Ronald Formisano, a historian whose work ranges from the early political history of Massachusetts to the modern battle over court-ordered busing, is now seeking to revive scholarly appreciation for authentic populist social movements. In his For the People, the first of a multivolume study of populism through the nineteenth century, Formisano argues that these movements have been one of the central elements, “if not the dominant theme,” of American political culture. Populist movements, according to Formisano, have drawn on “attitudes and predispositions embedded deep in American political culture and reaching back at least to the nation’s founding.”

With his usual style and vigor, Formisano’s goal is to move beyond the “psychologizing of populist movements,” which stems from the “tendency to minimize the actual grievances of protesters, the lack of attention to the varied composition of movements…as well a failure to probe deeply enough into the social and political reality confronting movement leaders and participants.”

Drawing on extensive research and a thorough examination of modern scholarship—the footnotes alone will serve as an invaluable reference source—Formisano’s study covers major extra-governmental and third-party revolts, from the Revolutionary era to the 1850s: beginning with the Carolina Regulators of the 1760s, Shay’s Rebellion in 1786, the Democratic-Republican Societies of the early 1790s, and the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794, Formisano then moves to the rise of Anti-Masonry in the 1820s and 1830s, the violent political turmoil in New York and Rhode Island in the 1840s, and finally the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 1850s. The first three chapters focus on the Revolution and its aftermath. Chapter 3, “The Taming of the Revolution,” is the best in the book. The author details the conflict in the 1790s between those who continued to use the Revolution as a “template for popular action” and those who viewed popular sovereignty merely as a rhetorical device. The touchstone of conservative ideas about sovereignty in the 1790s was legitimacy, defined, as President George Washington maintained in his Farewell Address (1796), as obedience to extant laws. For the opposition Democratic Republicans, this perspective left no space for legitimate and spontaneous citizen action against their elected representatives.

After a chapter on the transforming effects of the market revolution and the development of new social movements after the Panic of 1819, Formisano skillfully chronicles the history of the Anti-Masons and their foray into party politics. Formisano argues that the Anti-Masons were not opposed to the changes brought on by the market revolution. The movement itself developed from outrage at the 1826 cover-up of the kidnapping and murder of newspaper editor William Morgan in western New York, an area of the rapidly industrializing Genesee County. Formisano deserves particular credit for detailing the reports of three different special counsels who were appointed by the New York state legislature to “assist the prosecutions and to satisfy mounting Anti-Masonic demands for action” in the Morgan affair. The three reports highlight the widespread obstruction of justice in western New York in the months after Morgan’s kidnapping, proving that Anti-Masonic grievances could not be reduced to simple paranoia.

Chapter 8 examines New York’s anti-rent rebellion, along with Rhode Island’s brief but turbulent “Dorr War,” a failed attempt by populist constitutional reformers to seize the state government and forcibly revise the state’s antiquated constitution. Formisano’s discussion of the 1842 Dorr Rebellion relies on extensive primary research. The rebellion, led by the former Whig Thomas Dorr, was one of the most significant political and constitutional events between the age of Jackson and the election of Abraham Lincoln. By the end of the 1840s, the president, both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the lower federal judiciary had all passed judgment on the tempest that erupted over Thomas Dorr’s “People’s Constitution.” Unlike many recent accounts of the Jacksonian period that have included a discussion of the Dorr Rebellion, Formisano correctly notes that the constitution that was finally adopted in the wake of the rebellion was far from liberal because it retained property qualifications for naturalized citizens.

A minor criticism of Formisano’s description of the Dorr Rebellion is that it lacks a discussion of the relationship between Rhode Island Catholics and the Dorrite rebels. Boston’s Bishop Benedict Joseph Fenwick and the two priests stationed in Providence strenuously urged Catholics not to support Dorr’s rebellion. As was the case with abolitionism, since Catholics were a minority everywhere and a suspect minority at that, supporting controversial causes such as Dorrite constitutional reform and abolitionism would have only incurred the wrath of those opposed to both and fed widespread anti-Catholic sentiment.

For the People can be profitably read as a sympathetic exposition of the various ways critics of American politics and society and adherents to popular sovereignty have been a mainstay of our political culture. While covering much of the same time period as Sean Wilentz’s Bancroft Prize-winning The Rise of American Democracy, Formisano’s work, as he himself notes, takes a much different approach. Formisano is not interested in the same “rise” of democracy, a development that Wilentz sees as the foundation of pre-Civil War antislavery politics. Those who find Wilentz’s argument persuasive will undoubtedly take issue with Formisano’s decision not to include white or black abolitionists as a major part of his story of populist movements. According to Formisano, the antislavery movement did not contain any “grassroots” leadership and therefore cannot be classified as a “populist movement.” Several historians, however, have presented convincing evidence to the contrary. Where Formisano sees the abolitionist movement as an outgrowth in many ways of the Anti-Masonic movement, other historians have detailed a vibrant grassroots abolitionism concurrent with Anti-Masonry’s development.

These caveats aside, For the People will be essential reading for students of early American politics. The book greatly expands our understanding of and appreciation for the complex and paradoxical nature of American populist movements. At the same time, it captures the many contradictions of populist movements, especially their concurrent liberal and illiberal tendencies, as well as their reactionary and progressive postures. As always, Formisano’s scholarship is a force to be reckoned with. His research will have important implications for current scholarly debates about the meaning and legacy of popular sovereignty in the decades after the Revolution.

Further Reading

Legal historian Christian Fritz’s American Sovereigns: The People and American Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (New York, 2007) presents a fascinating revisionist account of the doctrine of popular sovereignty. For a concise history of the 1790s see James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn., 1993). The scholarship of Patrick T. Conley remains essential for those interested in the Dorr Rebellion. See in particular the final chapters of Democracy in Decline: Rhode Island’s Constitutional Development, 1776-1841 (Providence, R.I., 1977). For a recent account that discusses the role of Catholics in the Dorr Rebellion see Scott Molloy’s Irish Titan, Irish Toiler: Nineteenth-Century New England Labor (Lebanon, N.H., 2008). Richard Newman’s The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, 2002) provides evidence for grassroots abolitionism.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.2 (January, 2009).

Erik J. Chaput is a Ph.D. candidate in early American history at Syracuse University. His dissertation is entitled, “Contested Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Rhode Island: 1842-1888.”

The electoral college can fairly be said to be the most curious and hotly debated institution of government created by the Constitution of 1787. Yes, equal representation in the Senate, in which tiny Rhode Island or sparsely populated Wyoming each have the same number of senators as California and Texas, has its detractors. Many question the power of the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of laws. But no other element of American government elicits such bitter denunciations or fervent defenses as the electoral college. The 2000 election did not create ex nihilo a debate about a “college” that has neither campus, nor faculty, nor students. That debate has raged for over two hundred years.

Historians have a natural weakness for the argument that the past is always contained in the present. Yet in this conviction, contrary to Shakespeare’s wrong-headed aphorism that “the past is prologue,” they’re surely right. In the case of the electoral college, the past is the present itself. Why is that? Because entirely without meaning to, the Framers created a constitutional mechanism that it now turns out is inherently beyond repeal. That’s the reality overlooked by almost everyone who wishes either to preserve or scrap the electoral college. Any debate about its usefulness in the twenty-first century or about its conformity to modern American ideals must confront this harsh reality built into the Constitution itself.

Because history embodies the story and is not mere background to it, the history of the electoral college’s origins must be understood. The institution emerged from a series of extended exchanges in Philadelphia in the hot summer of 1787 over the foundations and power of the presidency. This critical debate had to do specifically with how and by whom a president would be chosen. But more was at stake. Since the young American nation had just emerged from a revolution fought in part against British monarchical misrule and then from six years under the nation’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, that had failed partly because it had no executive authority at all, getting the government’s executive power right was of supreme importance. But how to do so? Provide election directly by the “freeholders”–that is, by those white male property holders who alone at the time possessed the vote? By members of Congress? Or by some intermediary body specially constituted to choose a wise and good figure from among the citizenry?

The last of these options carried the day. Why was that? It’s hard to say, for the delegates in Philadelphia spent days searchingly debating the matter, voting, re-voting, and compromising to settle on what has existed almost unchanged since then. But if, as is sometimes said, a camel is a horse put together by a committee, then the electoral college, as established by Article II, Section 1, of the Constitution, is a camel–an institution that has all the characteristics of being a bit of this, a bit of that, each component designed to meet some objection and to satisfy some principle. The end result remains much like that ungainly desert beast.

Having such a mechanism in the first place can be credited to the Framers’ fears about any chief executive. One elected only by the freeholders, they worried, might rule demagogically–that is, with deference to popular opinion rather than the views of more experienced men. Freeholders would easily fall, said Charles Pinckney of South Carolina, under the influence of “a few active & designing men.” But, always concerned to check and balance each institution and each power of government, the Framers also feared that a president elected only by Congress would not be free of that body’s own strong influence. James Madison, the “Father of the Constitution” who had more to do with creating the American frame of government than anyone, feared “the powerful tendency in the Legislature to absorb all powers into its vortex” and pushed hard to keep the two branches fully separate. Because of such conflicting anxieties, the Framers concluded that an electoral college would avoid the dangers of both too much popular and too much congressional influence over the presidency.

The Framers also tried to build into the process for selecting a president some deference to the continuing powers of the states. So they provided that each state legislature, its members themselves chosen by the state’s freeholders, would determine how the electors would be selected (presumably by the legislature itself–as was the case until after 1815). Thus, the electoral college would reflect both voters’ and legislators’ views. In addition, because the legislatures could be presumed to choose as electors the “the wise and good” of each state, the president and vice president would themselves be the persons best fitted for their offices.

Leaving the mode of election of each state’s electors up to the legislature of each also relieved the anxieties of those who feared turning over too many powers to the national congress that was about to come into being. Giving each state a number of electors equal to the number of its representatives in the House and its two senators satisfied the small states who feared being overwhelmed by the large ones (from which they were somewhat protected by being ensured two electoral votes–for their senators–simply by being states). It also reassured the larger states themselves, who wanted their populations to count for something (as they did through the size of state delegations in the House). And permitting the electors to meet in their respective state capitals allayed the concerns of those who predicted that, were the electoral college to meet at the national seat of government, electors from distant states would not attend. If there was an institutional animal that might please the lovers (or haters) of both horses and giraffes, then this camel of an institution seemed to be it. Yet it is worth noting in this regard that Virginia’s George Mason, who urged in debate over the election of the president that the government “ought at least to be practicable,” refused in the end to sign the Constitution.

Impracticable the electoral college surely is. And it is precisely because of its improbable construction that today’s electoral college remains one of the least altered institutions established by the Constitution of 1787: a separate body of people elected once every four years by the voters of each state to select the president and vice president of the United States. What has changed in the more than two centuries of its existence are the circumstances of its members’ elections. When the Framers created it, political parties did not exist. But by 1800, contested presidential elections were a regular feature of American government. As a result, competing slates of electors came into being, too. Even today, most voters still believe that when they vote for the presidential and vice presidential candidates of their choice, they are voting for those two people. But they aren’t. Instead, they’re voting for people (unnamed on the ballots) selected by each political party to vote for that party’s candidates in the electoral college. These electors are in effect proxies for the voters. The electors who represent the winning candidate in each state meet in December in their state capital to cast ballots for the candidates of their party. The candidates with the majority of electoral votes in all the states combined gain the nation’s two highest offices. In all of this, Congress retains only two functions. The Senate must certify the electoral votes from each state–except for the election of 1876, a mere formality. And in the rare case of an electoral tie or the inability of a candidate to gain a majority of the electoral votes, the House of Representatives, with each state getting a single vote, elects the president and vice president from among the candidates.

Complicated? Surely. The object of criticism at home and bemusement abroad? Yes. Necessary in 1787 to secure ratification of the Constitution? No doubt. But of proven worth and still functional today? That’s what the debate is all about.

In every respect, the electoral college has achieved what it was created to achieve: It has functioned as part of the constitutional mechanism by which presidential candidates are legitimately elevated to office. Only three times out of 104 quadrennial presidential elections–in 1800, 1824, and 1876–has the college failed in its task (not a bad record for any governmental device), and in only the last of these three were the provisions established by the Constitution incapable of resolving the deadlock. Compared with the electoral records of other nations, whose histories have been frequently interrupted by coups, canceled elections, and revolutions, the electoral college has helped sustain the continuity of American constitutional government.

But this has not kept it free of sharp criticism. Among the strongest and most frequently advanced is the charge that, by allowing the election of minority presidents (that is, of those who fail to receive a majority of the total votes cast by all the people), it is undemocratic. And so it has done five times–most recently in 2000. These outcomes, argue its detractors with much justification, each time denied the majority its choice, as can happen again. In fact, given the relatively even balance between the two parties in the last fifty years, the chance of a candidate with a minority of popular votes going to the White House has grown increasingly strong. The elections of 1960, 1968, and 1976 were exceedingly close calls in that respect, and the election of 2000 confirmed critics’ worst fears: George W. Bush became president with fewer popular votes than his losing opponent because he (ultimately) gained a majority of the electoral votes.

Another objection to the electoral college is that, because of the winner-take-all system in forty-eight out of fifty states, it allows a winning candidate in each state to gain a disproportionately large percentage of the state’s electoral vote. If a candidate wins by a single vote in a state, he or she is awarded 100 percent of its electoral vote. Yet the Framers themselves intended that votes be accumulated within states but aggregated by states. In this way, they argued, individuals and states would balance each other off within the federal system. But opponents of the electoral college respond that these forty-eight states can easily follow the lead of the two states that distribute their electoral votes proportionately among candidates. This proposal has the appeal of avoiding a constitutional amendment to alter or do away with the electoral college while using the federal system in effect to thwart the potentially undemocratic consequences of the electoral college system. But the political parties in each state prefer a winner-take-all result, and so no change is made.

A third objection to the electoral college concerns the two-vote “bonus” in the electoral college that each state receives. Under the Constitution, each state’s electoral votes equal the number of its representatives in Congress plus its two senators. As a result, the thirty-one least populous states get a roughly 25 percent boost in their electoral college strength from the two-vote senatorial bonus while California gets only a 4 percent increase in its electoral votes and New York, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Florida get no more than 9 percent. This is the element embedded in the existing constitutional structure of the electoral college that almost certainly dooms any chance of doing away with it. The small states see it as their lifeline to influence over the larger ones. They’re not likely ever to relinquish their leverage.

While those who attack the electoral college can cite known and concrete problems with the mechanism, those who wish to preserve it can in response point to some known benefits of it. Yes, they concede; the electoral college may occasionally deny the majority the president it wants. But it also creates some important “requirements” for presidential candidates. As we saw in 2000, they argue, having to gain a majority in the electoral college forces presidential candidates to attend to the voters in small states. And it leads them to campaign everywhere, not just through television, but in person. Of course, the states with the largest number of electoral votes–California, New York, Texas, and Florida–sometimes get the lion’s share of attention. But in a close election, like 2000’s, battleground states, many of them small ones like Iowa and Oregon, receive more attention just for having an electorate that has not made up its mind. And that, say defenders, is democratic, too.

Furthermore, they argue, times like our own, when the popular and electoral votes roughly coincide in their closeness, very rarely occur. Usually the winner gains a decisive number of electoral votes even when the popular vote is close–as, for example, did Woodrow Wilson in 1912, even though, in that three-man contest, he received only a plurality of 40 percent of the popular vote. This pattern has solidified the president-elect’s victory and bestowed a constitutionally mandated authority upon him.

Those who wish to preserve the electoral college also summon in its defense, not known defects, but “what might be’s.” Imagine what would probably happen, they argue, if the system were altered or done away with. Most likely, our two-party system would give way to a multiparty system like that of most other countries. This would probably happen because parties would no longer have to work hard, engage in compromises, and campaign in such a way as to achieve an electoral majority. They could hope simply for proportional representation in the state legislatures and Congress. Therefore, argues the electoral college’s defenders, it’s better to stick with known “bads” than run the risk of worse ones.

For a nation whose political practices (if not its social realities) have achieved a rough kind of democracy in keeping with its ideals, the opponents of the electoral college clearly have the better of the argument, even despite the dangers of doing away with it. But the weight of experience favors its defenders. Especially because of the advantage the system gives to the numerous small states, all efforts to abolish the electoral college have always failed, either in Congress or in those states. As one would have predicted, the last constitutional amendment that sought to abolish the college, that of the late 1960s, passed Congress but failed to be ratified by the requisite three-fourths of the states. The principal reason? As usual, most of the thirty-one states to which the Constitution delivers a 25 percent electoral vote bonus exercised their power to determine the fate of the amendment and failed to approve it. The least populous ones, like Wyoming, Montana, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and Alaska refused to give up their electoral heft. In addition, tradition, constitutional reverence, protection of state differences, and anti-big-city sentiment in largely rural states continued to play their parts in keeping the electoral college in existence.

Without conscious thought and purposeful efforts to hold everything in balance, Americans have always somehow succeeded in doing just that. They mix old and new, jettison some old ways while holding onto others. And so they do with an institution that, after two hundred years, is something of an anachronism, invites the world’s ridicule, and surely makes the oldest written national constitution in the world seem even more ancient than it is. But the burden of proving that a change wouldn’t cause more harm than the current ones must perforce lie with those who seek the electoral college’s repeal. And by the rough logic of existence, they cannot provide that proof. So the electoral college is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

Further Reading: No doubt because it has not changed in over two hundred years, the electoral college has been the subject of almost no historical literature. We debate it. Political scientists examine it. But historians steer away from it because without change they have little to write about. Nevertheless, one can circle the subject and learn much. The fundamental record of debates concerning the electoral college and everything else during the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, when the electoral college began its life, is Max Farrand’s magnificent four-volume Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven, 1986), now available online at the Library of Congress’s American Memory site. The best work on the origins of the American constitutional system, which covers more than its subtitle indicates, is Forrest McDonald, Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution (Lawrence, Kans., 1985). A handy guide to the college itself is Lawrence D. Langley and Neal R. Peirce, The Electoral College: A Primer (New Haven, 1999). Some of the many issues concerning this unique institution are covered and debated in Walter Berns, ed., After the People Vote: A Guide to the Electoral College (Washington, D.C., 2001) and Judith A. Best, The Choice of the People? Debating the Electoral College (Lanham, M.D., 1996).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

James Banner, a Washington, D.C., independent historian of the early republic, is most recently the co-author, with Harold C. Cannon, of The Elements of Teaching (New Haven, 1997) and The Elements of Learning (New Haven, 1999) and co-director, with Joyce Appleby, of the History News Service.

While Donald Trump grabbed the nation’s, and the world’s, attention in the battle for the Republican presidential nomination, one of the more unusual contenders on the Democratic side passed by rather unnoticed. “Meet Lawrence Lessig, The Candidate With A Single Issue,” read the headline of an October 2015 National Public Radio profile of the Harvard Law Professor who had just reached his goal of crowdfunding one million dollars in small donations within thirty days. Lessig never seriously figured in the principal contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, but he did briefly outpoll experienced rivals Lincoln Chafee, Martin O’Malley, and Jim Webb before his withdrawal from the race after four months, which he blamed on the Democratic National Committee’s rewriting of the rules to exclude him from their televised debates. In his final message to the American people, Lessig once again pressed the importance of the single issue that headlined his NPR profile: campaign finance reform. His own campaign Website declares that “the system is rigged to favor the powerful and well-connected, and it ignores the voices of ordinary citizens. Our representative democracy has become so corrupted by this fundamental inequality, that only those who fund campaigns are represented. The result is the governmental dysfunction that we see today.” Elsewhere, in a piece penned for The Atlantic, Lessig argues that “Washington will not change until the economy of influence fueled by the lobbying-industrial-congressional complex is radically changed.”

Those who doubt the existence of a “lobbying-industrial-congressional complex” should consult the Website of the Center for Responsive Politics—a non-partisan research group that “tracks money in U.S. politics and its effect on public policy and elections”—which calculates that $3.2 billion dollars was spent lobbying the federal government in 2015, with over 11,000 lobbyists registered as active in the national capital (fig. 1). So why does it take a political outsider to place this important issue at the center of the 2016 election? Lessig suggests that this very fact is symptomatic of the fundamental corruption of the American political system in its current form; because his opponents are so dependent upon contributions from lobbyists to fund their own campaigns, they dare not speak out against them. The center identifies 337 lobbyists who have donated directly to one or more candidates’ campaign committees; this figure includes a number of “bundlers” who collate donations from multiple clients. Daniel Auble, a senior researcher for the center, told Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call that lobbyists are unusual among donors in giving to both parties, and this fact “lends some credence to the idea that some of these contributions are more transactions or practical than ideological.” One lobbyist was even quoted in the same article as admitting that “elected officials spend too much time raising money, and their time would be better spent focusing on policy.” No wonder 69 percent of respondents to one recent poll conducted by NBC and the Wall Street Journal across all demographics and partisan affiliations agreed with the statement that “I feel angry because our political system seems only to be working for the insiders with money and power, like those on Wall Street or in Washington, rather than working to help everyday people get ahead.”

We should not be surprised by these revelations, however, for lobbying is hardly a novel feature of American politics. Political scientists have tended to treat it as a twentieth- and twenty-first-century phenomenon. A few historians take the story back further, dating its emergence to the massive expansion in the powers of the federal government during the Civil War era. In truth though, lobbyists have been active in Washington, D.C., almost from its founding. Indeed, 2016 will mark not just the election of the forty-fifth president of the United States, but also the 200th anniversary of the creation of the first ever lobbying agency in the national capital, an agency that was founded by a Delaware factory manager named Isaac Briggs. 

Isaac Briggs was a man of many talents. Born in Haverford, Pennsylvania, in 1763, he studied at the College (now University) of Pennsylvania, at a time when very few Americans received a college education. After graduation, he served as secretary to the convention which ratified Georgia’s state constitution, helped survey the boundaries of the District of Columbia, taught school, trained as a printer, and tinkered with a design for an early steamboat engine. He was elected to the prestigious American Philosophical Society in 1796, formed a friendship with fellow member Thomas Jefferson, and was appointed by the latter as surveyor general of the Mississippi Territory following the Louisiana Purchase of 1803. It was after that appointment expired that Briggs moved into textile manufacturing, as part of a consortium of investors who established the mill town of Triadelphia, Maryland, in 1809 (the town no longer exists, having been wiped out by flooding eighty years later). Financial problems with his Maryland venture in 1814 prompted his move to Delaware, where he took on management of the Wilmington factory of Thomas Little & Company.

The business that took Briggs from Wilmington to Washington in 1816, and secured his own small place in American history, was the Dallas Tariff Act. The United States’ infant manufacturing sector had flourished over the previous two decades, cut off from foreign competitors by the Revolutionary Wars in Europe, but the return of peace reopened domestic markets to cheap imported wares. The beleaguered proprietors clamored for the federal government to raise tariff barriers against this flow of goods from abroad; “already the great importations glut the market, lower the price, and extend the credit, and I am certain in two years will lay in ruin, eighty percent of the present existing manufacturers,” pleaded one typical letter to the Treasury Department. The Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander James Dallas, responded by proposing to Congress a new schedule of rates which would serve to protect home industry. Whether Congress would follow the secretary’s lead was still in doubt, however, when Briggs set out for the national capital in December 1815, at the behest of his neighbors that he “communicate with members [of the government] on the just & reasonable objects of the manufacturers of this District.” The trip was funded by “levy[ing] a Tax on each and every Manufacturer (and those immediately concerned therewith) within a circuit of twenty miles of Wilmington,” with subscriptions ranging from five to twenty-five dollars, even the former of which would have been far beyond the purse of an ordinary factory worker. Even at this early period, money talked in American politics.

Upon arriving in Washington, Briggs soon discovered he was not alone in his mission. From Rhode Island came James Burrill Jr., a lawyer of some repute, recently appointed chief justice of his state’s supreme court, and taking time out between sessions to argue the case of local mill owners at the capital. New York sent Matthew Livingston Davis, a journalist and printer, best known to history for refusing to testify against his friend Aaron Burr following the latter’s fatal duel with Alexander Hamilton, an act of defiance for which Davis had spent time in prison. And New Jersey was represented by Charles Kinsey, himself a papermaker and well-versed in the arguments for protective legislation. “They are all men of talents,” was Briggs’ verdict after their first meeting, “and in the selection of them the manufacturers have given a proof of wisdom.”

Yet the presence of his fellow delegates also gave Briggs cause for concern: would their small lobby be able to act in concert? To this end, on January 13, 1816, he called together his new associates in a committee room in the capitol building, furnished for the purpose by a sympathetic congressman. “I made to them a little speech; on the importance of our speaking the same language, as we had in view the same object—if we should be found some pressing one point, and some another, incompatible, one using this mode of reasoning, and another that, irreconcilable with each other, we should not succeed,” Briggs recorded. He then proposed “that we form ourselves into a Society, under a proper organization, have regular and stated meetings, and each one should communicate his ideas to the Society previously to publication elsewhere.” “This motion was unanimously approved,” he noted happily, “and accordingly James Burrill was appointed President and Matthew L. Davis Secretary.” Thus was founded Washington’s first ever lobbying agency.

Burrill, Davis and Co. were certainly kept busy. Attending congressional debates, conversing with lawmakers, and writing in favor of protection, all these were “engagements laborious and incessant,” Briggs complained to his wife, adding “I have seldom gone to bed before midnight.” Several times they were invited to address the House of Representatives Committee on Commerce and Manufactures, and these occasions were attended by “a very crowded audience, mostly of members of Congress,” who listened “with great attention and respect” to their arguments. “I have often the pleasure to see our friend and your delegate Briggs,” one senator informed a correspondent in Delaware, “—he is very zealous and active in mixing with the Members and I have no doubt is an excellent choice—I think so far as I can collect that the Manufacturing Interest stands well in the minds of a considerable majority of Congress.” Sure enough, while the national legislature was not quite so generous in setting the new rates as the Secretary of the Treasury had recommended, they adopted the principal features of his proposal in the tariff act which came to bear his name. Their assignment completed, Briggs and his allies went their separate ways. Still, while their association was only a temporary one, their activities heralded the increasingly important role that lobbyists would come to play in national policymaking over the following half-century.

Three years later, the tariff was back on the congressional agenda, and the manufacturers launched a new lobbying campaign with their first national convention. The prompt for this meeting was the Panic of 1819, a financial crisis that devastated the American economy. “This distress pervades every part of the Union, every class of society,” lamented one commentator. “It is like the atmosphere which surrounds us—all must inhale it, and none can escape it.” On November 29, 1819, one week before the opening of a new session of Congress, thirty-seven delegates from nine states gathered in New York City for a “Convention of the Friends of National Industry,” to decide how best to pursue their common goal of securing federal aid for domestic producers. At a time when horseback was still the fastest way to travel, this was no small achievement; indeed, it would be another decade before any political party managed to hold its own national convention. Briggs did not attend, having left the textile business to work as a canal engineer, but his former colleague Matthew L. Davis did participate in proceedings. Those present adopted a resolution recommending to their fellow citizens the formation of “societies for the encouragement of domestic industry,” and a petition to Congress pleading for a further increase in tariff rates.

The task of drawing up suitable legislation on the subject fell to Henry Baldwin, representative for the industrial town of Pittsburgh—the “Birmingham of America”—and chair of the House Committee on Manufactures. Baldwin quickly found the tariff to be “a work of labor to write,” complaining that “it is impossible for one mind to view a subject in all its possible scope.” This should hardly be a surprise, for politics was still a part-time occupation for most lawmakers during this period; few could be considered experts on political economy, and with a turnover rate of approximately one-third from one Congress to the next, a significant proportion lacked any national legislative experience whatsoever. In desperation, Baldwin sent early drafts of his work to contacts among the manufacturing community, urging them to “suggest any amendments or alterations which strike you or your friends.” Sensing an opportunity, the manufacturers responded by sending their own man, Eleazar Lord, an agent of the New York-based American Society for the Encouragement of Domestic Manufactures, to assist Baldwin in Washington.

Lord, like Briggs before him, had many strings to his bow, a common characteristic of these early amateur lobbyists before lobbying itself became a recognized profession. Born in 1788 in Franklin, Connecticut, Lord originally planned to devote his life to the church, obtaining his license as a Presbyterian preacher in 1812. But a recurrent eye problem forced him to give up his spiritual calling and re-enter the secular world, where he engaged in banking and later established the Manhattan Fire Insurance Company. He remained active in religious ventures though, most notably as a founding member of the American Bible Society, and retained a rather pious attitude to the informal politicking which pervaded Washington’s social scene. Whereas Briggs had enjoyed socializing with the nation’s political elite, sharing a boarding-house with several congressmen and even dining with President Madison and his family, Lord stiffly informed his employers several weeks into his stay: “I can give but a poor account of the levees, for I have not been to one, nor to any balls, events, or other places of idleness, dissipation, folly, iniquity, & nonsense. Were I disposed to attend such assemblages any where it should not be here. With the views & feelings I have of the solemn responsibility of the representatives, especially at a period like this, & of the manner in which 4 months of their time was whiled away I should feel humbled & ashamed to meet one of them at such a place.”

Lord’s appearance was clearly a blessing for Baldwin. “I did not arrive here a moment too soon,” the New Yorker reported in early January 1820. “I am set at work drafting a schedule of a new tariff. Material alternations & additions can be made if adequate information & statements can be furnished.” “Mr. Lord is here and is very useful,” his new collaborator reiterated three weeks later. By the end of February, the two men were laboring on Sundays and dining together in the committee room as they struggled to complete their mammoth task. At the same time, Lord also cooperated with other members of the Committee on Manufactures to identify wavering legislators and hand deliver them protectionist literature, as well as depositing spare copies in the Library of Congress, to the gratification of future historians. For four months he persevered tirelessly in the cause, filing near-daily reports of proceedings both on and off the floor, in spite of the numerous discouragements that he faced. As he complained on one occasion, “an advocate of Manufacturing here seems to me to be regarded as a kind of insidious, designing & dangerous enemy who against all reason & prosperity wants to filch some favour from the guardians of the country.”

Unfortunately for the manufacturers, Baldwin’s Bill, as it was known to contemporaries (though it might more justly have been labeled Lord’s Bill), was defeated by a single vote in the Senate in May 1820. Nonetheless, Lord earned much praise for his work on their behalf. He was rewarded with editorship of a protectionist newspaper in New York, and the presentation of a silver pitcher from the “friends of National Industry,” in approbation of “the Zeal, talents, and intelligence he displayed at Washington, in support of American Manufacturers, during the first session of the sixteenth Congress.” Lord may not have succeeded in his mission, but the extensive cooperation between he and Baldwin in drawing up the new tariff and pushing for its passage presaged the kind of cozy relationship between legislators and lobbyists that has become commonplace today, to the alarm of critics like Lawrence Lessig.

The first presidential election in which lobbying played a significant role was probably that of 1828. Once again, the story begins with a national convention of manufacturers, this one held in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in July 1827. Ninety-eight delegates attended, representing thirteen of the twenty-four states in the Union. These included two sitting senators and four representatives, one of them the current chair of the Committee on Manufactures, along with a further nineteen who had previously served in the Congress; this figure illustrates that the so-called “revolving door” between governing and lobbying is by no means a new phenomenon. The Harrisburg Convention also embraced a more ambitious agenda than its New York predecessor, committing to paper a whole schedule of rates which it recommended for the attention of the national legislature. “Now there is not a petty manufacturer in the union from the owner of a spinning factory, to the maker of a hobnail—from the mountains of Vermont to the swamps of the Patapsco, who is not pressing forward to the plunder,” complained one commentator. These advocates of high tariff barriers, he added, were “a combining, club-meeting, planning, schemeing, petitioning, memorializing, complaining, statement-making, worrying, teasing, boring [a contemporary term for lobbying], persevereing class of men.”

The Harrisburg Convention immediately became a focal point of conflict between supporters of President John Quincy Adams and their opponents who favored the election of Andrew Jackson (fig. 2). “The real design of this convention at Harrisburg is not to advance American industry, but to organize a political club under the direction of the Administration of the general government to direct and control public sentiment,” accused an Opposition newspaper. “Doubtless there are manufacturers among its members, who think they have an interest in its proceedings; but the greater part of them are unquestionably actuated only by a desire to seduce [voters] from the cause of Jackson, under false pretences that himself and friends are opposed to a tariff, while Mr. Adams is in its favor.” The convention’s organizers, in turn, denied any partisan motivation. “The friends of Domestic Manufactures would have been madmen to break down their strength by mingling the economical plans with political matters,” wrote one, for they “are anxious that there may be unanimity upon the subject, and certainly will not mix up anything with the main object that might tend to invite opposition.”

The doings of the Harrisburg Convention dominated the agenda of the final session of Congress before the 1828 election. “The [protective] ‘System’ and the ‘opposition’ to it forms the two elementary principles of the two parties,” one observer recorded. “It was the Basis of the Harrisburg Convention: It is the leading Subject of debate in Congress: It is alluded to in every debate upon every other Subject. It is the leading Subject of State resolutions—some for & some against the System. It is a Standing question in the Newspapers and the principle topic of Conversation in all circles of Society public & private throughout the union.” Meetings were held across the country, urging legislators to adopt the proposals put forward by the convention, and several of the Harrisburg delegates were called upon to testify before the House Committee on Manufactures. Sympathetic congressmen lined up to praise those who attended; “they were not speculators, nor wild theorists, but practical men,” declared one, “—the farmer, the manufacturer, the merchant, the wool-grower and manufacturer, there met,” and he favored an increase in rates, “not only from his own investigation of the subject, but from the[ir] recommendation.” In response, critics questioned their impartiality. “No combination of wool growers and woollen manufacturers, should ever attempt to dictate a tariff to the people of the United States,” proclaimed future president James Buchanan. “They would be more than men, if self-interest did not prejudice their judgment, and call forth propositions for their own benefit, at the expense of the community.”

The result of all this too-ing and fro-ing was the so-called Tariff of Abominations, which imposed some of the highest, and most unevenly distributed, rates in American history. Jackson supporters in Congress assiduously courted states that might prove pivotal in the forthcoming election, offering protection to Kentucky hemp planters, Pennsylvania ironmasters, New York wool growers, and Midwestern grain farmers, while punishing New England industries for their loyalty to Adams. But the real loser was the South, which possessed little manufacturing of its own to benefit from the changes, but would now have to pay higher prices for its imported goods. Historians have recognized Southern anger over federal tariff policy as a source of growing sectional tension during this period, culminating in the Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833, but they have overlooked the particular role that lobbying played in that process. For Vice President John C. Calhoun, who would devise South Carolina’s doctrine of nullification, the Harrisburg Convention was “the selected instrument to combine with greater facility the great geographical Northern manufacturing interest in order to enforce more effectually the system of monopoly and extortion against the consuming States.” Thomas Cooper, in his famous “calculate the value of the Union” speech, concurred in this analysis. “There is a mongrel kind of lobby legislation attending at Washington,” he charged, “that operates from without on the members within: giving such statements (uncontradicted) to the various committees, as may best secure the interest of the manufacturers, and directing and managing the votes, as the occasions may require” (fig. 3).

Lobbying has always been controversial, but its practitioners have successfully argued that it is protected by the Constitution. “As a republican citizen, I claim the right of addressing, with respect and decorum, orally & in writing, any man either in or out of congress,” declared Isaac Briggs in 1816, and the existence of that right has been confirmed by several Supreme Court rulings over the the past century. Of course it is not the right of every American citizen to lobby his or her elected representative that concerns critics like Lawrence Lessig, it is the special influence that some professional lobbyists, acting on behalf of wealthy corporations, have exercised in return for funding the campaigns of sympathetic politicians. But where should we draw the line between proper and improper relationships, and how can we prove when wrongdoing has taken place? This too was a problem for nineteenth-century Americans.

Henry Clay built a forty-year career in national politics upon his championing of high tariff barriers (fig. 4). Along the way, he received countless gifts from grateful constituents, including: parcels of cloth; glass and silverware; a spade, shovel, axe, hoe, carving knife and fork; “two pair of Indian rubber over shoes,” a dozen kid gloves, countless hats, and, for the rare occasion he found himself without a hat, four combs; “a bureau travelling trunk,” presumably to keep it all in; “half a dozen bottles of American Cologne water;” several rolls of wallpaper; a pocket knife; a plough; a dozen scythes; and twenty-three barrels of salt. Today, congressional rules prohibit members accepting gifts of any kind from a registered lobbyist, and gifts of more than fifty dollars value from any other source. Prior to the Civil War, in contrast, there was no register of lobbyists, and no rule on accepting gifts. Still, no one seriously accused Clay of seeking to profit from these transactions, though one newspaper writer did jokingly suggest that he might “get up an auction” to dispose of all the “curious articles” sent him by his supporters. They were intended, a donor explained, “as a testimonial of our respect and esteem for the great advocate of protection of domestic manufacturers,” and were neither solicited by the recipient nor of sufficient worth to have influenced his stance on the tariff.

Much more questionable is the conduct of another great American statesman of the period, Daniel Webster (fig. 5). Webster enjoyed a close relationship with many wealthy capitalists, and was remarkably candid about what he described as “subscriptions,” “gifts” and “sweeteners” that he received in order to enable him to make the “financial sacrifice” his continued service in Congress required. Having previously led the fight against increased rates, Webster was a notable convert to protectionism in 1827, the year of the Harrisburg Convention, and just around the same time that a group of Boston manufacturers generously offered him a substantial share in their textile factory. “I can easily believe that a rumoured investment of $50,000 in the Lowell manufacture, may have conquered the heterodoxy of Mr. Webster’s former opinions, and brought him over to the true faith,” commented Thomas Cooper sarcastically, on hearing news of the deal. The terms were such that Webster would not actually pay cash for the shares, but would still enjoy the dividends on credit; in fact, he never paid for them at all until he came to sell them, at a substantial profit, nearly a decade later. “All Webster’s political systems are interwoven with the exploration of a gold-mine for himself,” was the verdict of John Quincy Adams on his Massachusetts colleague’s association with his financial benefactors.

Adams himself provides an example of a lawmaker who took his civic responsibilities extremely seriously. “My principle has always been to refuse all presents offered to me as a public man,” he once recorded rather primly in his diary. Yet even this seemingly straightforward policy was tested when he received a parcel containing several small soaps from an admirer. He initially resolved to insist on paying for the present, but his wife “shamed me out of that fancy,” and he reluctantly decided to accept them. “Where the value is very small, I thought it would be ridiculous to make a point upon it,” he rationalized, before adding, tellingly, “it has not always been easy for me to draw the line of distinction.”

One incidence in which contemporaries did agree that wrongdoing had been committed became public knowledge after a congressional investigation into corruption surrounding the passage of the Tariff of 1857, one of a spate of such investigations into lobbying during that decade. The inquiry was prompted by the bankruptcy of a Massachusetts textile manufacturing company, Lawrence, Stone & Co., whose financial records subsequently disclosed the expenditure of some $87,000 in connection with a mysterious “tariff account.” One partner in the company attempted suicide, another fled to Europe, leaving the third, William W. Stone, to face the music in Washington. Stone’s testimony implicated a number of politicians, both in and out of Congress, and revealed startling details about the methods by which interested parties were already seeking to influence national legislation.

A cabal of woolen textile manufacturers, it transpired, had been for several years secretly cultivating public opinion in favor of admitting raw wool duty free, to increase the profit margin on their own product. Stone admitted that he had met frequently with newspaper editors to promote their cause. “I never offered to pay them one farthing, and they never asked any such thing,” he maintained, but did admit that wherever a favorable article appeared, his associates would buy up large numbers of copies for distribution, and the author might receive “a bonus” for his trouble. The investigating committee also found that the mill owners had “sought to propitiate and conciliate leading and influential men, in all the political parties of the country, to favor their scheme,” making payments to them under various spurious guises. As the report continued, “when such men … are employed to ‘collect statistics’ and write newspaper articles, everybody knows that it is not the labor which they perform, but the weight and influence of their name and character which is the main consideration for the money which is paid them.”

Even more troubling were the details of funds disbursed inside the capitol itself. One thousand dollars, a huge sum for the period, went to Abel R. Corbin, a clerk on the House Committee on Claims, for what the investigating committee called “his advice and assistance, and for the advantage which his official position gave him of ready access to members of the House.” The benefactor claimed this was “a mere trifling gratuity or present, by way of acknowledgement of sundry acts of kindness and advice received from Mr. Corbin during Mr. Stone’s stay in Washington.” This defense was somewhat undermined however by discovery of a letter from Stone to Corbin written following passage of the new tariff, in which the former stated “‘the labourer is worthy of his hire,’ and I enclose a check … for one thousand, in accordance with my understanding with you. You have fairly earned the money.” Ironically, unknown to Stone, Corbin had actually lobbied against the bill, after finding it not to his liking, though this did not prevent him from accepting the payment when it was offered. “Although the committee are not disposed to give Mr. Corbin all the credit which he claims for controlling the legislation of Congress on the most important measures of legislation affecting the revenue and finances of the country for the last ten years,” the investigators’ report dryly concluded, they were satisfied of his willingness to sell whatever influence he did possess to the highest bidder. Corbin would later marry the sister of President Ulysses S. Grant, and get caught up in another scandal when he abused his influence with the White House in colluding with speculators to corner the gold market in 1869.

None of the missing money could be proven to have ended up in the pockets of members of Congress, but there was certainly plenty of suspicion to go around. The Speaker of the House, Nathaniel P. Banks, who had shepherded the bill through the lower chamber, was revealed to have accepted $700 from Lawrence, Stone, & Co., but was cleared of any wrongdoing on the basis of his claim that the payment was a loan, which he still intended to repay, and was unrelated to the tariff. It was also alleged that New York congressman Orsamus B. Matteson (fig. 6) had told the manufacturers that there were twenty-five votes in the House that could be bought for $25,000; again, this charge proved impossible to corroborate, though it does not say much for Matteson’s character that he is the only member of the House ever to face two expulsion hearings on different charges, having previously been implicated in another lobbying scandal. “The inevitable Matteson had his finger in the pie, as usual,” noted one disgusted newspaper writer. As for the investigating committee, they concluded that the whole sorry episode “shows how the legislation of the country may be influenced by large masses of capital, concentrated in the hands of a few persons having a common interest, so as to benefit that interest at the expense of the great mass of the people.”

“One of the most unfortunate and alarming features of the politics of the day, is the prevalence of corruption among those who are selected by the people as their representatives and law-makers. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that a monarch more powerful than any European sovereign, the Almighty Dollar, is yearly gaining new strength, as the real controlling power of far too much of the legislation of the country, whether Municipal, State, or National. … So far has this custom progressed that our legislative halls are thronged with professional vote-sellers. Nominally, there are lobby members, but really they sell out, at so much a head, some of the honourable members, as pigs are sold in the market.” This newspaper editorial, entitled “The Prevalence of Corruption,” was written not in 2016, as an accompaniment to Lawrence Lessig’s quixotic campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, but over 150 years earlier, on the eve of the Civil War. When Lessig speaks of the need “to fix our democracy first—to take it back from the billionaires and corporations, so we’d have a chance of addressing sensibly the host of critical problems that we face as a nation,” he confronts an issue that is not new to American politics, and that others have confronted before him. Whether the candidate who emerges triumphant from the current race for the White House will have the courage to confront that same issue, in an era when lobbyists are more numerous and more powerful than ever, remains very much in doubt.

Further Reading

Douglas E. Bowers, “From Logrolling to Corruption: The Development of Lobbying in Pennsylvania, 1815-1861,” Journal of the Early Republic 3 (Winter, 1983): 439-474.

Amy Handlin, ed. Dirty Deals? An Encyclopedia of Lobbying, Political Influence, and Corruption, 3 vols. (Santa Barbara, Calif., 2014).

OpenSecrets.Org (Website of the Center for Responsive Politics).

Jeffrey L. Pasley, “Private Access and Public Power: Gentility and Lobbying in the Early Congress,” in Kenneth R. Bowling and Donald R. Kennon, eds., The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development (Athens, Ohio, 2002).

Carl E. Prince and Seth Taylor, “Daniel Webster, the Boston Associates, and the U.S. Government’s Role in the Industrializing Process, 1815-1830,” Journal of the Early Republic 2 (Autumn 1982): 283-299.

Mark W. Summers, The Plundering Generation: Corruption and the Crisis of the Union, 1849-1861 (Oxford, 1987).

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Daniel Peart is a lecturer in American history at Queen Mary University of London. His latest project explores the role that lobbying played in the making of U.S. tariff policy between the War of 1812 and the Civil War.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

In 1608 the Castillian-born adventurer Juan Martinez de Montoya, a man described as “tall, of good feature, blackbearded,” reported that he had “made a settlement at Santa Fe.” The place he called Santa Fe was a beautiful little valley with a small river flowing through it, beneath the mountains a few miles east of the river named the Rio Grande. It grew into the capital of the province of New Mexico, and for more than one hundred and sixty years, until Monterey was established in California in the late eighteenth century, Santa Fe was the northernmost capital of a Spanish province in the New World. It was the second permanent Spanish colony within the present United States–San Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565, was the first–and was established within a year of the settling of Jamestown, the first permanent east coast English colony, in 1607. It was the first permanent European colony in the American west.

At the time Santa Fe was founded, New Mexico was floundering. Juan de Oñate, the proprietor and military commander of the colony, had established New Mexico in 1598, with his headquarters at the pueblo of San Gabriel, just west across the Rio Grande from the still-existing pueblo of San Juan. Ten years later, Oñate was going broke because he had not discovered the legendary gold mines of Gran Quivira, and a faction led by his secretary of war and government, Juan Martinez de Montoya, was lobbying successfully with the viceroy of New Spain in Mexico City for his arrest and replacement. Martinez de Montoya was forty years old when he arrived in New Mexico as a captain in the reinforcements sent to the new colony.

One of the strangest things about Juan Martinez de Montoya’s most important act–the founding of Santa Fe–is that it is shrouded in mystery. For most of the twentieth century, the actual year of the founding of Santa Fe was a matter of historical speculation, and the name of its founder, Juan Martinez de Montoya, has only recently been accepted by scholars.

The uncertainties about the early years of Santa Fe are entangled in the history of New Mexico itself. The region along the Rio Grande that became the core of New Mexico was first explored by Coronado in 1540-42, and for a long time it was a tradition (and still is, among some of the more irresponsible tour guides) that Coronado had himself placed a small Spanish settlement in an Indian pueblo at the place called Santa Fe. Others argued that if Coronado did not establish Santa Fe, then Antonio de Espejo, an explorer who visited the future location of the town in 1583, must have done so. These stories, unsupported by any historical evidence, date to the 1880s, when they were created by a rather unscrupulous group of Santa Fe businessmen who were promoting a bogus three-hundred-fiftieth (or perhaps three-hundredth) anniversary of the founding of Santa Fe in an effort to boost tourism to the city.

But what began as a fraud became almost unassailable history, since it was nearly impossible for historians to find evidence to disprove this specious date because virtually all manuscripts–public, private, and religious–recording the history of the province were destroyed during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, when most of the pueblo Indians of New Mexico rose up against the Spanish occupiers and drove them out of the province for a period of twelve years.

The great date debate, then, is based on rather slender records, the few that Spanish authorities had sent out of New Mexico before the revolt. At first, historians were sure that Santa Fe had been founded sometime early in the 1600s, and they generally agreed on a date of “about 1605” as most likely correct. The well-respected historian Frederick Hodge presented a succinct summary of the argument in favor of this date in 1913–but the same year, the equally respected historian Lansing Bloom published an equally firm statement that the founding must have been after 1609, and possibly as late as 1617.

Sometime during the 1920s, the problem seemed to be cleared up with the discovery of a set of instructions from the viceroy of New Spain to don Pedro de Peralta, appointed the new governor of New Mexico in 1608. Among these instructions was a clear order to create the Villa de Santa Fe as the capital of the province as soon as Peralta arrived there. Since Peralta must have reached New Mexico in the spring of 1610, most historians concluded that Bloom had been right in his claim that Santa Fe had been established sometime soon after 1609, and 1610 became the accepted date for the founding of Santa Fe.

But in 1944, the man who had emerged as the leading historian of New Mexico, France V. Scholes, published a short note that he had examined a file of documents owned by Maggs Brothers of London, dealers in antiquities. This file contained, among other things, a number of certified copies of documents recording the activities of Juan Martinez de Montoya in New Mexico. Little was known about Martinez, other than that the viceroy had appointed him governor when Juan de Oñate resigned in 1607, but the advisory council of the colony refused to accept him, and made Oñate’s son, Cristobál, the acting governor in his place. Scholes reviewed the testimony in the file, and to his surprise found a specific statement that at some point in the period from mid-1607 to mid-1608, probably in the first months of 1608, Martinez had established a “plaza de Santa Fe,” a private settlement or town of Santa Fe. During this same period, Martinez became disgusted with the untenable political situation in New Mexico, and decided to leave the new colony and return to Mexico. He did so in late 1608.

The existence of these documents, although discussed by Scholes in 1944, was quickly forgotten during the tensions of the war years, and noticed only as a curiosity afterwards, until Dr. Thomas Chavez, director of the Governor’s Palace Museum, decided to see if there was anything more to the story as presented by Scholes. In 1994, Chavez contacted Maggs Brothers of London, and found that they still held the documents. The state of New Mexico purchased them and they are now a permanent part of the collection of the Governor’s Palace.

Juan de Oñate established New Mexico as an entrepreneurial colony, one that was intended to make him a profit. The presence of the Pueblo Indians gave the colony a good financial basis, because Oñate was given the privilege of dividing the products of their pueblos among the military leaders of the colony, in an arrangement called encomienda. This gave the leaders an income that allowed them to each support a troop of armed militiamen and their horses, which would provide the protection of the new colony. Oñate expected to find the so-far-unlocated golden cities of Gran Quivira, and to make a huge profit from taking this gold and tracking down the mines from which it came. “I trust in God that I shall give your majesty a new world, greater than New Spain,” he wrote to the viceroy. Such success had happened before in the eighty years between the conquest of Mexico and the conquest of New Mexico–Oñate confidently expected it to happen again, with himself and his followers as beneficiaries.

Oñate proceeded to break a number of the Laws of the Indies in his efforts to regain the expenses he had spent in order to establish the colony and in his efforts to make the big Gran Quivira gold strike. Establishing a viable colony, getting farming and ranching established, and setting the religious conversion program of the Franciscans on a sound basis were all secondary concerns. Ultimately this led to dissension and factionalism. The colony divided between the militarists, who were convinced that a little more squeezing, a few more expeditions against surrounding tribes, would reveal the great quantities of gold that Coronado had said the Indians of the area had told him about, and the settlers, who wanted to establish their farms and ranches, set up a reasonable working relationship with the pueblos, and get the colony onto a sound economic footing. A trade in hides, cattle, sheep, and salt to the silver mining towns to the south could produce a dependable income.

Martinez was apparently a key member of the settler faction, and an opponent of the militaristic approach of Oñate and his officers. But Oñate, as poblador, as the man who created the colony, was allowed to set up the government, so all the political positions of any power in Oñate’s capital at San Gabriel were occupied by his faction.

Most of these men lived in houses converted from the rooms of the pueblo of San Gabriel–the Indian families who had lived here had moved to San Juan when Oñate took over the pueblo. Dissatisfaction with Oñate’s decisions, with his favoritism for his ruling clique, and with his failure to achieve anything like a dependable civil establishment led to a mutiny among the nonmilitarist settlers, and some actually fled the colony and returned to Mexico, including some of the Franciscan priests. Father Juan de Escalona reported that “the entire army, in a body, resolved to move to some other place where it could find relief for its wants.” Influential members of the settlers’ faction, probably led by Martinez, sent complaints about the situation to the viceroy. The viceroy wrote to the king that “I cannot help but inform your majesty that this conquest is becoming a fairy tale.” The king determined that Oñate had far overstepped his privileges, and prepared to have him arrested and brought to Mexico City. Oñate, apparently with friends in the capital, seems to have heard of this impending order, and resigned the governorship in August 1607. When the viceroy was notified of Oñate’s move, he then sent an order to New Mexico appointing Martinez de Montoya acting governor in place of Oñate. The events clearly imply that Martinez was a member of and probably the leader of the pro-civil government, pro-development, anti-military, anti-conquest, and anti-exploitation faction. The ruling council refused to accept Martinez, saying that he was “not a soldier,” that he was not of the militarist faction, and appointed Oñate’s son, Cristobál, instead.

It was apparently the same settler faction that in 1608 petitioned for the establishment of a new capital of New Mexico away from the Indian pueblo of San Gabriel. The petition was sent to the viceroy on the wagon train of August 1608, coincidentally the same wagon train in which Martinez de Montoya returned to Mexico City. This wagon train arrived in Mexico City in December 1608. A copy of the petition no longer survives, but King Philip’s response in early 1609 mentioned that “the Spaniards and the friars residing [in New Mexico] were planning to establish a villa.”

The information that arrived by this wagon train, including that brought by Martinez himself, convinced the king to appoint a new governor, Pedro de Peralta, for the province of New Mexico, and ordered him “to settle or found the villa in question,” to be the capital of the province. When Peralta arrived in New Mexico, he ended the entrepreneurial colony and established a royal colony instead. He applied the order to establish a villa to Martinez’s settlement of Santa Fe, raising it from a plaza, or village, to a villa, or town. In other words, the king’s orders to Peralta did not establish the town of Santa Fe, but simply elevated the already-existing settlement to that rank.

The town had been established on the north bank of the Santa Fe River, near the head of its valley. Several springs and marshes were scattered along this bank, and the little town was fitted onto a dry area between these watery areas. It appears that the town plaza and primary streets were laid out at the time of the establishment of the settlement, and the plan was developed farther when the place became the official capital two years later. The lot for the town church was established at the east end of the plaza, and the north side of the plaza was selected as the site for the governor’s residence. Unfortunately, the Pueblo Revolt destroyed all property records and any maps of the town during the period from its establishment about 1608 to 1680. The earliest surviving map was drawn in 1767, after many changes had altered the details of the town plan–but the 1767 map probably gives a good impression of the general layout and appearance of the town. Santa Fe was laid out as a series of blocks around a plaza, with the government buildings on its north side. Originally, the plaza was probably a long, rectangular area extending eastward to the front of the parish church, but later inbuilding filled part of this area with houses. Remarks in documents of the 1600s name at least one street, San Francisco Street, which was probably the same street with that name today, passing along the south side of the much-reduced town plaza.

The town served as the capital of the Province of New Mexico until the revolt in 1680, and then was reestablished as the capital of the reconquered province in 1692. It continued in this position through the Mexican period until it was captured by American forces in 1846, during the Mexican War, and became the capital of the state of New Mexico when it entered the Union in 1912. The Spanish considered the province to be “remote beyond compare,” harshly cold even in the summer, and with such a short growing season that it was difficult to raise their usual crops. Located in a high desert climate at seven thousand feet, Santa Fe receives only about ten inches of rain a year, quite unlike most of the provinces farther south.

Ultimately, Santa Fe became the capital of a province of missions, ranchers, and farmers. Oñate’s expectations of a great gold strike never came true–the value in the colony was in its land, its people, and the supplies it could send to the great silver strikes in the Santa Barbara and Parral areas to the south. This was what Juan Martinez de Montoya and his settler faction had argued for, and although he was forced out of the colony, his vision for its future development proved to be correct. For the rest of its colonial and Mexican history, New Mexico remained a land of farmers and herders, trading supplies to the silver mines to the south.

Further Reading: More about the story of Santa Fe, and the days of the earliest exploration of the American Southwest, can be found in John Kessell, Spain in the Southwest: A Narrative History of Colonial New Mexico, Arizona, Texas, and California (Norman, 2002), and David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, 1992).

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

James E. Ivey is a research historian for the history program of the Intermountain Cultural Resource Center of the Intermountain Regional Office, National Park Service, in Santa Fe. An archeologist and architectural historian, his work has centered on missions, presidios, frontier forts, ranches, settlements, and industrial sites from Texas to California.

Baltimore | Boston | Charleston | Chicago | Havana

| Lima | Los Angeles | Mexico City | New Amsterdam | New Orleans
Paramaribo | Philadelphia | Potosi | Quebec City | Salt Lake City
Saint Louis | Santa Fe | San Francisco | Washington, D.C.

“Tenochtitlan,” as the Aztecs called the metropolis at the heart of their tribute empire, has always had the capacity to astonish outsiders. The first Europeans to see it were the small band of Spanish adventurers led by Hernan Cortès who were to become its conquerors. As they crossed a snowy pass into the shallow cup of a wide valley in central Mexico late in November 1519, they saw a sight they could not easily believe. A great white city, lightly moored to the shores by three long causeways, floated on a shimmering lake. The last city they had seen was Seville, the largest in Spain, sheltering more than sixty thousand souls. This lake-borne city was almost four times as large, with thousands more people clustered in the “suburbs” fringing the mainland. And this city, unlike the cramped muddle of houses, streets, and byways that made up medieval Spanish towns, had been planned. Its habitations were neatly packed within a ruler-straight grid of canals and footpaths, so Cortès and his men could see four processional ways converging on a central precinct where temples and pyramids rose in the morning air like man-made mountains. No encrustations of smoke or dirt sullied these fairytale structures: they were brilliant with colored stuccos, and even the humblest dwellings, some of them crested with roof-gardens, shone with whitewash. In old age, Bernal Diaz, a Spanish foot soldier in that long-ago campaign and still our best and most engaging witness, remembered the impact of the “enchanted vision” of the magical city, with its “pyramids and buildings rising from the water . . . Indeed, some of our soldiers,” he reported, “asked whether it was not all a dream.”

Astonishingly, the Spaniards were welcomed as the ambassadors they claimed to be. As they were ushered into the city they noticed, in the midst of the planning and pageantry, another unfamiliar detail that rather unnerved them. The city and its people were immaculately clean, the paths and squares swept, and the humblest canoemen clean in his rags. There was none of the filth and squalor they regarded as inseparable from city life. While their dreams were of an ordered urbanity (a dream later partially realized in conquered Tenochtitlan), their experience was of public streets and spaces foul with rubbish ejected from houses and shops, and mired in the ordure of horses and, in the darker alleys, of men. Bernal Diaz, dazzled from the first by the glories of Tenochtitlan, was perhaps most impressed by its system of public latrines. Canoes, moored at intervals along the canals, with little huts built over them for privacy, received human wastes, which were then poled away, probably to fertilize the “floating gardens” that supplied the city’s luxury trade in corn, fruit, and flowers. All offensive trades–leather tanning and the like–were banished to the far lakeshores. And in this city, the Spaniards realized with a jolt, the sole draft animals were men.

In time the interlopers came to understand that the city was clean, orderly, and magnificent because it was a sacred place: a material testament to the glory of the Aztecs’ tribal god Huitizopochtli, “Hummingbird on the South,” the god of war and the sun. In Tenochtitlan cleanliness was a demonstration of respect for the gods, not for men, and constant sweeping a sign of devotion.

As the band of Spaniards wandered about, wide-eyed tourists, they were struck by the contrast between the airy palaces of the lords, splendid as Moorish palaces with their pools and courtyards and halls hung with delicate draperies, and the modest dwellings of artisans and workers. The differences between classes (or were they castes?) were even more tellingly marked by the conscientiously simple dress and meek demeanor of the commoners, and the superb hauteur of the lords. Acclaimed warriors were especially magnificent in regalia and demeanor, while Cortès judged that the glory enveloping Emperor Moctezoma surpassed that of the court of Spain. Women (at least the respectable ones) were properly demure, passing through the streets as swiftly and modestly as Moorish women, and if the huge market was rowdy, as such places usually are, with prostitutes strolling about clacking their chewing gum “like castanets,” the trading was controlled and the taxes regularly collected. And law was properly enforced; the public space of the market was the favorite location for the bloody punishment of offences as commonplace as drunkenness.

As they got to know this supremely elegant place better (they were to live there under an increasingly unstable truce for almost eight months), the Spaniards began to realize the people of this astonishing city were less amenable than they seemed; that the great warriors, for instance, who spoke with such soft courtesy, were fired by an arrogance even greater than their own. The dream city increasingly took on aspects of nightmare as apparent similarities dissolved into sinister parodies of their own practices, most dramatically in the business of worship.

The Aztecs were an admirably pious people. Their service to the gods was unwearying, a demanding ritual calendar fervently celebrated. Priests were everywhere. Like Spanish priests, most abstained from women, and their bodies, thinned like those of Spanish ascetics by rigorous fasting and scarred by the disciplines of self-mortification, were decently concealed by long dark robes. But those robes were stained with human blood, and their long hair was clotted with it, and while some of the blood was their own, drawn from the lacerations they inflicted on their ears, tongues, and penises, most came from the human victims they slew daily. An essential part of the rituals conducted before those flowery shrines crowning the shining pyramids was the killing of tribute slaves, or captured warriors. As the months passed the Spaniards saw women, children, and infants die under the knives of the priests, and learnt that even their gentle hostage-host Moctezoma could not be dissuaded from the regular sacrifice of living beings–and, as they were convinced, from eating the flesh of his victims.

The very order of the city, once understood, became its own threat. Despite their medieval walls, Spanish towns were porous. Anyone entering Tenochtitlan did so by permission, and under scrutiny. The Spaniards held Moctezoma prisoner, but they were prisoners too. So they retreated to their narrow quarters, and even there knew themselves to be watched. And when the truce collapsed at last into violence, they learnt in the course of one terrible night, as they fled and died along the causeways, that this beautiful city could transform on an instant into a death-trap, and its courteous citizens into murderous hunters of men.

Over the next two years the Spaniards and a host of Indian allies (like other imperial powers, the Aztecs were well hated) discovered that the only way to break Tenochtitlan’s resistance was to destroy it stone by stone, which they slowly, methodically, bitterly did. Now we know the city only from a few excavations, and the words of men who were present at its dying. The shadowy Tenochtitlan we reconstruct from those remains and re-activate through the disciplined historical imagination affronts our expectations of urban life almost as much as the living city did its Spanish destroyers.

First, consider again its peculiar location: on a lake, which was once noisome swampland. The city had been founded, as the Aztecs (or “Mexica,” as they called themselves) told it, only in the year Two House, which is 1325 in the Christian reckoning. Its site was fixed by the god Huitzilopochtli, who sent a sign to the priests of his wandering tribe of his sacred will. It came in the form of a great eagle. A later Indian scholar recalled the moment as described in the old stories: “and when the eagle saw the Mexicans, he bowed his head low . . . Its nest, its pallet, was of every kind of precious feather . . . and they also saw strewn about the heads of sundry birds, the heads of precious birds strung together, and some birds’ feet and bones. And the god called out to them, he said to them, ‘O Mexicans, it shall be here!’’’

That is an unusual beginning for a city. We expect cities to come into existence by a geographical or political circumstance: a confluence of rivers, a strategic pass, an economic opportunity, an alliance; not by an announcement made by a god reinforced by a sacred bird’s symbolic promise of luxuries to come through success in war. But we also notice that perhaps tribal gods choose shrewdly. It was possible that the local earthly powers might let homeless refugees get away with squatting on swampy, useless land, especially if the tribe’s young men could be exploited as mercenaries.

However, while the exigencies of life, environment, and circumstance profoundly influenced the development of Tenochtitlan, their god-imposed destiny was to remain paramount throughout the city’s brief, brilliant existence. Tragically, it was its people’s knowledge of their sacred destiny that rendered the surrender Cortès expected hourly during those last days of siege psychologically impossible, so guaranteeing their own and the city’s destruction.

We also expect cities to be loosely knit: an agglomeration of anonymous individuals enjoying both the freedom and the misery unfettered individualism allows. The old saying “town air makes free” encapsulates folk memories of the escape by European populations from the control of master-ridden feudal countrysides to the promising liberty of “the city.” There was no freedom in Tenochtitlan. While the city’s life depended on the movement of people (merchants, craftsmen, carriers, peddlers) and goods (food, clothing, raw materials, firewood) brought daily into the city by canoe or causeway, that movement was strictly controlled at a series of checkpoints. The hundreds of other strangers brought into the imperial city as war captives and tribute slaves were closely guarded until they faced the sacrificial knives. Why did Tenochtitlan mistrust outsiders, given its unchallengeable military and economic supremacy?

Its own citizens were equally controlled by an ingenious interlocking system of urban supervision. It began with the smallest domestic unit of the family compound, and then ran through the immediate neighborhood, whose inhabitants were, historically, kin related and often specializing in the same trade, through “wards” ruled by local lords in association with regional councils, to “quarters,” and so on up to a sophisticated central administration with some of the characteristics of a professional bureaucracy, but which remained under the jurisdiction of a council of hereditary lords who allocated executive and judicial offices between themselves. Each level owed service to the one above, and each in return gained a share in imperial bounty: a guaranteed “trickle-down” effect. This is the kind of system we might expect to find in post-revolution China, but not in a pre-modern nascent state in central Mexico. What had begun as a simple clan-based organization had transformed in the course of not much more than a hundred years into a highly effective form of urban centralism resting on a strong base of family and local loyalties. Tenochtitlan offered urban opportunities without the loss of the warmth of kin relationships, or the costs–and the liberties–of urban depersonalization.

We are left with a puzzle. Tenochtitlan was economically dynamic. How did its managers stimulate individual ambition and the intensification of economic inequality while sustaining the stability of the clan? For example: if the guild of long-distance merchants looks very like a monopolistic corporation to us, some merchants became much wealthier than others, while within clans traditional lords could sink into poverty, and carry their kinsfolk and dependants down with them. I think the key is that, despite visible inequities, all males and therefore all families had a ladder to prestige and wealth: warriordom. Combat was a career open to talent from all ranks, and every boy trained for war in his local warrior house. Most never rose beyond the local level and were called to serve only if there was need of a mass levy to subdue an unruly province. But some, by courage or luck or skill, rose through a clear and honest hierarchy to become stars in the warrior firmament, bringing glory and material rewards both to their kin and their locality. Nowadays the best comparison is with a local lad winning national prestige and wealth as, say, a ballplayer or a boxer, so bathing his family, friends, and neighborhood in the refracted light of his glamour. I think of the warrior hierarchy as a set of external stairs, rather like a fire escape, running up the side of an otherwise rigid social structure. Gross failure was punished, but it was punished outside the system and remote from the kin, by death on the sacrificial stone of another city.

Tenochtitlan’s precarious, dynamic order was held together by a passionate devotion to religion and the discharging of the Aztecs’ special and ever-expanding obligation to the gods. The Aztecs knew themselves to be a chosen people. It was their task to sustain the movement of the natural order–the sequence of seasons above all–by nourishing the earth with the “sacred water” of human blood, and sustaining the heat and energy of the sun by feeding him (he was unequivocally male) with hot pulsing human hearts. This faith entailed not withdrawal but passionate engagement with the world, and lacked any concern for the individual soul. Instead it committed its believers to labor and to urgent military and sacrificial action. This city was no engine for secularization.

As for more intimate politics: warrior societies are typically uncomfortable places for women, who are regarded as breeders and feeders of fighting men or their off-duty toys. It is true that the Aztec city maintained official brothels, the “Houses of Joy,” staffed by tribute girls whose sexual services were doled out to successful warriors as rewards. Their own women were treated very differently. In metaphysical terms Aztecs dreaded what we would call “the female principle,” which they saw as embodied in the dreadful image of the voracious “Earth Mother,” who “ate the Sun” nightly, and who endlessly devoured her own children in an inescapable cycle of destruction and regeneration. Women who died in the throes of childbirth and in thrall to her sacred powers were believed to become her agents. Transformed into witches, they regularly returned to earth to afflict and destroy children. But women in the social world were free from the taint of the dangerous sacred, and enjoyed substantial protections, along with a high degree of freedom. It is true that public politics was an exclusively male domain, but women could pursue a craft, run a business, and control their own property independently, and won social repute by doing so. Wives enjoyed legal protection from marital abuse, and took unchallengeable custody of the younger children in cases of marital breakdown. Even more surprisingly, they were understood to have a right to sexual fulfillment. The old Aztec nobles who are our chief informants of how life was lived in pre-conquest Tenochtitlan also acknowledged women’s lively participation in informal social occasions, and the cruel wit they used to puncture male pretensions. It seems that only the priests and the greatest warriors were safe from their tongues.

This account can no more than skim the surface of a remarkable experiment in urban living, an experiment that falls quite outside our assumptions and our experience. Cities are as complex and various as the humans who inhabit them, and every close study rebukes our parochialism. Confronted by the complicated actuality of Tenochtitlan, we are reminded of how implausible it is to dream of imposed conformity.

Further Reading: If you would like to know more of the texture of life in Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish conquest, you could begin with the paperback edition of my Aztecs: An Interpretation (New York, Cambridge, Melbourne, 1991) especially part one, “The City.” For pure pleasure and the excitement of an eyewitness account, I recommend Bernal Diaz del Castillo’s The True History of the Conquest of New Spain (Mexico), various editions.

This article originally appeared in issue 3.4 (July, 2003).

Inga Clendinnen is an emeritus scholar at LaTrobe University, Bundoora, Australia, and has written on the Aztecs and the Yucatec Maya at Spanish contact. Her most recent books are Reading the Holocaust (New York, Cambridge, and Melbourne, 2000) and Tiger’s Eye: A Memoir (New York, 2001).

War and finances in America, from the U.S.-Mexican War to the present

The American republic seeks “peace with…all the world. To enlarge its limits is to extend the dominions of peace over additional territories and increasing millions. The world has nothing to fear from military ambition in our Government.” Spoken not by a member of the present administration but by James K. Polk in his inaugural address, these words nonetheless bear an eerie resemblance to the rhetoric of recent years. Today the United States presents itself as a nation at peace with all the world, yet like no other nation it pursues war across the globe. When Polk made his remarks in 1846, however, he was speaking about the annexation of Texas, not about American intervention in another country. Yet within mere months he would order the invasion of the nation’s southern neighbor. From the Mexican perspective the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846-1848 has always seemed an unjust war of conquest. On the American side judgements have been more mixed. But regardless of the moral dimension of the invasion, the Mexican War is of interest for what it says about the long-term rise of the American republic from colonial dependence to world domination.

When Polk was elected president, what is now the mainland United States was divided between five sovereign states. Three were republics: the United States, Mexico, and Texas. Two were monarchies: Great Britain and Russia. In addition to Europeans and their descendants, many stateless Indian nations also resided on this territory. Within three short years, the American republic had acquired title to almost all of its present day North American possessions, a process completed by the Gadsden Purchase in 1853 and the acquisition of Alaska in 1867. In a process where sovereign states disappeared (Texas), contracted (Mexico), or gave up their colonial possessions (Russia), and stateless peoples were dispossessed and killed off (Native Americans), the United States picked up the spoils.

There is a romantic notion that this American expansion was achieved by settlers unaided by government—the rugged frontiersmen of the mythic West. In reality, however, the United States expanded through state action: annexation in the case of Texas; diplomatic settlement with Britain in the case of Oregon; war with Mexico in the case of California and the Southwest; purchase from Russia in the case of Alaska. Against the Indian nations, the full range of state tools was employed: war, diplomacy, and land purchases, which together amounted to a policy of ethnic cleansing. In the competition with states and stateless peoples in North America, the United States won because it could bring to bear a stronger and more efficient state. Although this American state acted in many different ways, underlying them all was the ability to raise money to finance government action. From Ancient Greece to our own times, money has been the supreme sinew of power.

The significance of sound public finances to a nation’s history is vividly demonstrated in the different destinies of Mexico and the United States in the nineteenth century. At first sight the outcome of the competition between the two nations over the Southwest and California may seem a foregone conclusion. After all, the American republic was both richer and more populous than its southern neighbor. But population and wealth matter little to a state’s strength if the government cannot mobilize and translate such social resources into military power. This is not as easy as it may sound and failures are common in the records of history. Natural circumstances did not make Mexico a poor nation. Before independence, New Spain had not only been a prosperous colony but had also generated a substantial tax revenue. On average, annual tax collections amounted to some fourteen million dollars in the late 1780s. This can be compared to the four to six million dollars that the federal government north of the border raised annually in the mid 1790s. Even after independence, Mexico’s tax collections were far from insignificant. As late as the period 1840 to 1844, Mexico’s tax revenue was only marginally smaller than that of the American central government.

The problem was that despite substantial tax collections, the Mexican government ran large and growing deficits for every year between 1826 and 1844. Tax reforms were tried, but the government lacked the political muscle to implement them over the long term. When deficits could not be met by raising taxes, the government turned to the loan market, first in London and then domestically. Within merely three years, payment on the London loans was suspended and this effectively cut off Mexico’s access to foreign credit and forced the government to turn to domestic lenders. Gradually the Mexican treasury fell into the hands of groups of creditors who provided the government with short-term loans at often usurious interest. To secure these loans the government often had to transfer control over government assets such as customs collections, mines, the mint, and government monopolies, a practice that further depleted the treasury. The government tried to make ends meet by cutting or withholding the salaries of government employees and reducing payments to the army. Such policies were highly unpopular among affected groups. Above all they bred discontent in the army and made officers and soldiers willing instruments of coups. Thus, weak government generated weak finances, which in turn further weakened the government. When the American invaders poured over the Rio Bravo del Norte, the Mexican government was thus in no condition to repel them.

The United States in contrast stood strong in 1846, possessing the fiscal and financial institutions as well as the experience necessary to raise money to meet extraordinary expenses such as war. To the Americans, funding the war with Mexico proved to be easy. As in the present-day conflict in Iraq, the administration avoided raising taxes to pay for the war. While Polk and his treasury secretary Robert J. Walker may not have agreed with Republican Tom DeLay that “nothing is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes,” they did engage in ambitious reforms to reduce the fiscal burden in the face of war. Rather than risk alienating the citizenry by levying taxes to pay for a controversial war, the administration borrowed more than eighty million dollars, about three times the annual tax revenue. These loans were secured mostly on American financial markets, which by the 1840s had become very advanced, and to a lesser extent in London and on the European continent. For the first time, the government made use of the services of investment banking firms to further facilitate borrowing. Meanwhile, on the other side of the border the Mexican government continued to mismanage its finances. Mexico began the war by suspending payments on the nation’s public debt. Although this action reduced expenses it also made sure that no voluntary loans would be forthcoming. Instead, the war effort, such as it was, was financed with forced loans and army requisitions. At every step, the Mexican government relied on coercion rather than voluntary action when raising money.

The war with the United States was only one instance in a series of crises when Mexico’s sovereignty was undermined as the result of the government’s weakness. Often enough these crises could be directly attributed to the troubled nature of Mexico’s public finances. At other times, lack of money triggered or exacerbated political crises. Spanish troops sent to reconquer Mexico were repulsed in 1829. In 1838, French forces occupied Veracruz to secure compensation for damages to French-owned property. Five years after the U.S.-Mexican War ended, the United States bought territory that now is part of southern Arizona. In 1857, a civil war began and bonds emitted by the losing side found their way into the hands of French creditors. When the new post-war Mexican government refused to honor this debt, Britain, France, and Spain decided to intervene militarily. In 1861 their troops landed in Veracruz. Britain and Spain soon disassociated themselves from this venture when they realized that Napoleon III had more ambitious plans for Mexico than debt collection. Hardly more than a decade after the American army had left, Mexico was again conquered by a foreign power.

Whereas the period between independence in 1821 and the establishment of the Porfiriato in 1877 was one of political turmoil and territorial disintegration for Mexico, the antebellum era was an age of expansion for the United States. Mexico’s distress highlights the significance of the successful fiscal and financial reforms undertaken by the federal government in the United States after the adoption of the Constitution. After troubled beginnings, the fledgling American republic very rapidly copied British methods of public finance, just as Britain had copied “Dutch finance” after the Glorious Revolution. The mastermind behind the reform of American finances was the nation’s first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton. Under Hamilton’s direction, Congress federalized much of the debt the states had run up during the War of Independence, merged it with the federal debt, and converted the entire public debt into long-term interest-bearing bonds. Congress also reformed the tax system so that the federal government could draw a stable income from customs duties, thereby allowing it to service the public debt to perfection. By making good on its debts, the value of government debt—represented by the price of government bonds—rose and public credit was restored. Hamilton was of course one of the more controversial figures of the early republic and historians have sometimes reduced his financial program to a blatant attempt to enrich the members of his own (adopted) class. But such an interpretation misses Hamilton’s crucial achievement. When he retired from the Treasury in 1795, the United States had both a productive and stable tax system and the ability to borrow large sums of money on the open credit market.

The creation of a stable and productive fiscal regime and the transformation of post-war financial chaos into an ordered public debt may never become the stuff of heroic narrative, but these achievements were nonetheless of immense significance for the nation’s future. Between the adoption of the Constitution and the outbreak of the Civil War, the federal government financed a number of institutions and ventures that helped the nation grow in wealth, size, and power. It maintained a small army in the West that acted as a border constabulary, pacifying Indian nations and policing the frontiers. Special envoys treated with the Indians to secure title to their land in return for compensation in money or kind. Land offices surveyed and sold public lands throughout the West. By means of its diplomatic corps and its navy, the federal government extended its reach far beyond the nation’s borders. The consular departments, with representatives in every major port worldwide, looked out for the interests of American merchantmen and sailors. Although the navy was small it was used successfully against weak opponents, such as the Barbary powers, or stateless actors, such as pirates. The major duty of the navy was to promote American commerce by protecting merchant vessels, whalers, overseas citizens, and their property; by opening markets through diplomatic and commercial agreements; and sometimes by the threat and use of force. Already by 1840 the United States maintained permanent squadrons in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, the West Indies, the South Atlantic, and East Asia. The navy also promoted commerce by collecting important information on seas and river basins, on tides, currents, and winds, and on whaling areas and potential new markets for American manufactured goods.

But the most spectacular uses of the government’s financial capacity were the funding of war and territorial purchase. The Mexican War was far from the only time this power was put to use. Given their aversion to taxes, debts, and big government in general, it is ironic that it was the Jeffersonians who made the most use of Hamilton’s fiscal reforms. Hamilton’s ingenious restoration of public credit made it possible for Jefferson to purchase Louisiana from France in 1804. It also allowed Madison to embark on a “second war of independence” against Britain in 1812. Loans paid for land the government acquired from Spain in 1819 and for the territory and claims of Texas after its annexation by the United States. Loans and taxes paid not only for the invasion of Mexico in 1846 but also for the compensation for territory surrendered by Mexico in 1848 and again in 1853. Despite the enormous debt run up during the Civil War, the federal government found the means to buy Alaska in 1867. And there could have been more. Much as he fretted over the debt created by the war against Mexico, President James K. Polk had his eyes on Yucatan and never hesitated when he saw the chance to buy Cuba from Spain for the princely sum of one hundred million dollars.

The ability to promote the national interest and to maintain the territorial integrity of a nation depends on the government’s capacity for action. That Mexico lost half its territory in the decades after independence must be ascribed chiefly to the difficulties it experienced in trying to establish efficient and legitimate governmental institutions, not least a stable and productive fiscal system and sound practices of debt management. That the United States doubled its territory at Mexico’s expense was a result of the nation’s success in creating a strong government based on strong public finances. The consequences for the Mexican republic of its failure to create an efficient central state apparatus were profound. In all but name the new nation was reduced to colonial status. Unable to maintain its sovereignty and territorial integrity the Mexican nation lacked the means to govern its own fate—the very meaning of republicanism. In contrast, the significance to the United States of its success in creating a strong and stable government was that it avoided the fate of Mexico, becoming instead a truly independent republic. For better or worse, a strong government also made it possible for the American republic to join Europe’s empires in dominating the less fortunate nations of the world.

Further Reading:

Readers who wish to explore the relationship between public finance and political power can start in no better place than John Brewer’s The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688-1783 (London, 1989). An extensive treatment of the funding of the Mexican War is found in James W. Cummings’s excellent University of Oklahoma dissertation from 2003, to be published this fall as Towards Modern Public Finance: The American War with Mexico, 1846-1848 (London, forthcoming). The troubled finances of Mexico are the topic of Barbara A. Tenenbaum, The Politics of Penury: Debts and Taxes in Mexico, 1821-1856 (Albuquerque, N.Mex., 1986). Hamilton’s reforms of American public finances are analyzed in Max M. Edling and Mark D. Kaplanoff, “Alexander Hamilton’s Fiscal Reform: Transforming the Structure of Taxation in the Early Republic,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 61:4 (October 2004): 713-44, and in Max M. Edling, “‘So immense a power in the affairs of war’: Alexander Hamilton and the Restoration of Public Credit,” The William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 64:2 (April, 2007): 287-326.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Max M. Edling holds a research fellowship from the Swedish Research Council and is a member of the history department at Uppsala University. He is the author of A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (2003).