The American Revolution, the Constitution and Shays Rebellion: Historically, there has always been tension between agrarian and mercantile interests in the U.S. Over time, the business, banking, and corporate machines prevailed over the agrarians. For example, the Tyson Corporation which controls poultry and pork production in the US has replaced independent farmers in producing and marketing poultry and pork. Many farmers are little more than tenants under Tyson contracts.
In order to understand our history, it's useful to review the time of the American Revolution and the conflict between the cash-based mercantile economy and the barter-based, inland, agrarian economy. Some historians see this as a clash between the values of Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton.
Shays Rebellion: Due to mismanagement, the mercantile (business) class had rung up huge post-revolutionary war debt owned the British. They were holding an excess of imported goods they couldn't sell. What occurred is that they called in the debt owed them by the smaller rural merchants, who were then forced to require cash payments from farmers rather than taking bartered goods or services. Many small farmers in western Massachusetts were forced to sell their land, often at less than one-third of fair market value. Loss of their property reduced many farmers to poverty. It also meant they might lose their right to vote since suffrage was often tied to property ownership.
Calling themselves "Regulators," men from all over western and central Massachusetts began to agitate for change to a more democratic system. Initial disturbances were mostly peaceful and centered primarily on freeing jailed farmers from debtors' prisons. Daniel Shays met other farmers at Conkey's Tavern in Pelham, Massachusetts, where he vented his anger calling on the farmers to rebel. Eventually, the farmers revolted as they were losing their farms and way of life. Shays, a veteran of the American Revolutionary War, led the charge in what was the last great stand of the agrarian class in the country.
In response, the mercantile class crushed the rebellion with their own armies. Shays and his followers were defeated on February 3, 1787. He and many of the leaders of the rebellion escaped across the border to Vermont where they were sheltered by prominent Vermonters such as Ethan Allen. Samuel Adams, once a great advocate of the American Revolution, called for death for the farmers.
The rebellion was closely watched by the nation's leaders. George Washington came out of retirement, seeing a need for a stronger central government. The lack of a central government response to the uprising energized calls to re-evaluate the Articles of Confederation, giving strong support for the Constitutional Congress, begun in May 1787. Shays Rebellion is considered to be a turning point in American history, as it sparked the drive for a constitution. This document places the army, commerce, the money supply, and the judicial system in the hands of the federal government. This marked the beginning of the end for the barter-based, agrarian economy.
Source: wikipedia.org.
Trade as Plunder
The tension between farmers and mercantile interests began long before Shays Rebellion in 1787. At the time leading up to the American Revolution, England plundered her colonies. The king's corporation did not permit the profitable enterprise of farming or other enterprises of farming in the colonies.
In 1700, the English Parliament decreed that no wool, yarn, cloth or manufactured goods should come from America. In America farmers were free to sell their products, unlike Europe's peasants who were exploited. Soon the same phenomena of exploitation happened in the American south with the slave trade and cotton production.
During this period, great wealth passed into the hands of British merchants and manufacturers. America's domestic industries, such as shoemaking and rope making were suspended. The colonial market was flooded with British goods. Prices fell. Without domestic trade, laborers went idle, and without earnings, their property declined in value.
Source:
The information on Trade as Plunder came from the writing of Charles Walters. Unforgiven - The American System Sold for Debt and War. Acres U.S.A.
The Rights of Conquest: In 1600, the exploitation of people and natural resources began with England's conquest of the world. Queen Elizabeth gave a royal charter to the East India Company that was given a monopoly over all British trade, including trade in the American colonies. The company was based in part on the philosophy of John Locke, "the rights of conquest." The East India Company founded Haileybury College for the purpose of running the empire. It trained soldiers, businessmen, and missionaries. The East India Company rose to dominate world trade by the mid-18th century.
Robert Malthus, philosopher and minister of Christian doctrine was an influential teacher who theorized that the planet would soon be overpopulated, that some life is superfluous and that farming could not feed everyone if the population continued to increase. In 1805, Malthus became Britain's first professor in political history at Haileyburg College.
Malthus was followed by Charles Darwin in the mid 19th century who argued for the "survival of the fittest." This philosophy helped to set the Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese and English on a course of conquest for every inch of land on earth. In the U.S., we called it our "Manifest Destiny" as we conquered the West.
Side Notes:
Conquest Revisited: The 2008 economic crisis in the U.S. reminds me in some ways of how the British empire subjected the colonials to economic exploitation. In this case the corporate world has taken the place of Great Britain and are exploiting its citizens as well as other peoples around the world. Most corporations pay no or very few taxes and have all kinds of tax write-offs. At the same time, the middle class continues to carry the tax burden, over-consume material goods, save little and build up credit card debt.
We have become a nation of consumers rather than producers while millions of factory workers are being laid off and corporations such as Wal-Mart are exploiting cheap foreign labor to produce their products. Add to this our continued dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East and the billions of dollars in loans from China that support our mounting annual deficits.
One author, Andrew J. Bacevich, speaks to these issues in a real way. He has written a number of books including The New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War and his recent book, The Limits of Power; The End of American Exceptionalism, with an epitaph taken from the bible; "Put thine house in order." Bacevich says we must confront our consumerism, give up our messianic dream of controlling the world and cease our efforts to coerce history in a particular direction.
Bacevich takes some of his message from the theologian, Reinhold Niebuhr, when he says that not only must we understand the limits of what a government -- and its military -- can accomplish, but we must resist the temptation to guide history towards some perceived purpose or end.
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