The Political Economy of the Original Constitution

There seems to be little dispute that the original Constitution of the United States—and by “original Constitution” I mean the document drafted in 1787 and ratified, along with its first Ten Amendments, in 1789 and 17911—was an economic document. It was a document containing provisions that addressed eco‐ nomic issues and reflected economic attitudes. But the original Constitution was by no means solely an economic document. This Article will argue that if one emphasizes the Constitu‐ tion’s economic dimensions, one should approach it as a document reflecting attitudes toward political economy, that is, the relationship between political theory and economic activity.  

This approach is distinct from another line of scholarship that has been concerned with “economic interpretations” of the Con‐ stitution. The other line of work, first made visible by Charles Beard’s An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution2 and per‐ petuated by Beard’s critics,3 sought to identify the economic “in‐ terests” of the men who drafted the Constitution and to suggest that those individuals—Beard identified them as including shippers, manufacturers, and bankers—wanted a strong central government to further their interests.4 Beard’s critics, by looking more closely at the backgrounds of the Framers, concluded that some of his characterizations were faulty. For example, although Beard claimed that groups whose economic interests centered on “personalty” favored the Constitution, in opposition to those whose interests centered on “realty,” some of Beard’s critics demonstrated that a majority of the Framers derived most of their income from real property holdings.5  

The difficulties with economic interpretations of the Consti‐ tution are twofold. First, the approach, which rests on an “in‐ terest group” analysis of politics and economics fashionable for a time among twentieth‐century historians, is anachronistic be‐ cause it projects later conceptions of the organization of Ameri‐ can political and economic life back on to the framing period. Most wealthy Americans of the framing era derived their in‐ comes from a form of agricultural householding, which could involve extractive agriculture, land speculation, and domestic and international commerce.6 Agricultural households oper‐ ated both as subsistence farming operations and as commercial enterprises, blurring the line between “personal” and “real” property ownership.7 Second, the approach tends to oversim‐ plify. The mere fact that a supporter of the Constitution could be described as having a particular economic interest hardly proves that he supported the Constitution because of that inter‐ est. There are numerous reasons why late‐eighteenth‐century Americans might have supported or opposed a measure in‐ tended to transform the structure of American government. Economic interpretations of the Constitution, in the hands of some historians, become another way of demonstrating those historians’ preference for ascribing weighty causal significance to economic motivations in historical actors.  

Thus, the central question is not whether the Constitution is susceptible of an economic interpretation. Rather, if one as‐ sumes that the original Constitution was in some respects an economic document, one must ask what sort of economic doc‐ ument it was. In other words, on what assumptions about eco‐ nomic activity was the Constitution based? And, what was the relation of those assumptions to broader assumptions about human behavior, human governance, and the course of human events that the Framers held? In short, how might one describe the political economy of the original Constitution?