So we leave in mid-1787 a frustrated former commander-in-chief , now a frustrated economic developer presiding over the Constitutional Convention, which having abandoned the alternative of amending the Articles of Confederation, was in process of creating a new Republic, for a new nation. Events and Expectations have obviously morphed considerably since 1783.
Whatever else we see in the five modules introducing our candidate for America’s Father of Mainstream Economic Development we see consistence in his evolution from plantation farmer to land development and then post-war to something much larger and comprehensive: the composition, framing and hammering out in his mind what I call America’s first major economic development paradigm. More than that he forged a coalition-team who shared his view in varying degrees, with their help secured state-level public support, and then sat down and began to implement a grand vision, almost-technically hopeless, in real time with his own EDO. He walked the walk, not just talked the talk.
In the five modules we can see a human being emerge from this marble sculpture of a personality that has been passed down to us. He is flawed, much more of a visionary than most seem to credit him, a man of action that also can delegate and lead behind the scenes. We see a businessman in politics, with all that virtues and flaws. His vision is remarkable because he sees two compelling needs of the 1783 America, to protect its independence, and to grow and develop. He sees they are inherently related and then devises a strategy to bring them together in a coherent fashion employing an amazing number of sub-strategies intertwined to serve the two main goals. He concluded, quite logically, these twin goals, and the economic development paradigm stood zero chance of success in the existing Articles government framework, and directly and indirectly assembled a coalition to reform it. Events, personalities and public and private expectations took over after that. He pl;aced himself in the middle of the coalition that assumed the responsibility to devise a new political (and by implication , social and economic) system.
Washington, the man with a mission, had stumbled into a perfect storm, a witches brew of drivers of change which he proposed to harness into one overarching national defense, western settlement and nation-building. The glue that held these drivers together was economic development. The bottoms-up historical approach, by starting with states (and local) we ask different questions, see different relationship, and arrive at different “conclusions” than we do using our approach to history. Most historians, certainly most textbook on which American citizenship rely, stress political and individual rights dynamics, dynamics that are reflected in an “American” Revolution and the development of our Constitution and unique (for the time) version of a democratic republic.
The great dilemma-shame inherent to the conventional historical approach is that when economics–and economic self-interest–obviously entered into that development and debate, it was seen, to a considerable degree, as a bit of a scandal, or at least an undesirable conflict of interest. Currently a derivative of economic self-interest, slavery, which created a moral original sin on our soul, the American character and its subsequent history has entered into how we think of ourselves and has become a major feature in our approach to citizen-education. Over the years, several important approaches to American history (Charles Beard for one) have stressed the dubious contribution of economic self-interest into the Early Republic and the making of the Constitution itself. By starting with Washington’s Virginia-based effort to open up the West and make a buck out of it, we have suggested, rather strongly, that not only did economics and self-interest enter into the making of the Constitution and the formation of the Early Republic United States, it, along with other economic self-interests (not mentioned in the case study) caused it. Using the Washington case study we flirt around the idea that political freedom, individual rights, and the formation of America’s governmental system was a by-product of a movement generated primarily, never exclusively, by economic self-interest.
All this rather profound and probably controversial thought was not our original intention by any means. I wanted a history that used state and local economic development as a filter policy area to understand why American states differ and how and why they practice their own versions of economic development. My history was more a history of American Federalism or a history of American State and Local Economic Development than a new (or old) approach to understanding our nation’s history, culture and character. But here we are.
Let’s capture from Washington and the modules lessons and observations of dynamics, factors, structures, and strategies-goals that will populate the future chapters and modules of our bottoms-up state and local economic development history. Once that is in place, we will be armed to go forward with a peak, a glimmer of insight into some of the larger dynamics, factors, drivers, structures and strategies that we will turn to in Part 1 of this volume. A Simplified Big Picture of what lies ahead.
Summing Up: George Washington and Economic Development
We led off with his national defense/western settlement economic development paradigm. In 1783, even before the Peace Treaty and his subsequent retirement, as commander-in-chief he saw the clear linkage of two NATIONAL goals, defense and settlement of the trans-Appalachian West. That these goals blurred his dreams for private wealth and his past occupation as a land developer is obvious. Equally obvious he did not see these twin goals could be attained without some forged unity of both private and public. From the beginning his, for both good and bad, was a private-public partnership. Consciously, or not, he had identified with a rising English capitalist system that was creating a diversified economic base, a modern system of classes, solidified with urban centers. Science, entrepreneurship, property-contract-tiled rule of law, and independent to a considerable degree from public control.
Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was written in 1776; there is no indication that I have found, that suggests Washington ever read it. I am sure he knew about it from others. Somewhere all that entailed the acceptance of a republican-election-based democracy–as each American colony had fabricated over their historical life. I suspect he inherited and incorporated his Virginia-version of democracy reflexively, but his experience as war-time commander-in-chief seems to have enlarged him as a moral person (slavery), he also discerned (imperfectly) the inherent conflicts of public and private, the clash of classes and political cultures, and extended his state-bound experience into a national perspective. We have called the 1783 Washington, the “New George”. The new George espoused a national defense-western settlement-development of national identity paradigm achieved through economic development strategies. This contrasts radically from what his co-patriots were trying to do at the Constitutional Convention and the Federalist Papers. They were construction an American political system, a federal democratic republic’s system of government. Washington, on the other had, with his economic paradigm was forging a nation.
Some, Jefferson for example, thought Washington as simple, inarticulate, street-smart perhaps, but intellectually limited. In my opinion, and looking at what the man did, not said, I can see a man able to not only grasp, but forge a big picture with many complex moving parts–in an age of revolutionary change.He acted on his “Big Picture” vision. One could write an instruction manual by observing his sequence of decisions. Somewhere in all this he learned how to manage men, not run-of-the mill men but Founding Fathers (and Mothers, Abigail liked him) type of people; he often did this behind the scenes for he was a woeful and for all his battlefield bravery was a nervous, stumbling public speaker. Barack Obama he was not. In politics he would not lead from the front line as he often did in battle. Whatever his faults as a man, a man of action, and a big picture visionary, I think it obvious (as the reader will hopefully see in future chapters and modules) that he deserves our crowning him as America’s First Economic Developer, and the founder of American Mainstream Economic Development.
From him and these introductory modules we glean the following observations:
His National Defense-Western Settlement Economic Development Paradigm:
Washington was an entrepreneur, as surveyor and land developer before he ever was a plantation planter. He failed and then rallied back on a number of occasion; he understood networking, and was mentored by the best. He learned from his failings, begrudgingly. Washington instinctively was an entrepreneur in economics and in his approach to (probably) his first career choice as a young man: the military. He was a frontiersmen who travel into the hostile interior on a regular basis. Hands-on he learned to introduce agriculture into new lands he would combine these careers, and learn the need to work with Native Americans to somehow fabricate sufficient control over the land to secure a land title–and the value of the rule of law to protect it.
His was a world dominated by agriculture, and he learned the economic base that his strategy relied on was predominately agricultural. Instinctively, he diversified that base to include manufacturing, fishing, trade and commerce. From the latter he infused his economic strategy with the need to build export urban centers, port cities–always understanding that was the key to his success. Export, free trade, and export finance, not to forget transportation logistics were familiar to him. In the trans-Appalachian wilderness as well as the Virginia plantation heartland, he developed a successful land development portfolio, of incredible size and diversity, and wealth (paper used as collateral) real as pyramid Ponzi-like scheme. He well-understood this highly competitive, literally dangerous occupation; he was always looking over his shoulder–and usually someone was there.
He knew from the beginning of this land development phase, that end-users, those to whom he would sell the land and then proceed to develop it, needed access to the land. He also knew most would be yeoman, household farmers-at least in their startup years. Rivers, canals and roads, linked to piers in port cities (internal and coastal) were centerpieces and put into practice by 1774. Interestingly, he used without compunction, the structures of colonial British America (state-chartered corporation), land auctions, lotteries–sale of bonds and shares of stock–and the need for state/colony level partnership–thereby incorporating significant elements of the colonial past into the Early Republic future. His canal company, originally established in 1769, was revamped and given new life in 1784–our first official EDO. He lacked what we shall shortly call “institutionalization”. In particular, he operated on the fringes of the British fiscal and economic system. Except for his friend Robert Morris’ North American Bank (and one in Boston, and NYC) there were no banks as we know them today–and no currency worth mentioning. The Articles had paper legal authority, but no “feet” on the ground–and few powers of enforcement. The legal system was what it was.
The new, post-1783 George knew that the day had come that the west would be settled by hordes of immigrants and migrations into the interior. He also knew their identity as “american” was fragile, and that their needs once settled in the west would draw them into whoever controlled what they needed: access to commerce and supplies. After eight years fighting the British, and six years in alliance with France, he well understood the nature of these European powers. As a general he also knew that power won battles–and that endurance was a form of power. The trans-Appalachian west–and the seas and oceans–were the new battlefields of an independent America–and to win those battles the economy had to grow, along with the population, and the West had to be developed–that meant canals, cities, and commerce that developed a political identify infused by economic relationships that underlie any political bond. That required transportation/communication access, and the funds to install it in the wilderness, and the site-control and accommodation with Native Americans that was its precondition.
Finally, he learned, too late–perhaps he didn’t ever learn it–that innovation and technology were preconditions for the success of his strategy. Steamboats and venture capital were essential and he passed that test. But not the test of understanding innovation; there were to be no quick innovations that could survive in a developing nation. In this horde of a paragraph, the reader sees most of the moving parts, the complex interweaving of subordinate economic development strategies into a coherent whole directed to achieve his twin goals of national defense and western settlement. It is worth note, that on his death other Virginians like Jefferson and Henry Clay picked up the paradigm and took it into the new century. What he didn’t venture into, and succeeding generations would have to rather quickly was developmental transportation infrastructure financing. His was a one-off, largely Virginia-based financing scheme that ultimately worked because he could link it to his 1790’s city-building of Washington D.C. It didn’t hurt to be George Washington, a celebrity President either. The canal would be built, and it would generate profit, but steamboats weren’t, and by his death there wen’t any internal port cities of any consequence. As to free trade, protectionism, and freedom of the seas–oh well. His was a developing nation, and reality does bite.
Drivers Behind Washington’s National Defense-Western Settlement Economic Development Paradigm
Generational Change–Hidden within our Washington story are several nuggets that I think help explain him, his “maverick” approach to western land development, and his less than open view of egalitarian democracy.Not apparent in our case study thus far, generational differences played an important role in Washington’s economic development world vision, and affected the formation of a coalition that made his economic vision possible in the world of Virginia policy-making. Washington’s world view was shaped less by the Enlightenment (as were a decade younger Jefferson and Madison), than the Northern Neck Tidewater culture and economics. As an outdoors-man and a man of action not contemplation, he was guided less by philosophical abstractions/concepts than practical business affairs. His skill-set was vastly different from the younger generation that followed him. When Virginia tobacco economics drastically and negatively changed after 1750, the Virginia elite as a cohesive group were challenged. Reliance on the export tobacco plantation economy was not producing sustainable results and many plantation owners, Jefferson and Madison included, had to develop secondary income sources–and land development was a natural,
In this economic diversification Washington, their elder, was a role model and leader. Markedly less political than the younger generation, his path to independence and revolution was correspondingly more economic than political–as opposed to the generation that followed him. That younger revolutionary generation saw western settlement in more limited economic terms than Washington, a second job so to speak for themselves and for Virginia, Washington, always primarily economically (and militarily)-driven saw a new way of life opening up in the West. For him economics drove political unity, economic power not political values/ideals its foreign policy. In this division between two generations we see a future rupture. In the story of Patowmack Canal project, however, we see Washington pursuing a world vision and his allies/investors, Jefferson and Madison, symbiotically supply him their vital political skills that made Washington’s project feasible; he was in return, to deliver income to supplement their Virginia plantation export “manor” economy.
Perhaps that diminished commitment to the manor, and the more enhanced commitment to an entrepreneurial lifestyle explains why Washington on death allowed his morals to rip asunder the essential pillar of the manor: ownership of slaves. The younger, “more enlightened” (pardon the pun) generation could not break the bonds with the manor world vision, even at death. Washington, more the English capitalist than Royalist manor owner, had evolved from a different political culture, Northern Neck, than the Piedmont-raised younger generation. That Northern Neck culture shaped younger generations as well, but they followed Washington. Out of this culture would come for instance, John Marshall, the future Federalist Chief Justice who fought tooth and nail against Jefferson’s Piedmont world view. Remarkably, that post-1800 Democrat-Republican Piedmont Virginia Dynasty (Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) continued to see value in Washington’s western settlement paradigm; they saw it through Virginia’s eyes, not as a national opening of the West–they will consciously frustrate early Erie Canal development, for example, and continue to (unsuccessfully) Virginia’s trans-Appalachian river-canal-road based opening of the West–the National Road, for example, the continued funding of Washington’s declining Patowmack Canal.
Political Culture–George Washington was a Virginian–never left the state until he turned twenty. A slave-owning Tidewater tobacco plantation oligarch (political elite) that controlled Virginia colonial government/administration Washington was socialized into a political culture and his expectations were shaped by Virginia’s past political heritage. As a democracy and a balanced, diversified economic base, Virginia exhibited serious imbalanced and an overdependent on export tobacco plantation economy. Maverick economically, Washington remained a Virginian, and he served as the connecting bond with the traditional coastal and Piedmont Tidewater politicians n the years of the Early Republic. Alone in the Virginia delegation to the Continental Congress, he wore a uniform. He did not serve in the Second Continental Congress (and did not sign the Declaration of Independence)–he was in Boston commanding the Continental Army.
Virginia’s colonial policy system and political heritage fused private and public more than most of the colonial policy systems. Washington almost instinctively regarded Virginia’s colony-level government as a partner. He was an elite; he knew it and wouldn’t have it any other way. As we shall discover, the Virginia plantation elite dominated to the point of controlling their local polity and economy–similar to a English manor and that shaped their notions of local democracy. He came from a policy system and political culture nexus that was very distinctive, and it absolutely shaped how he approach implementation of his proposed economic development vision and practice. Without his experience in the Revolutionary War, he may well have evolved into Virginia’s first Robert E. Lee. Having said, that however, in very many ways Washington was also a Virginia maverick–he was blazing a trail from Virginia plantation oligarch into an interstate business entrepreneur.
Why he did so will be developed at length in our Virginia chapter. The Tidewater tobacco economy was stagnant and the Virginia oligarchy was effectively drifting into systemic bankruptcy. That crisis was apparent even in the 1750’s when Washington reached adulthood–his brother forged a path out of it that Washington followed upon his early death. What triggered Northern Neck transformation from tobacco planting to land development was the impact of 1750 tobacco economics of their grand cultural world view and lifestyle. Lord Fairfax, an outsider to the culture, espoused a more versatile and flexible response to change. He himself was more the entrepreneur than tobacco farmer, and he came to America to manage his estate not because of tobacco, but to manage his land holdings–primarily land sales to migrants in the Shenandoah Valley. This is where he sent young George to survey back in 1748-9. This is where George bought his first tract of speculative land at age eighteen. In land development profits came from an end-user (land sale or rent and improvements). If we think of George as a land assembler and real estate developer, we can see his mindset had departed from the the manor and plantations. One definitely should not assume he was typical of Virginia’s plantation elite in this regard.
As an oligarch he was willing, at some indeterminate point to, end plantation slavery–he did free his slaves on death, not common in Virginia by any means. Martha did not–either did “all men are created equal” Thomas Jefferson (and George Mason, or James Madison and Monroe–or Henry Clay). Washington was a protege of Thomas Lord Fairfax, the largest landowner in Virginia (Northern Neck)–he educated George and gave him his first surveying job. The Fairfax family insulated George–and he very much needed that because the early George was very obnoxious. In any event, George, presiding over his porch at Mount Vernon, had evolved from the Virginia tobacco oligarchy, and was leading a political and economic wing that he would take to Philadelphia and then, so to speak, to Washington D.C. The Virginia Federalist wing was his, and that wing cohesive until 1791-2 was paramount in the writing of the Constitution, the set up of the Early Republic and the core of the first Washington administration. It did not last much after 1793 and from that struggle we shall see the Jefferson-Madison Democrat Republican Tribe break off.
To summarize all this as a take away: the Tidewater Virginia oligarchy elite fragmented after 1760, and the different wings of it that emerged played a heavy role on, not only the United States, but the events and dynamics of our economic development history.
the Virginia Economic Base–Washington struggled with Mount Vernon farming–less so with Martha”s plantations. He couldn’t make a go out of tobacco, and within three or fours years of trying he switched to wheat, abandoned tobacco, and just as quickly diversified Mount Vernon’s economic base, into saw mills, grist mills, liquor, horse-raising, Potomac fishing–and land development. As indicated above, the economics of Virginia’s plantation-export tobacco agriculture were stagnant, and Virginia tobacco was no more the gazelle-celebrity industry sector as it was in the days of John Rolfe–it was a commodity in competition with other tobacco grown elsewhere, a commodity that different in quality-taste, the costs of transportation and production. This is a real life 1750’s example of something that has been called the profit-life-cycle. In a future module, I will more formally introduce the reader to that driver of economic development policy-making, but in the meantime we can sense economic growth was in question, and the quest for something that could leaven the Virginia economy was a shared concern, in varying degrees, across the colony-state’s policy-making elites.
What is not evident from our river-canal-roads, western settlement, national defense paradigm case study, is what was going on simultaneously with its implementation and execution, is that western settlement was already in motion–Kentucky and Tennessee in particular were filling up with people. Kentucky’s movement to statehood had already commenced when Washington ran his Mount Vernon Conference–two years before the Annapolis Convention. Spain now controlled the lower Mississippi–England controlled Florida. There were still occupied British forts in upper New York, and serious and bloody Indian wars wracked the Ohio and Kentucky–Georgia borderlands. A frustrated and bitter England was not cooperating in the resumption of commerce and trade (also the vital foreign direct investment), and France was in the twilight zone on the eve of its Revolution. This was the national defense vulnerability that Washington sensed as a former commander-in-chief. Bluntly, in his mind a western economic base had to be developed–and that economic base had to be tied, hand and foot, to the coastal states–or it would develop on its own, or become dependent on one or another of the European powers that controlled our borders. By using the word “settlement” which implies population migration, that Washington economic development strategy also meant economic base-building. Washington was building a regional east-of-the-Mississippi economic base, not simply Virginia’s.
I will also hint that Washington, and those who followed closely his economic inclinations, was not merely trying to diversify the Virginia economy as was Jefferson and Madison, but to turn land into a “platform” from which all sorts of different economic activities (i.e. sectors and industries) could spring forth. We are used to using agglomeration and clusters in a modern and industrial economy, but land in the agricultural economic base of 1780’s was real platform around which economic growth was made possible. In our opening story I stressed how land (ownership and development) became the bond for national identity and economic/political union. Land as a platform transcended policy areas and academic disciplines–just as today technology can be innovation through disruption–that too transcends the boundaries of the policy areas and disciplines. This, BTW, is what Jefferson instinctively sensed was going on in the Federalist agenda a decade later.
Migration– There is no escaping that Washington’s paradigm was based on population migration. Literally well over 100,000 migrants had poured into Virginia’s western counties, the Shenandoah Valley and areas adjoining today’s border areas of Kentucky, West Virginia, and Tennessee. Washington had just spent a six week trip through much of these areas, plus the western Ohio Valley as well. This is where the bulk of his non-Tidewater land portfolio lie. It was there he faced his existential crisis with land development as his profit-seeking path down to his version of the American Dream–it clashed head-on with a different version held by the Scots-Irish. The Scots-Irish were an ethnic migration machine, in constant motion generated by their lifestyle, value system and their mode of agriculture. They valued wilderness and borderlands–they are defined as refuges from Irish, Wales, Scottish and English borderland counties. Economics clashed with political culture; and culture overflowed into economics–a two-way street–and both intersected with population migration.
Political culture, population migration and development and configuration of a local and state economic base were interrelated–and to compound this melange of independent variables, each entered into the policy system as inputs on their policy-making processes. The full effects of all this, of course, do not emerge from our opening modules, but they in the modules to follow. Whether these drivers of change and development cross in similar ways all policy-making areas is beyond our scope of interest (or knowledge), but I will take considerable pains in this history to demonstrate they really do affect state and local economic development policy-making. There is one additional driver that arises from our Washington case study–Virginia and Alexandria’s competition with Philadelphia/New York City and Baltimore. The makings of a canal race to open up the West is already apparent before the United States as we know it was created. I will call this driver “competitive hierarchy” and as the history unfolds we will discover there are three levels of competitive hierarchy. Competing cities/states is one of them.
This underlying clash of tides and currents, prompted different economic development responses from different cultures. In a paragraph below, the reader will see a much larger chasm developing among cultures over their vision of what is economic development and to whom should it benefit. In 1784 Washington faced an existential crisis when he confronted the Scots-Irish who squatted on his land. Washington was more used to the Germans, who could be reasoned with because they wanted land ownership, and freedom to be Germans. Their version of the American Dream fit into Washington’s paradigm–but the Scots-Irish would have nothing to do with simply settling down and carving out a living from a family homestead. They had a different idea of freedom, and a different type of economic system in mind. They had experienced absentee owners and lenders making profits off their hide, and they wanted nothing to do with it. The land was theirs because they seized it from the Indians, paid for it with their blood and the sweat to make the improvements on that land. A land title was a piece of paper that bound them to servitude they had fled from in England. And like Washington their tempers got easily riled. That didn’t fit into the Virginian’s sense of proper local democracy. These were the settlers Washington knew would inhabit the unsettled West. He couldn’t stop them if he wanted–and once there, who knows … That westward movement segues into the last driver: population migration, the geographic diffusion of political cultures and economic bases.
Going Forward
Our opening story centers on a “new” George Washington that emerged out of the forge of his leadership in the War of Independence’s unbelievable military victory over the rising British Empire. He more than anyone at time realized how tenuous and fragile was that independence. From his unique position, he able not to discern, but actually feel the effects of the new, not fully formed American “identity”, an national identity that co-existed with previous “state’ identities, an ethnic and religious heritage and value system, and most importantly the multiple “American Dreams” around which the future of individual’s, do we dare to call them “Americans”, aspired. The dream involved “freedom”, and ‘liberty” as the textbooks claim–whatever either meant specifically to each individual somehow aggregated into a swirling public opinion, debate, and discourse of the day.
America’s national identity had not yet been fused, unless it consisted principally as a refusal to pay taxes without representation. Hopefully, it was more than that. But the Washington that emerged from the war knew, I believe, instinctively that the war was a cease fire rather than a permanent peace, and the bonds of American union were divided by sectionalism, the stain of slavery, the rise of capitalism and the consequent generation of inequality, and the desire for equality from “teeming masses” of new and recent immigrants that sought a new home, a new beginning and their own version of an American Dream. Those teeming masses were disproportionately resident in the western peripheries of each state, on the edge of a hostile wilderness frontier, ready, willing, and from their perspective able, to cross over the Appalachian Mountains and settle into their new home. While Washington was leading the Army during the War, many of them began their trans-Appalachian trek. Boonesborough Kentucky was settled in 1774, and Lexington took its name from the 1775 Massachusetts Battle of Lexington. Trans-Appalachian settlement commenced simultaneous with the first conflicts of the War of Independence. When the War ended, there was no stopping western expansion.
The War of Independence, its causes, and activities, have largely been focused around political questions and values, less economic, and even less demographic. The conflict is often traced from the large cities of Boston in particular, Philadelphia also. These were the capital cities of the American colonies, the political and economic centers of colonial America. In these urban centers were lodged, not always resident, the political elites of colonial America. Each of the thirteen colonies–and Vermont had already begun its effort to establish an independent colony (the potential 14th)–had developed its own policy system. Virginia and Massachusetts/southern New England were the oldest and most developed, but New York and Pennsylvania, to some extent South Carolina were fairly mature policy systems by the time of the Revolution. The others, Delaware, New Jersey, North Carolina were relatively recent young colonies; Georgia was a babe in the woods, and was arguably the weakest policy system in British North America.
The core colonial policy system only weakly impacted the immigrant-laden western counties of each state, and these counties were poorly integrated politically and economically–forget socially–into the coastal and Piedmont core colonial policy system. These policy systems had evolved political elites of different temperament, composition, and political heritage surprising unique, more or less, to each colony. Each colony’s economic base had evolved in a distinctive configuration and developed its own patterns. Before the Revolution there was already a “North” and a “South”–and slavery, while critical, was far from the only important difference. Each traditional colony was settled by different people over different time periods for different reasons–most of which has become obscure to us today.
But for us, as we will demonstrate the core policy system at the time of the Revolution was dominated by its own policy elites that had their own ideas, their own version of the American Dream, and their own expectations as to why we entered the War of Independence. They also had expectations as to what would, or need be, follow from the now independent Articles of Confederation that presided over/coordinated, little more than that BTW, the conduct of the War and its peace negotiations. In four short years, using Washington as an example, these elites were grossly dissatisfied, for many different reasons (even reasons that clashed with other American elites), and the Articles were quickly brushed aside and a new Constitution debated, written, and approved by the electorates of each colony, now state, creating the Early Republic United States–the subject of this volume in our history.
What we will see in the modules of Part 1, and thereafter, is these elites, drawn from the core colony-state policy system had different ideas, culture, and versions of the American Dream than those recently-arrived immigrants/migrants on their western borders. To them the American Revolution and American Independence meant different things–but the elites, as is their wont, usurped political power (would the reader prefer acquired?) and “interrupted” the version of Independence found on the western peripheries, and the national government in particular (the states as we shall find had to discover ways to integrate these western residents into their core state policy system (or find ways to cast them into the margins of politics). In some states the integration of these western residents into the core policy system (Pennsylvania–North Carolina) for example brought these westerners to prominent position in state policy-making; other states, such as Virginia, and even Massachusetts preserved the state core policy system as the bastion of the traditional elite. In either case, most of the westerners, headed west, formed new states, and they too went to Washington D.C. and played the national game of politics defending the interests of their states. And so it went on over the years.
Lost in this telling is the obvious: the Constitution did not create American federalism; it inherited it and incorporated it into the Constitution itself. In 1789, and after, the states remained as they were before, the dominant level of American government. One does not get this reality from our educational training–that centers on national institutions and sees policy-making through the national perspective. That, however, was not what was going on at the time–and does not reflect they why of policy-making and the sequence of historical events. It also obscures the state agendas that were incorporated into national policy. The 1789 Constitution decentralized American policy-making, to states principally, and to private elites as had been the tradition in colonial America, and English democracy up to that time.
In 1789, we had distinct regions/sectionalism that embraced values, and economic base, and cultures, both individual and political. The thirteen colonies were in 1783 sovereign states, states that competed among themselves to attain their own goals, objectives and advance their own economic interests. The national government, certainly in the Early Republic was the battlefield where those differences were reconciled. These were the years when the first paradigms of American economic development evolved, from the primeval soup that had been the Articles of Confederation. We have seen now, through Washington’s eyes, how Virginia took the lead in adopting and implementing the first major American economic development paradigm. But why was it Virginia, not Massachusetts or even Pennsylvania? That is the story we shall tell in Part 1 that follows after this module.