We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2015
This article argues that, in the mid-nineteenth century, the American merchant community created local commercial organizations to propagate a vision of economic development based on republican ideals. As part of a “business revolution,” these organizations attempted to balance competition and cooperation in order to promote and direct the expansion of national markets and commercial activity throughout the country. Faced with the crisis of divergent sectional political economies and committed to the belief that businessmen needed a stronger political voice, merchant groups banded together to form the National Board of Trade, an association devoted to creating a unified commercial interest and shaping national economic policies.
1 “Art. V. Work for Boards of Trade and Chambers of Commerce,” Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review 32, no. 6 (1 June 1855): 709.
2 Ibid., 710.
3 Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (New York, 1963), 1Google Scholar. While not strictly speaking class analysis, studies of social class have shaped my understanding of the commercial community. See Katznelson, Ira, “Working-Class Formation: Constructing Cases and Comparisons,” in Working-Class Formation: Nineteenth-Century Patterns in Western Europe and the United States, ed. Katznelson, Ira and Zolberg, Aristide R. (Princeton, 1986), 1–41Google Scholar.
4 The political scientist Richard Bensel has highlighted the importance of this forty-year period (1840–1880) as key to the uneven regional economic development of the nation. See Bensel, Richard Franklin, The Political Economy of American Industrialization, 1877–1900 (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 19–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 The importance of economic change and its relation to the sectional crisis is not new, of course. The classic texts on the impact of industrial capitalism and sectionalism are Beard, Charles A. and Beard, Mary R., The Rise of American Civilization (New York, 1927)Google Scholar; Hacker, Louis M., The Triumph of American Capitalism: The Development of Forces in American History to the End of the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1940)Google Scholar; North, Douglass C., The Economic Growth of the United States, 1790–1860 (New York, 1966)Google Scholar; and Foner, Eric, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970)Google Scholar. For an updated view see Egnal, Marc, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War (New York, 2010)Google Scholar.
6 Bensel, Richard Franklin, Yankee Leviathan: The Origins of Central State Authority in America, 1859–1877 (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 11–17Google Scholar.
7 The historiographical debate over American economic development from the 1790s to 1860 is both crowded and contentious. A classic overview of the period that touches on many of the issues of economic development is Taylor, George Rogers, The Transportation Revolution, 1815–1860 (New York, 1964)Google Scholar. A more recent synthetic work that encompasses much of the same territory as Taylor is Howe, Daniel Walker, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York, 2007)Google Scholar. The most contentious rift exists between historians of the “market revolution.” Some claim that capitalists forced market relations upon an unwilling population of agriculturalists and artisans who had produced and consumed largely outside the market. For this side of the debate, see Sellers, Charles, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1814–1846 (New York, 1991)Google Scholar. Others have criticized Sellers by arguing that a market culture existed prior to the Jacksonian period; that farmers, laborers, and merchants were active participants in creating such a culture; and that the market promised independence more than subservience. For this argument, see Stokes, Melvyn and Conway, Stephen, eds., The Market Revolution in America: Social, Political, and Religious Expressions, 1800–1880 (Charlottesville, Va., 1996)Google Scholar; Howe, What Hath God Wrought; Larson, John Lauritz, The Market Revolution in America: Liberty, Ambition, and the Eclipse of the Common Good (New York, 2010)Google Scholar; and Lamoreaux, Naomi, “Rethinking the Transition to Capitalism in the Early American Northeast,” Journal of American History 90, no. 2 (Sept. 2003): 437–61CrossRefGoogle Scholar. A recent work from the perspective of an economic geographer is Meyer, David R., The Roots of American Industrialization (Baltimore, 2003)Google Scholar. For the work describing these changes as a “business revolution,” see Zakim, Michael and Kornblith, Gary J., eds., Capitalism Takes Command: The Social Transformation of Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, 2012)Google Scholar.
8 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Young American,” The Dial: A Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion, Apr. 1844, 491.
9 Considering their importance to the political and economic life of the pre–Civil War United States, merchants have not drawn nearly the attention that their later industrial brethren have. The most important works that focus on merchant life are Bailyn, Bernard, The New England Merchants in the Seventeenth Century (New York, 1955)Google Scholar; Doerflinger, Thomas, A Vigorous Spirit of Enterprise: Merchants and Economic Development in Revolutionary Philadelphia (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1986)Google Scholar; Matson, Cathy D., Merchants and Empire: Trading in Colonial New York (Baltimore, 1998)Google Scholar; Beckert, Sven, The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850–1896 (Cambridge, U.K., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Dalzell, Robert F., Enterprising Elite: The Boston Associates and the World They Made (Cambridge, Mass., 1987)Google Scholar; Haydu, Jeffrey, Citizen Employers: Business Communities and Labor in Cincinnati and San Francisco, 1870–1916 (Ithaca, N.Y., 2006)Google Scholar; and Porter, Glenn and Livesay, Harold, Merchants and Manufacturers: Studies in the Changing Structure of Nineteenth-Century Marketing (Baltimore, 1971)Google Scholar. Brian Luskey gives an excellent recent overview of nineteenth-century American clerks in “‘What Is My Prospects?’: The Contours of Mercantile Apprenticeship, Ambition, and Advancement in the Early American Economy,” Business History Review 78, no. 4 (Winter 2004): 665–702CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 Philadelphia Board of Trade, Twenty-First Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1854), 23, Philadelphia Board of Trade Annual Reports, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Penn. (Hereafter, PBTAR.)
11 Boston Board of Trade, Fifth Annual Report of the Government Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1859), 20.
12 See Pisani, Donald J., “Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy,” Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (Dec. 1987): 740–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 See Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England (Cambridge, U.K., 1994)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; for a broader overview, see Lamoreaux, Naomi R., Raff, Daniel, and Temin, Peter, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108, no. 2 (Apr. 2003): 411–14CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Hill, Hamilton Andrews, Commercial Associations: Their Uses and Opportunities (Boston, 1869), 6Google Scholar.
15 Ibid.
16 Boston Board of Trade, Fifth Annual Report, 23.
17 The efforts of southern merchants were in many ways far ahead of their northern and western counterparts. The best study of this organization is Johnson, Vicki Vaughn, The Men and the Vision of the Southern Commercial Conventions, 1845–1871 (Columbia, Mo., 1992)Google Scholar.
18 For more on the role played by “boosterism” in the West, see Cronon, William, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York, 1991)Google Scholar; Mahoney, Timothy R., River Towns in the Great West: The Structure of Provincial Urbanization in the American Midwest, 1820–1870 (Cambridge, U.K., 1990)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Adler, Jeffrey S., Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis (Cambridge, U.K., 1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Abbott, Carl, Boosters and Businessmen: Popular Economic Thought and Urban Growth in the Antebellum Middle West (Westport, Conn., 1981).Google Scholar
19 Odle, Thomas, “Entrepreneurial Cooperation on the Great Lakes: The Origin of the Methods of American Grain Marketing,” Business History Review 38, no. 4 (Winter 1964): 439–55.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20 Philadelphia Board of Trade, Second Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1836), PBTAR 1835–1864; Philadelphia Board of Trade, Fourth Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1838), 6, PBTAR 1835–1864.
21 Philadelphia Board of Trade, Tenth Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1844), 1, PBTAR 1835–1864.
22 Hill, Hamilton Andrews, “The Relations of the Business Men of the United States to the National Legislation,” Journal of Social Science, Containing the Proceedings of the American Association, no. 3 (1871): 155Google Scholar.
23 Ibid., 167.
24 “‘Commerce Is King.’—Its Condition and Its Relations,” Plough, the Loom and the Anvil 8, no. 6 (Dec. 1855): 322Google Scholar.
25 Michael Zakim, “Producing Capitalism: The Clerk at Work,” in Capitalism Takes Command, ed. Zakim and Kornblith, 226.
26 Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men; Egnal, Clash of Extremes; Majewski, John D., A House Dividing: Economic Development in Pennsylvania and Virginia before the Civil War (Cambridge, U.K., 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Majewski, John D., Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
27 Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 244.
28 Larson, Internal Improvement, 32.
29 A number of historians have, in the past fifteen years, forcefully challenged the prevailing perception that government in the U.S. during the nineteenth century played little to no role in affecting economic or social change. See especially John, Richard R., “Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787–1835,” Studies in American Political Development 11 (Fall 1997): 347–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar; John, Richard R., Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, Mass., 1995)Google Scholar; Balogh, Brian, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, U.K., 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Novak, William J., The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996)Google Scholar; and Wilson, Mark, The Business of Civil War: Military Mobilization and the State, 1861–1865 (Baltimore, 2006)Google Scholar.
30 Williams, Mentor L., “The Chicago River and Harbor Convention, 1847,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 35, no. 4 (Mar. 1949): 608CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
31 “Milwaukee vs. Chicago,” American Railway Times 9, no. 27 (2 July 1857): 1.
32 “The Chamber of Commerce at St. Louis—Where the Shoe Pinches,” Chicago Tribune, 9 June 1857.
33 Report on the Internal Commerce of the United States for the Fiscal Year 1889, 51st Congress, 1st sess., 1890, H. Ex. Doc. 6, part 2, 881–97; National Board of Trade, Proceedings of the Second Annual Meeting of the National Board of Trade (Boston, 1870), xv.
34 Boston Board of Trade, Eighth Annual Report of the Government, Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1862), 18.
35 Boston Board of Trade, Ninth Annual Report of the Government, Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1863), 16–23.
36 Proceedings of the National Ship-Canal Convention, Held at the City of Chicago, June 2 and 3, 1863 (Chicago, 1863), 3Google Scholar.
37 “General News: On a Tour. The French in Mexico. A Misrepresentation—Unconditional Loyalty. Revival of the National Canal Enlargements. An Excellent Letter from General Dix—How to Build Steam Rams,” New York Times, 9 Mar. 1863; “Meeting at the Produce Exchange,” New York Times, 16 May 1863.
38 Boston Board of Trade, Tenth Annual Report of the Government, Presented to the Board at the Annual Meeting (Boston, 1864), 25–26.
39 “The Essence of Envy,” Chicago Tribune, 25 May 1863.
40 “The Commercial and Canal Convention,” Chicago Tribune, 30 May 1863.
41 Proceedings of the National Ship-Canal Convention, 8–9.
42 Philadelphia Board of Trade, Thirty-First Annual Report of the Directors of the Philadelphia Board of Trade (Philadelphia, 1864), 9, PBTAR 1835–1864.
43 Hill, “The Relations of the Business Men of the United States to the National Legislation,” 157.
44 Detroit Commercial Convention, Proceedings of the Commercial Convention, Held in Detroit, July 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th, 1865 (Detroit, 1865), 8Google Scholar.
45 Ibid.
46 Ibid., 26.
47 Ibid., 27.
48 The characterization of the Constitution as a capitalist document is an old one, prevalent among merchants in the nineteenth century and historians in the twentieth. Probably the most famous example of this idea is the Beardian interpretation of the Constitution as the product of the economic interests of its authors. This interpretation has been modified or abandoned by many scholars, but interest in the commercial roots of the convention of 1787 remains high. For more recent studies of the commercial interpretation of the Constitutional era, see Matson, Cathy D. and Onuf, Peter, A Union of Interests: Political and Economic Thought in Revolutionary America (Lawrence, Kan., 1990)Google Scholar; Edling, Max M., A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Crowley, John E., The Privileges of Independence: Neomercantilism and the American Revolution (Baltimore, 1993)Google Scholar; McNamara, Peter, Political Economy and Statesmanship: Smith, Hamilton, and the Foundation of the Commercial Republic (DeKalb, Il., 1998)Google Scholar; and Pisani, “Promotion and Regulation.”
49 Detroit Commercial Convention, Proceedings, 42.
50 Ibid., 116–17.
51 Ibid., 196.
52 Ibid., 196–97.
53 “The Detroit Convention,” Chicago Tribune, 12 July 1865.
54 “Commercial,” New York Observer and Chronicle 43, no. 29 (20 July 1865): 230.
55 Member Meeting Minutes, 14 Dec. 1865, 468, Box 398, 1858–1868, Series VIII, 1768–1973, New York Chamber of Commerce Records, Columbia University Rare Books and Manuscripts, New York, N.Y.
56 National Commercial Convention, Proceedings of the National Commercial Convention, Held in Boston, February, 1868 (Boston, 1868), viiGoogle Scholar.
57 Ibid.
58 Ibid., 2.
59 Ibid., 121.
60 Ibid., 127–33.
61 Ibid., 83.
62 Ibid., 209.
63 “The National Board of Trade,” Merchants' Magazine and Commercial Review, 1 July 1868, 40.
64 Ibid., 41.
65 Ibid., 46.
