Cronyism

CHAPTER 2

THE AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY WAR: THE TRIUMPH OF LIBERTY

A Reactionary Military and Financial Strategy

The American Revolutionary War played an indispensable role in the eternal struggle between liberty and power. The colonists unhesitatingly fought the British Empire’s cronyism but disagreed over whether they wanted an American Empire’s cronyism. Reactionaries created a new Articles of Confederation to facilitate American privileges, but failed to secure total dominance because of the pro-liberty radicals. Their special-interest policies resulted from wartime military, financial, and bureaucratic planning.

When the second Continental Congress met in May 1775, it faced open war in Massachusetts. The appalled Joseph Galloway withdrew from political life and joined the British. John Dickinson of Philadelphia, now leading the reactionary statists, initiated an Olive Branch Petition to plead for immediate negotiation. More ominously, the delegates decided how to conduct the current hostilities: conventional instead of guerrilla warfare.

Conventional military planning referred to the ancient practice of organizing a formally trained conscript army to fight the enemy in pitched battles. This method required a war machine to furnish supplies and invasive financing measures (e.g., taxes, debt, inflation, and outright confiscation of supplies), which lead to cronyism. On the other hand, guerrilla warfare, a new and still developing strategy, advocated for informal militiamen and volunteers to ambush, harass, and disrupt enemy supply lines. This persistent snipping at the opposition complemented the colonists’ comparative advantage since they knew their own terrain, and did not formally train for pitched battles, and could not match Britain’s military resources.

However, the Continental Congress chose the first option, appointing the conventional George Washington of Virginia instead of the guerrilla strategist Charles Lee of Great Britain as commander in chief. In addition to sending out Dickinson’s Olive Branch Petition, Congress also approved an ill-fated Canadian invasion because of the expectation that its citizens would join in resistance.

While Washington adopted the Prussian method and turned the army into a standard, regimented, and hierarchical system, Congress turned to finance. Recognizing that the colonists would not tolerate taxes, the landed oligarch Gouverneur Morris of New York, a supporter of reconciliation and grandson of a former royal governor, pushed for soft-money financing. As a result, Congress started to issue Continental dollars that it promised to redeem in specie sometime in the future (a promise quickly dropped).

Shortly thereafter, Congress created a nine-man Secret Committee to negotiate foreign munitions purchases and a six-man Committee of Secret Correspondence to communicate with potential allies. One man quickly assumed the committees’ leadership: Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris (no relation to Gouverneur Morris), yet another supporter of reconciliation. Out of the Secret Committee’s $2 million in lucrative cost-plus contracts from 1775 to 1777, Morris steered $500,000 to his own company, Willing & Morris, and $300,000 to the firms of other committeemen. Unsurprisingly, the corrupt Robert Morris soon tried to consolidate power in the government he largely controlled. By this time, his cadre included Gouverneur Morris; the landed oligarchs Philip Schuyler and Robert Livingston of New York; the theoretician Colonel Alexander Hamilton of New York, aide to Washington and son-in-law of Schuyler; and the lawyer James Wilson of Pennsylvania. These men would contribute significantly to the reactionary cause.

Secession Declared

These statist machinations mirrored growing splits regarding the particular path of reform. First, the Americans debated whether to secede (the radical position championed by Patrick Henry, Richard Henry Lee, Sam Adams, and John Adams) or instead fight for British representation (the reactionary position supported by Gouverneur Morris and his associates). Second, assuming independence, Americans fought over establishing localist and limited governments (the radical view) or a corrupt empire that would enrich political, landed, military, and commercial elites (the reactionary view). A proper analysis of cronyism requires discussion of the important ideological developments that followed the Enlightenment and Cato’s Letters, particularly Thomas Jefferson’s epochal Declaration of Independence, Adam Smith’s influential Wealth of Nations, and the new state constitutions.

Colonists largely resolved the first debate with Thomas Paine’s explosive Common Sense (1776). His popular pamphlet radicalized the colonists, imbuing them with basic Enlightenment principles and how the Old Order infringed on Americans’ natural rights. Significantly, Paine’s Common Sense stole the thunder from the theoretician John Adams, who unfortunately responded by drifting into the reactionary ranks. The return of Richard Henry Lee, the arrival of the merchant Elbridge Gerry, and the crown’s punitive response to the Olive Branch Petition also bolstered Congress’ independence sentiments.

On July 2, 1776, the most libertarian event in American history occurred: Congress seceded from Great Britain. This formation of thirteen separate states was the most extreme action that could be undertaken to fight cronyism: external amputation from a coercive apparatus. Some holdouts remained: predictably, John Dickinson and Robert Morris opposed the decision and abstained from the final vote so that Pennsylvania could declare independence.

Congress tasked Thomas Jefferson with writing a philosophical justification. The Virginian brilliantly grounded it in a Lockean world-view, appealing to a public that read Cato’s Letters. Congress approved his amended Declaration of Independence on July 4. In it, Jefferson eloquently stated the colonists’ natural rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” and

whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

This spectacular enunciation of natural rights formed a mighty bulwark against cronyism: the people did not have to idly submit to their overlords but instead possessed the right to fight back.

Jefferson’s original draft was far more extreme. For example, he condemned King George III for strengthening the slave trade—the literal antithesis of the secessionists’ libertarianism. Jefferson, like many other leading Virginians, was a planter who owned slaves but deeply regretted the institution. However, at the fierce insistence of South Carolina, Georgia, and New England slave transporters, Congress removed Jefferson’s remarks from the final draft, leaving the issue of slavery unresolved.

Jefferson also started to envision an American Empire different from the reactionaries’ dream. The theoretician did not want an Empire of Power; he desired an Empire of Liberty composed of independent yeomen who would homestead the frontier. He did not care if a loose confederation of states or multiple confederations controlled the continent. Common language, constitutional systems, and market values, not force, would link the empire and resist the European Old Orders’ corruption.

Americans debated the extent of Jefferson’s Empire of Liberty and government intervention in the coming decades. Significantly, the classical liberals already started to answer this question by reading new economic works and securing constitutional reforms.

In the same year as Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, an Enlightenment thinker published an economic treatise in Great Britain that encapsulated the thrust of the seceding American colonies: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Adam Smith, like other Enlightenment economists, supported some mercantilist interventions. However, his work spearheaded the laissez-faire assault against Old Order intellectuals such as James Steuart and Jean-Baptiste Colbert. Smith described the “invisible hand”: a self-interested individual acting under a framework of private property is incentivized to “promote an end [prosperity] which was no part of his intention.” He also criticized Great Britain’s mercantilism, from the corporate charters to the Navigation Acts, arguing that “in the mercantile system, the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer.”

Smith’s free market economics was heavily influenced the radicals, particularly Jefferson, who by 1790 considered The Wealth of Nations the best work in political economy. On the other hand, the preeminent intellectual working on behalf of government power, Alexander Hamilton, sneered at Adam Smith’s reasoning and praised the “indefatigable endeavours of the great Colbert.” This dividing line over the free market continued in ensuing decades.

Ideological breakthroughs aside, radicals also battled reactionaries and replaced Old Order colonial charters with new state constitutions. The new governments informally united in the Continental Congress to coordinate the war effort. Each sovereign state had to agree to fundamental decisions, and this unanimity significantly limited Congress’ privileges. Furthermore, the new constitutions increased representation of the people, instituted rotation of office, and prohibited interventions through bills of rights. Gordon Wood rightly states that “nothing . . . in the years surrounding the Declaration of Independence engaged the interests of Americans more than the framing of these separate governments.”

The most prominent example of the new state polities was Pennsylvania, which Murray Rothbard describes as a “beacon and inspiration to libertarians” and a “triumph of the radicals.” In the fall of 1776, against the resistance of the entrenched elites, the radicals passed a constitution with a unicameral legislature, an executive consisting of a plural council, and a judiciary with seven-year terms. These reforms weakened the oligarchs and made it harder for them to pass special-interest legislation.

In Virginia, radicals Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, and the lawyer George Mason battled ultra-reactionaries, creating a constitution in June 1776. Virginians elected Henry to the governorship and the state now supported western settlers’ rights. In addition, radicals included Mason’s Declaration of Rights in the Constitution, a bill of rights in the tradition of Cato’s Letters that imposed restraints through enumerations of government power. Mason’s work inspired Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence. Unfortunately, Virginia reactionaries revised Mason’s Declaration to clarify that slaves did not possess a natural right to freedom. Furthermore, Henry and Jefferson later split over the nature of executive power—Jefferson for a weak governor, Henry for a strong—fatefully sundering their relationship.

In 1777, New York’s pro-power forces responded to independence with a highly reactionary constitution that restricted suffrage through high property requirements and contained no bill of rights. However, after a tenant uprising against feudalism’s remaining vestiges, the radical George Clinton defeated Morris affiliate Philip Schuyler in the state’s first gubernatorial race. Once in control, the radicals redistributed crony feudal landholdings, solidifying support among upstate libertarians such as Abraham Yates.

Clearly, 1776 was a high point for liberty. The colonists seceded and Jefferson articulated a libertarian justification for the decision. They were well on their way to answering the second debate with the impact of Smith’s laissez-faire treatise and new state constitutions. At the same time, though, interventionists secretly brainstormed how to undo the radicals’ accomplishments.

The Articles of Confederation

Against the libertarian secession, statists planned to consolidate the thirteen independent states, thereby facilitating crony economic and military legislation. These former supporters of the British Empire cunningly shifted tactics, now arguing that only a centralized federal government transcended local interests and represented the will of “The People.” Spearheading the charge, Dickinson released a draft for the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union in July 1776, which radicals only partially defeated.

Dickinson’s draft resembled Galloway’s proposal before the war. On top of creating a permanent executive council, the draft established Congress’ supreme national sovereignty and made its powers sweeping and vague, particularly a clause that stated Congress possessed “authority for the Defence and the Welfare of the United Colonies and every one of them.” This ambiguous “general welfare” clause, unshackled by any real enumeration of powers, made it easier for legislators to pass future special-interest legislation, because opponents could not criticize proposals as unconstitutional. Furthermore, at the behest of large land companies, the draft ordered states to cede western land claims to Congress. The only power not granted was the crucial power to tax—the states provided revenue to Congress voluntarily. However, reactionaries knew that the states would vehemently object to any taxing authority; better to push for it after ratification.

Against this rampant accretion of power, Thomas Burke of North Carolina assumed the radicals’ leadership, drastically weakening the plan. Burke recognized power’s “irresistible propensity to increase” and how inevitably it “will some time or other be abused unless men are well watched, and checked by something they cannot remove when they please.” In other words, to stop corruption, one must reform and shackle government institutions.

In addition to his assistance in removing the executive council, Burke secured a states’ rights amendment that drastically weakened the new government. It became Article Two of the completed Articles of Confederation:

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

Article Two provided a mighty bulwark for states’ rights, because it “expressly delegated” what the central enforcer could do. The people who elected the state legislatures reserved all other governance.

Classical liberals also raised fierce resistance about how the proposed constitution dealt with the western lands problem, particularly the nationalization of Virginia’s claims over the Northwest. On the surface, this seemed the right decision given Virginia’s past history with land companies. However, Virginia’s new constitution reasserted land claims on behalf of the individual settler. Consequently, Lee and Jefferson resisted nationalization. Jefferson in particular believed that speculative land companies could more easily corrupt a centralized Congress instead of the separate states. Confirming his fears, three large land companies led the nationalization drive—the Indiana Company, the Illinois Company, and the Wabash Company. Robert Morris participated in the Indiana Company, which also employed his lawyer, Wilson. The land companies fought bitterly, but ultimately Virginia and the other landed states won: the Articles did not require them to cede territorial claims.

Congress finished revising the Articles of Confederation in November 1777, sending it to the states for unanimous ratification. Only Maryland, whose oligarchs owned the Wabash Company, failed to ratify, wanting Virginia to cede its land claims like the other states, but Virginia refused. Maryland finally ratified in February 1781, believing Congress would press for Virginia’s land claims. Even after Maryland ratified, Virginia only relinquished its claims in March 1784, when the Confederation Congress voided the speculative land companies’ claims. Afterward, Congress passed Jefferson’s Ordinance of 1784, outlining the future policy of creating western states out of self-governing territories. Jefferson’s original Ordinance tried to forbid slavery in any western territories after 1800, an immense attack on the institution. However, the South resisted and slavery was fatefully not prohibited, though the Ordinance of 1787 forbade it in the Northwest. Once again, the institution lingered.

In addition to Article Two and allowing states to keep their land claims, the Articles conferred many benefits. Significantly, the state legislatures annually elected the representatives of the unicameral Confederation Congress on a revolving basis, preserving rotation in office. Each state delegation cast one vote, and fundamental policies required a supra-majority of nine states. The Articles also required unanimity of the state legislatures for ratification and amendments. Crucially, and to the statists’ chagrin, the revised Articles still did not allow Congress to tax either the states or the public. This important structural feature severely weakened Congress’ ability to increase its own power and distribute special privileges.

Despite the revisions, the Articles unfortunately encouraged consolidation, including a perpetual union and two general welfare clauses. Article Three declared that the states enter into a “league of friendship . . . [for] their mutual and general welfare,” while Article Eight allowed for “expenses that shall be incurred for the common defense or general welfare.” In addition, the Articles weakened state armies, invoked the states to supply Congress with revenues in proportion to land values, and made Congress the final court of appeal for various disputes between states. Significantly, it also assumed all of the old Continental Congress’ debts and paper money.

Therefore, the Articles of Confederation were ultimately a defeat for reform, because the new polity centralized governance and provided a springboard for future interventions. The radicals quickly learned that this future was not far off.

The Reactionary Counterrevolution

Statists quickly moved to augment the Confederation’s power through executive departments, a national taxing power to benefit debt speculators, and a central bank to channel inflation to privileged borrowers. They succeeded in creating executive departments and a central bank but failed at the eleventh hour to equip the Confederation with a taxing power.

The pro-power coalition first built up their political base in the new states. In 1780, the wealthy oligarch James Bowdoin worked with John Adams to devise a reactionary Massachusetts constitution with limited suffrage, a strong executive, and an upper house. They also managed to regain control of Pennsylvania in the 1780 elections.

Reactionaries then turned their eyes to the main prize: money. From 1775 to 1780 the Continental Congress and the states inflated to finance their military operations, causing a fifty-fold increase in the money supply. When they imposed legal tender laws, specie predictably disappeared from circulation. After the institution of controls to combat skyrocketing prices, mass shortages resulted. By early 1781, federal and state paper money started to depreciate out of existence. However, the governments did not repudiate the debt instruments used to purchase supplies. Privilege-seeking speculators bought up these securities, lobbying governments for redemption at face value. They sought windfall profits, courtesy of the taxpayer.

In early 1781, reactionaries in Congress proposed a 5 percent federal tariff to fund debts and expand operations, envisioning it as an entering wedge for higher taxes in the future. Since the tax was an amendment to the Articles, it required the approval of every state. Reactionaries quickly commenced lobbying efforts.

Around the same time, James Duane of New York, inspired by Alexander Hamilton, proposed foreign affairs, war, navy, and finance departments to create a powerful executive branch. The Confederation Congress obliged, choosing Robert Morris for the crucial Department of Finance.

With Hamilton’s backing, Morris first pushed for the corporate chartering of the confederation’s first central bank. But Congressman James Madison of Virginia, otherwise a proponent of centralization, worried about federal incorporation because such a power did not explicitly exist in the Articles. However, he voted for the motion and did not protest the bank’s constitutionality. When Morris asked Congress to grant the charter, the legislature justified it as a wartime emergency. In particular, the constitutionality derived from the general welfare clauses. However, Congress required the bank to get permission from states it wanted to operate in, a move consonant with states’ rights. Morris also secured a charter from Pennsylvania, so Congress could not completely dissolve the bank.

Modeled after the Bank of England, Morris envisioned the Bank of North America (BONA) as the Confederation’s privileged fractional reserve bank. The central bank wielded a temporary monopoly charter over commercial banking in return for loans to the government, a partial owner of the institution. The BONA inaugurated the cozy partnership between government and banking.

Astoundingly, Morris appropriated money loaned to Congress to meet the Bank’s capital requirements, an action Murray Rothbard describes as “virtual embezzlement.” He then made his business partner Thomas Willing president and in January 1782 opened up shop in Philadelphia, the confederation’s financial capital. The BONA’s first directors and shareholders were Morris’ wartime chums and Willing’s commercial relatives, such as Gouverneur Morris. Robert Morris soon loaned $1.2 million to the government, channeling these loans into lucrative war contracts for his associates.

By the fall of 1782, Morris appeared to have won. The Bank existed, and one by one the dragooned state legislatures ratified the impost. His supporters controlled the federal machinery, and the reactionary New York legislature, led by Hamilton, even issued a call for a constitutional convention to strengthen the Articles. Demoralized radicals, such as Richard Henry Lee, left Congress in 1781, and some, like John Adams, fully transitioned to the reactionary side.

At this crucial moment, though, the reactionaries failed to breach the final bulwark: the Articles’ unanimity requirement. Rhode Island had not yet ratified the Articles, and with the indomitable radical Congressman David Howell, it would not. Howell, a classical liberal professor at Brown University, staunchly contrasted with contemporary court intellectuals and refused to ally the throne with the secular altar. The Rhode Islander recognized that the power to tax “will be like Pandora’s box, once opened, never to close,” and the federal government would have free reign to tax and intervene as much as it wanted.

Without Rhode Island, the tariff could not go into effect. Recognizing this, Robert Morris and his cadre intimidated Rhode Island into ratifying, and it looked as if the little state would succumb. But suddenly, in December 1782, Virginia libertarians repealed the state’s ratification once they realized the war was virtually over. The impost was no more, halting the government’s recent expansion and stopping Morris and his crony counterrevolution.

Recognizing imminent defeat in January 1783, Morris raised the stakes and bluffed Congress, promising to resign unless it funded the debt. In March, he worked with Gouverneur Morris, Wilson, and Hamilton to enact their dream national government, this time by force. With the war winding down, disgruntled army officers wanted the Confederation Congress to officially restructure the army along European lines. The commanders desired half-pay pensions to officers for life and better pay for their wartime efforts. Rumors circulated that the army in Newburgh, New York, refused to disband, waiting for a powerful general to take charge. Naturally, the reactionaries looked to George Washington. However, unlike numerous commanders throughout history, Washington heroically refused to take part in a corrupt military putsch. The movement collapsed.

However, Congress did grant officers a five-year pension, augmenting the federal debt and incentivizing militarists to push for an even stronger central government. In particular, Washington, Hamilton, Chief Artillery Officer Henry Knox, and Quartermaster General Timothy Pickering of Massachusetts now wanted a professional peacetime standing army. Morris heartily backed their endeavors. As a first step, high-ranking military officers formed the quasi-aristocratic and hereditary Society of the Cincinnati to lobby for such a government. Thomas Jefferson, Sam Adams, and Elbridge Gerry, fierce opponents of standing armies, trenchantly denounced the Society.

The nationalist James Madison spearheaded a second request for an impost in April 1783 so Congress could pay off its debts. But despite these efforts, the statist program was all but dead, and Morris left office in disgust. By the end of 1783, the BONA only possessed its Pennsylvania charter; the federal government had paid off all loans and was no longer a partial owner.

Thus, against Morris’ drive for cronyism, pro-independence libertarians fought valiantly and stopped the entire counterrevolution dead in its tracks. Without their heroic efforts Morris would have successfully instituted the governing infrastructure—particularly the ability to tax—necessary to establish an Old Order American Empire.

The Libertarianism of the Revolution

The Treaty of Paris in 1783 ended the American Revolutionary War, recognizing the United States’ secession. The costly conflict resulted in economic destruction through collapsing confidence in the currency, military confiscation of goods, British pillaging, and fleeing loyalists. But in the end, the highly radical conflict promoted liberty. It was truly a “People’s War”: when John Adams famously stated that only one-third of Americans actively supported the Revolution, he actually referred to the French Revolution. Groundswell libertarianism led to a highly successful war that achieved long-term reforms.

First, the Revolution dismantled feudalism as states split large aristocratic landholdings, distributing them to the homesteading farmers. Future sales greased the market economy’s wheels and led to a more efficient allocation of resources. Second, the states dealt a devastating blow to the religious court intellectual by relaxing laws restricting religious worship. No longer could reactionaries enlist them to divinize statism. Third, the Revolution resulted in new state constitutions that increased suffrage and representation compared to the old colonial charters. With rotation in office and express prohibitions of interventions, higher suffrage weakened state officials’ ability to enrich themselves at taxpayer expense. Fourth, the war encouraged similar European revolutions against absolutism, mercantilism, and feudalism. While they failed because of the Old Orders’ entrenched power, the rebellions sent painful reminders to statists that their depredations faced limits.

Finally, the Revolution contributed to the restriction of feudal slavery, a major step in the reduction of cronyism. The war encouraged the eradication of government protections for the slave trade and even slavery itself in several states. Crucially, and quite ominously, slavery prohibitions largely occurred in the North (particularly in New England, with the Mid-Atlantic trailing), though every southern state except South Carolina and Georgia restricted or banned slave importations. Virginia even relaxed laws regulating manumissions and allowed owners to free ten thousand slaves. In that state, the classical liberal slave owners such as Jefferson, Henry, and Mason optimistically hoped slavery would eventually—somehow—disappear. They believed slave-trade restrictions and diffusing slave populations across the West would end the practice, an unfortunate delusion because such restrictions also strengthened slavery by encouraging domestic breeding to maintain the ranks of the enslaved.

It is very important to understand sectional differences regarding slavery. Both northerners and southerners, disapproving of blacks, feared uncontrolled emancipation and integration. But the disparity in black population sizes (3 percent in the North versus 35 percent in the South) made northerners much less fearful of emancipation, though they expressed little desire to accept any blacks from the South’s plantations. Fatefully, because of the South’s higher black population, slavery lingered on. Over time, the ignoble institution strengthened and corrupted classical liberal southerners.

The ultimate catalyst for that corruption lay in the Treaty of Paris. Great Britain dubiously granted the Northwest and the right to navigate on the Mississippi River to the United States—empty actions because the British had only sparsely settled the Northwest and Spain essentially controlled the Mississippi River. But these acquisitions proved crucial to future foreign policy, because the imperial power of controlling the West tempted the nascent American confederation. For now, however, the republic shined bright.

Only a significant political faction in favor of classical liberalism stopped the Grand Design and the reactionary counterrevolution. The libertarians destroyed the Grand Design by utilizing the extreme reform of secession, and they fought the counterrevolution—led by the very men who resisted secession—by weakening the Articles of Confederation and employing its unanimity requirement. Temporarily defeated, the statists plotted their next moves for an American Old Order.

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Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vols. 1–4 (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2019), p. 1145.

Ibid., pp. 1131–36, 1144–45.

Ibid., pp. 1137–39; Joseph R. Stromberg, “Mercenaries, Guerrillas, Militias, and the Defense of Minimal States and Free Societies,” in The Myth of National Defense, ed. Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2003), pp. 215–38.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1144–53, 1160–66.

Ibid., pp. 1157–59, 1167–69, 1175, 1338–39; Richard Sylla, “The Transition to a Monetary Union in the United States,” Financial History Review (April 2006): 77–78.

Philip Burch, Elites in American History, vol. 1 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1981), p. 61; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1161, 1223–30, 1342, 1502.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 65; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1239–64.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1289–91.

Ibid., p. 1292.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 48; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1292–94.

Glenn Tucker and David Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 20–21, 159–63, 312–13; Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 357–59, 371.

Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, vol. 1, Economic Thought Before Adam Smith (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute 2006), p. 464.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Mercantilism,” in Economic Controversies (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2011), p. 644.

Ivan Jankovic, American Counter-Revolution in Favor of Liberty (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), p. 146.

Rothbard, Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought, 1, pp. 246–49, 437–38, 463–69; Murray N. Rothbard, An Austrian Perspective of Economic Thought, vol. 2, Classical Economics (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2006), pp. 7–8.

Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), p. 128. See also Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1244, 1357.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1371, 1374.

Murray N. Rothbard, “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States,” Journal of Libertarian Studies (Summer 1995): 19–20; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1371–76.

Jon Kukla, Patrick Henry (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), pp. 257–60; Roth-bard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1268–74, 1293, 1363–64.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1387–90, 1543–47.

Jankovic, American Counter-Revolution, p. 137.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, p. 1360.

Ibid., p. 1367.

Jankovic, American Counter-Revolution, pp. 137–38; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1357–62, 1364, 1367–68.

Burch, Elites in American History, 1, p. 61; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1362–66.

William Watkins, Crossroads for Liberty (Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2016), pp. 227, 230.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1364, 1367–70, 1483–86, 1527–29; Murray N. Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, vol. 5, The New Republic, 1784–1791, ed. Patrick Newman (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2019), pp. 88–89.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1498–501.

Ibid., pp. 1487–97, 1508–11; Murray N. Rothbard, “The History of Money and Banking Before the Twentieth Century,” in A History of Money and Banking in the United States, ed. Joseph T. Salerno (Auburn, AL: Mises Institute, 2002), pp. 59–62.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1502–04, 1514–15.

Ibid., p. 1506.

Irving Brant, Madison, The Nationalist (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), pp. 125–30; Merrill Jensen, The New Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), pp. 60–63; Brion McClanahan, How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2017), pp. 40–41; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1504–07, 1523–24.

Jackson Main, The Anti-federalists (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina, 2004), p. 81.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1501, 1512, 1515–17.

Richard Kohn, Eagle and Sword (New York: The Free Press, 1975), pp. 10–11, 17–52; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1518–26.

Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, “Benefits of the American Revolution,” in The Library of Economics and Liberty (July 2018); William Marina, “The American Revolution and the Minority Myth,” Modern Age (Summer 1976): 298–309; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1114, 1181–82, 1478, 1543–42, 1553–68; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 5, pp. 49–50.

Unless otherwise noted, all percentages are rounded.

Historical Statistics of the United States, Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC, 1960), pp. 11–12; Hummel, “Benefits”; William Hyland, George Mason (Washington, DC: Regnery History, 2019), pp. 227–57; Kukla, Patrick Henry, pp. 123–26; Dumas Malone, Jefferson the Virginian (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), pp. 264–68; Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1548–52.

Rothbard, Conceived in Liberty, 1–4, pp. 1470–80.