legislation on resistant states, and the broken promise of restrictive amendments. Patrick Henry led a valiant stand against the Constitution in Virginia, and in New York the Clintonians, led by Governor George Clinton, proved to be formidable opponents. But one by one the bulk of the Antifederalists in each state cracked under the pressure until only little Rhode Island was left, who begrudgingly joined the new Union in 1790 when part of the state seceded and the U.S. government threatened a draconian trade act against it.
“Part VI—The Nationalists Triumph: The Constitution’s Legacy” brings the epic series to a close. The Federalists had managed to secure the adoption of the Constitution only with the promise of amendments and even calls for a second constitutional convention, and the shrewd James Madison realized that this would inevitably lead to the destruction of the nascent national government. He therefore decided to nip the movement in the bud. As a congressman he pushed for a bill of rights which included only lukewarm protections of individual liberty and were not actually the restrictive amendments Federalists promised. It is no coincidence that Antifederalists realized that they had been tricked and the promised amendments were a sham. For Rothbard, unlike the American Revolution, which was a radical event on the side of Liberty, the adoption of the U.S. Constitution was a conservative event on the side of Power. The demoralized and broken Antifederalists scattered and became strict constitutionalists who hoped to destroy the Constitution from within. They and their followers were absorbed largely by the Jeffersonian Democrat-Republicans of the early nineteenth century and the Jacksonian Democrats of the mid-nineteenth century. In some sense, the late-nineteenth-century Bourbon Democrats of the Northeast, who Rothbard describes so expertly in The Progressive Era, could also claim a lineage to the Antifederalists.
3. Conclusion
The 2019 publication of the fifth volume marks the forty-year anniversary of the fourth volume. Although Murray Rothbard and many fans of the original series are no longer alive to see its release, it will hopefully encourage new and younger readers to start the series and become well versed in early American history. Rothbard’s writings are timeless, and this book, so near to the point of being lost forever, is no exception. Volume V—The New Republic, 1784–1791 is Rothbard, the master of political economy, at his finest: insightful, forceful, engaging, and enjoyable to read. Anyone who is interested in understanding the U.S. Constitution and how the modern federal government is able to assume such broad powers must read this book.
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Rothbard typed out only a small fraction of the manuscript and left the rest of it handwritten in rough-draft form. His cursive, scrawling longhand almost reminds one of the Founding Fathers and is very hard, if not impossible, for most people to read. I am indebted to Barbara Pickard, Archivist of the Mises Institute, and Judy Thommesen, Managing Editor of the Mises Institute, for helping me in the initial stages of this project. Were it not for their encouragement and assistance, I would have given up long ago. As editor, I have, albeit imperfectly, done my best to read the handwritten pages, edit the entire manuscript, and track down and cite all of the material.
To keep its format similar to the original Conceived in Liberty series, I added the opening quotes to the book, divided it into parts, and added sectional titles. I have not written a bibliographical essay but instead continued to footnote citations Rothbard had included in the manuscript, and provided a simple bibliography of all the material cited. I have also added select [Editor’s remarks], my additions to existing footnotes, and [Editor’s footnote], my entirely new footnotes.
I would like to thank the Mises Institute, and Academic Vice-President Joseph Salerno in particular, for offering me the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to work on this project. I would also like to thank Chris Calton and Joseph Salerno for reading the manuscript and providing helpful comments, and Judy Thommesen for finalizing the book and correcting typographical errors. All errors are entirely my own. Most importantly of all, I am grateful to Murray Rothbard for writing such an incredible book, for never giving up or getting discouraged, and for inspiring libertarians around the world.
Patrick
Newman
Tampa, Florida
March 2019
- 1. Murray Rothbard, Man, Economy, and State: A Treatise on Economic Principles, 2 vols. (Princeton, NJ: D. Van Nostrand, 1962, 1962) and Power and Market: Government and the Economy (Menlo Park, CA: Institute for Humane Studies, 1970); Conceived in Liberty, 4 vols. (New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House Publishers, 1975, 1975, 1976, 1979); The Ethics of Liberty (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1982); An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 2 vols. (Brookfield, VT: Edward Elgar, 1995, 1995).
- 2. Rothbard’s statement was “What! Another American history book? The reader may be pardoned for wondering about the point of another addition to the seemingly inexhaustible flow of books and texts on American history.” Murray Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 4 vols. (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2011), p. xv; vols. 1 and 2, p. 9; vols. 3 and 4, p. 11. The original Conceived in Liberty volumes were published in individual editions. Page numbers to the earlier individual editions will follow page numbers to the 2011 all-in-one edition.
- 3. Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, ed. Patrick Newman (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2017).
- 4. Motivations are also neglected
and underappreciated in economic history to the extent that they are
derived from the empirical outcomes of an action or policy, which in the
modern era is almost always a statistical and heavily quantitative
approach. This procedure of deriving motivations from results assumes that
people never err and that the outcome is always the intended result.
Historical analysis needs appropriate psychologizing from relevant private
remarks, personal relationships, public speeches, and so on in order to
discover why individuals acted the way they did.
For more on the thymological approach and Rothbard’s application of it, see Patrick Newman, “Introduction,” in Murray Rothbard, The Progressive Era, ed. Patrick Newman (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2017), pp. 19–24. In addition, see Joseph Salerno, “Introduction,” in Murray Rothbard, A History of Money and Banking in the United States: The Colonial Era to World War II, ed. Joseph Salerno (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2005), pp. 7–43. These works discuss other aspects of Rothbard’s historical method that space constraints preclude from discussing here, such as Power Elite analysis, the Iron Law of Oligarchy, and the Alliance of Throne and Altar. - 5. When discussing history, Mises mainly wrote on the methodological approach, particularly in his Theory and History: An Interpretation of Social and Economic Evolution (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957). Rothbard paid his debts to Mises and considered him one of his three major influences as a historian. The others were the libertarian political philosopher Albert Jay Nock and the English historian Lord Acton (John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton). Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, p. xviii; vols. 1 and 2, p. 11; vols. 3 and 4, p. 13.
- 6. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, pp. xv, 502; vol. 1, pp. 9, 512.
- 7. Rothbard was especially influenced by Nock’s dichotomy of social (voluntary) power versus state (coercive) power, and Lord Acton’s famous dictum that “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Ibid., pp. xvi, xviii; vols. 1 and 2, pp. 10–11; vols. 3 and 4, pp. 12–13.
- 8. Murray Rothbard, “Transcript: How Murray Rothbard Became a Libertarian,” Mises.org (April 2014).
- 9. This is certainly not to discourage reading the original four volumes but only to note that with this introduction it is not a requirement in order to understand volume five.
- 10. The Glorious Revolution led to the establishment of the English Bill of Rights in 1689, which stated that the King could not suspend laws, Parliament had supreme taxing and martial powers, and subjects could not be unlawfully arrested and detained. In the same year John Locke published his libertarian politico-philosophy tract grounded in natural rights called Two Treatises of Government.
- 11. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, p. 500; vol. 1, p. 510.
- 12. Ibid., p. 861; vol. 3, p. 97.
- 13. Ibid., p. 1357; vol. 4, p. 243.
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