He would like to thank the following for their helpful comments: Barbara A. Black, Donald Dewey, Sigmund Damond, Louis Henkin, Norman Mint, Erlc L. McKitrick, Richard B. Morris and Alden Vaughan of Columbia University; Vincent P. Carosso of New York University; Joel Colton of Duke University; Tian Kang Go of Chuo University (Tokyo); John Hoigham of the Johns Hopkins University; Jackson Turner Main of the University Colorado; Jerome J. Nadelhalf of the University of Maine; Rosalind Seneca of Drew University, and Frederick D. Williams of Michigan State University.Google Scholar

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³ This standard depiction of medieval conditions hardly requires documentation. For changes in those conditions see de Roover, Raymond, in Lane, Frederic C. and Riemersma, Jelle C., eds., Enterprise and Secular Change (Homewood, 1953);Google Scholar and Baldwin, John, “The Medieval Merchant before the Bar of Canon Law,” Papers in Michigan Academy of Science, Arts, and Letters, 44 (1959).Google Scholar

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¹⁰ Appleby Capitalism and a New Social Order, p. 7. The expression “America was born free” is apparently from Degler, Out of Our Past, p. 5.Google ScholarBailyn, Bernard, Education in the Forming of American Society: Needs and Opportunities for Study (Chapel Hill, 1960).Google Scholar

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¹⁶ Nash, Gary B. makes the point that “It is easy, however, to overstate the operation of a well-oiled set of relationships between superiors and inferiors, and the unresentful acceptance of them as natural. Many urban people deferred because their economic security was bound up with a landlord, employer, or creditor. This was economic clientage and it doubtlessly produced social deference”. The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), p. 9.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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¹⁹ See the discussion of these issues in McCusker and Menard, Economy of British America, pp. 258–76, and Jones, Wealth of a Nation to Be, pp. 155–94, 381–88.Google Scholar

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²⁸ This interpretation finds some support in the insight of Nelson, William E.. “There is evidence,” Nelson writes, “that some members of the postrevolutionary generation consciously sought legal protection of property as a means of insuring economic and social stability… The very idea of property, in sum, may have become a code word for a broad constellation of genuine conservative values, including the preservation of upper-class wealth, community stability, and, perhaps even ethnic unity.” Americanization of the Common Law, (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) p. 127.Google Scholar

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³⁰ In a private communication Eric L. McKitrick makes the arresting suggestion that Hamilton may well have had his own vision of growth, of growth led by merchants rather than by manufacturers. David Hume emphasized the importance of the functions performed by the merchant class and “there is clear evidence of Hamilton's having been much influenced by [Hume's] writings in preparing his own papers on the public credit.” Hamilton's appreciation of merchants is unmistakable, but I believe this is not because he viewed them as instruments of growth. Rather, it was because their imports provided the revenues (in the form of duties) that were essential to the financing of government operations and the servicing of the debt.Google Scholar

³¹ Ogden v. Saunders, 7 U.S. (12 Wheat), 132, 215 (1827); Sturges v. Crowninshield, 17 U.S. (4 Wheat) 362, 368 (1819).Google Scholar

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³⁴ Bank of Augusta v. Earle, 38 U.S. (13 Pet.), 1839, 519; Louisville Rail Road Co. v. Letson, 43 U.S. (2 How.), 1844, 497. I do not wish to imply that this was the end of the matter.Google Scholar

³⁵ Craig v. The State of Missouri, 29 U.S. (4 Pet.) 1830, 410; Briscoe v. The Bank of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, 36 U.S. (11 Pet.), 1837, 257.Google Scholar

³⁶ Ibid., p. 300.

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