1. Original quote from 1795, in Peter Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 22.
2. A “system of land surveys which, perfected by practice and experience, [would later be] adopted by nearly every” country in the world. Roy Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain 1776–1970 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 8.
3. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 469.
4. Jerry Ostler, “‘Just and Lawful War’ as Genocidal War in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832,” Journal of Genocide Research 18, no. 1 (2016).
5. White, Middle Ground, 474. Jefferson, for instance, as president, held that the Indians would simply be subsumed into white society through property ownership and marriage. In a December 1808 letter to the Miami, Potawatomie, Delaware, and Chippewa, he wrote, “When once you have property, you will want laws and magistrates to protect your property and persons, and to punish those among you who commit crimes. You will find that our laws are good for this purpose. You will wish to live under them; you will unite yourselves with us, join in our great councils, and form one people with us, and we shall all be Americans. You will mix with us by marriage. Your blood will run in our veins and will spread with us over this great island.” (Gary Nash, “The Hidden History of Mestizo America,” Journal of American History 2, no. 3 [December 1995]); Aziz Rana, The Two Faces of American Freedom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.
6. Thomas Hart Benton, Thirty Years View: Or a History of the Workings of the American Government, from 1820 to 1850 (New York: D. Appleton, 1854), 104. (Reprinted New York: Greenwood Press, 1968.)
7. Tamara Venit Shelton, A Squatter’s Republic: Land and the Politics of Monopoly in California, 1850–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013).
8. Claude Oubre, 40 Acres and a Mule (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2012). About 1,000 black families did end up with deeds.
9. On the Preemption Act of 1830, see Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 50; on the Preemption Act of 1841, see ibid., 89; on the Homestead Act of 1862, see ibid., 206; on the Southern Homestead Act, see Oubre, 40 Acres and a Mule; on the Timber Culture Act of 1872, see Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 218; on the Desert Land Act of 1877, see ibid., 249; on the Reclamation Act of 1902, see Richard Wahl, “Redividing the Waters: The Reclamation Act of 1902,” National Resources & Environment 10, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 31–38.
10. As Roy Robbins explained, “Congress intended that the domain not fall into the hands of those who already had enough land” (Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 89).
11. Ibid., 207. At the same time, to ensure public control of the overall process of settlement, the Act also broke the railroad’s landholdings into carefully isolated portions. By 1871, citizens put an end to railroad land grants entirely and began to claw back what they had given away, and by 1884 they had moved to take back lands the railroads had not used or sold off (ibid., 277–278).
12. Paul S. Taylor, “The 160-Acre Water Limitation and the Water Resources Commission,” Western Political Quarterly 3, no. 3 (September 1950): 435–450.
13. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 273.
14. And so the goal remained 150 years later, when in the middle of the Great Depression, agriculture secretary Henry Wallace wrote, “I know of no better means of reconstructing our agriculture on a thoroughly sound and permanently desirable basis than to make as its foundation the family-size, owner-operated farm” (Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Coming of the New Deal, vol. 2 of The Age of Roosevelt [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1959], 380).
15. Don Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), 83.
16. Onuf, Statehood and Union, xvii.
17. Ibid., 133.
18. Ketcham, James Madison, 301.
19. The most well-known proponent is Robert Nozick, in Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 25–27. The term was originally used in a negative sense by the German socialist Ferdinand Lassalle in 1862.
20. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 25.
21. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 8.
22. Onuf writes that in the Ordinance, Americans structured the market to promote “compact” townships. Their goal was to create “larger, denser, more productive settlements” (Onuf, Statehood and Union, 29–31). Robbins writes that until the Revolution, America had been developed under two very different systems of land use. In New England, under the township system, entire communities would first form and then pioneer a new town together. In the “proprietary colonies” of the South, by contrast, there was little to no planning, and individuals tended to squat in isolated homesteads and sparsely populated communities. “By time of independence, even southerners recognized that experience attested to the fact that the nature of society was to a very great extent determined by land policy” (Robbins, Our Landed Heritage, 7).
23. Original text of the Ordinance, cited in Onuf, Statehood and Union, 24.
24. Onuf writes that the authors of the Ordinance aimed to establish “a national market for western lands” in which it was Congress that regulated supply of land. The authors believed that it was surveying itself—the careful demarcation of the parcels of property themselves—that made “a true market situation” characterized by “open competitive bidding” possible (Onuf, Statehood and Union, 15, 35, 42).
25. Ibid., 60.
26. Richard John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
27. Manessah Cutler, a land company promoter, quoted in Onuf, Statehood and Union, 38.
28. Ketcham’s words, in James Madison, 301.
29. James Madison, “Who Are the Best Keepers of the Peoples Liberties,” National Gazette, December 20, 1792, emphasis added. Available online at Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-14-02-0384. (Original source: The Papers of James Madison, vol. 14, 6 April 1791 – 16 March 1793, ed. Robert A. Rutland and Thomas A. Mason [Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1983], 426–427.)
30. James Madison, “Republican Distribution of Citizens,” March 5, 1792, in The Writings of James Madison, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1900). Available online at https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/madison-the-writings-vol-6-1790-1802.
31. Gabor Boritt, Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978), 275.
32. Walt Whitman, Speciman Days and Collect (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2015), 255.
33. John Rae, Life of Adam Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1895).
34. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to Thomas Mann Randolph Jr.,” Founders Online, National Archives, May 30, 1790, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-16-02-0264. (Original source: The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 16, 30 November 1789–4 July 1790, ed. Julian P. Boyd [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961], 448–450.)
35. In Britain, regulation of local markets for foods and other goods traces at least as far back as 1086, when William the Conqueror ordered the survey of all Britain’s lands and towns and institutions, for what came to be known as the Domesday Book. George Williams, “Early Markets and the Market Cross,” in Economic Action in Theory and Practice: Anthropological Investigations (Research in Economic Anthropology, Vol. 30), edited by D. Wood (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2010), 257–274.
36. William Novak, The People’s Welfare (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 95, 96.
37. That evening handbills signed “Joyce Junior” were nailed up about town, in 1776 or 1777 (Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 237).
38. Ibid., 311.
39. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, wrote that such a monopoly results in a variety of harms, including that “all the other subjects of the state are taxed very absurdly in two different ways; first, by the high price of goods, which, in the case of a free trade, they could buy much cheaper; and, secondly, by their total exclusion from a branch of business, which it might be both convenient and profitable for many of them to carry on [emphasis added].” Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations (New York: Modern Library, 1994), 814. The idea that monopolies infringe on the liberty of individuals to engage in certain lines of business or work later played a major role in the concept of “industrial liberty” as defined by Senator John Sherman in his speech defending the antitrust law that bears his name (“Trusts, Speech of Hon. John Sherman of Ohio, Delivered in the Senate of the United States,” Friday, March 21, 1890, available through the HathiTrust Digital Library, University of Wisconsin, Madison), and later used by Louis Brandeis (see, for instance, “The Regulation of Competition versus the Regulation of Monopoly,” An Address to the Economic Club of New York, November 1, 1912). James Huston traces this “free labor ideology” to what he calls the “doctrine of calling,” and writes that “This mastery of contribution—of production, of manufacture, of skill” enabled individual men and women to develop “pride” being able to take productive part in society. Huston, The British Gentry, 11.
40. Smith famously concluded this section with the observation that “without the assistance and co-operation of many thousands, the very meanest person in a civilised country could not be provided, even according to what we very falsely imagine the easy and simple manner in which he is commonly accommodated.” Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 13.
41. “The wise and virtuous man is at all times willing that his own private interest should be sacrificed to the public interest of his own particular order or society. He is at all times willing, too, that the interest of this order or society should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the state or sovereignty, of which it is only a subordinate part. He should, therefore, be equally willing that all those inferior interests should be sacrificed to the greater interest of the universe, to the interest of that great society of all sensible and intelligent beings, of which God himself is the immediate administrator and director.” Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), C. III.
42. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Fox’s East India Bill, December 1, 1783,” in The Speeches of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke (Dublin: James Duffy, 1862).
43. Smith, Wealth of Nations, 812.
44. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 321.
45. “The right of incorporation as practiced in early America was a special gift (accompanied by special privileges) bestowed by the polity upon select associations as quid pro quo for the performance of special duties and obligations” (Novak, The People’s Welfare, 105). With these regulations in place, Americans sped up the creation of new corporations, to 114, between 1791 and 1795 (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 321).
46. Samuel Blodget, Economica: A Statistical Manual for the United States of America (City of Washington: Printed for the author, 1806), in Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 321.
47. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 321.
48. Eric Hilt, “Early American Corporations and the State,” in Corporations and American Democracy, edited by Naomi Lamoreaux and William Novak (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017).
49. Novak, The People’s Welfare, 294, note 111. For religious establishments in the 1780s, see also George Heberton Evans Jr., Business Incorporations in the United States 1800–1943 (New York: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1948).
50. Forrest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton: A Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 4.
51. Ibid., 215.
52. “The result would be a regional and class concentration of power Madison could only view with alarm” (Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography, 313).
53. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution, 395.
54. Hamilton’s financial system was modeled in part on Walpole’s corrupt manipulation of the House of Commons (using Crown patronage). John Harold Plumb, Sir Robert Walpole: The King’s Minister (London: Penguin Press, 1960).
55. Ketcham, James Madison, 322.
56. Ibid., 314.
57. Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 144–145.
58. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005), 396. See also Sharon Ann Murphy, Other People’s Money: How Banking Worked in the Early American Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017); Peter Temen, The Jacksonian Economy (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); and Hammond, Banks and Politics in America.
59. Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (New York: August M. Kelly, 1967), 166.
60. Ketcham, James Madison, 297.
61. Keane, Tom Paine, 90.
62. “By the late 1780s many of the younger revolutionary leaders like James Madison were willing to confront the reality of interests in America with a very cold eye” (Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 252).
63. David Hume, “Of the Independency of Parliament,” 1742, in David Hume: Political Writings, edited by Stuart Warner and Donald Livingston (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 113.
64. Makan Delrahim, “Remarks for the Antitrust New Frontiers Conference,” Tel Aviv, June 11, 2019. We also see such thinking among progressives; Ralph Nader in a 1976 book called Taming the Giant Corporation notes on the very first page that “The Constitution of the United States does not explicitly mention the business corporation” (Ralph Nader, Mark Green, and Joel Seligman, Taming the Giant Corporation: How the Largest Corporations Control Our Lives [New York: W. W. Norton, 1977], 15).
65. James Madison, “Federalist 10,” in Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Hamilton, The Federalist: A Commentary on the Constitution of the United States, edited by Robert Scigliano (New York: Modern Library, 2001).
66. James Madison, “Letter to Thomas Jefferson,” October 17, 1788, The James Madison Letters, vol. 1, 1769–1793 (New York: Townsend Mac Coun, 1884), 427.
67. E. A. J. Johnson, The Foundations of American Economic Freedom: Government and Enterprise in the Age of Washington (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973), 188.
68. Jefferson in 1816: “In so complicated a science as political economy, no one axiom can be laid down as wise and expedient for all times and circumstances, and for their contraries” (McCoy, The Elusive Republic, 7).
69. Madison, “Federalist 51,” The Federalist, Scigliano, emphasis added.
70. Hounshell, From the American System to Mass Production, 25–26.
71. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1945), vol. 2, 156–157.
72. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution, 308.
73. Ibid., 328.
74. Ibid., 7.
75. Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014).
76. “The breadth of its devastation cannot be overstated” (Leigh Merritt, Masterless Men: Poor Whites and Slavery in the Antebellum South [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017], 4).
77. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 49–50.
78. Rod Soodalter, “These Pimps of Piracy,” New York Archives Magazine 9, no. 1 (Summer 2009).
79. Charles Sumner, His Complete Works (Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1900), 43.
80. Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Sanitary Fair in Baltimore,” April 18, 1864, in The Writings of Abraham Lincoln, 1863–1865 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1923), 121.
81. Jefferson in his 1784 draft of the Ordinance proposed excluding slavery from all western lands after 1800, a plan that failed due to absence of one delegate. Rufus King of Massachusetts resurrected the idea, and Jefferson’s language, in 1785. King’s language was then retained almost verbatim in the final version approved by Congress in July 1787 (Onuf, Statehood and Union, 110–111).
82. Amar, America’s Constitution, 260 and 264–266.
83. The numbers added up. The 1820 census showed that over the previous two decades the population of Ohio grew by 200,000 more than Kentucky’s (Onuf, Statehood and Union, 127).
84. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 18.
85. Celebration of the 47th Anniversary of the First Settlement of the State of Ohio, by Native Citizens, 1835 (Onuf, Statehood and Union, 138). As Onuf would conclude, “Here, in short, was a republican landscape, beautiful in its diversity and its busy pursuits, as well as for its ennobling effects on an enterprising citizenry” (ibid., 146).
86. In the years leading up to the Civil War, a main subject of debate was the validity of the Ordinance’s prohibition on slavery. We see this in Justice Roger Taney’s contortionist efforts, in his notorious Dred Scott decision of 1857, to prise apart the Ordinance, with what one historian characterized as a “phantasmal history of the United States” (Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case, 372). We see this also in Lincoln’s strong defense of the validity of the prohibition in the Ordinance, in his debates with Stephen Douglas (Harry Jaffa, Crisis of the House Divided: An Interpretation of the Issues in the Lincoln-Douglas Debates [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1959], 295).
87. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 266.
88. Onuf, Statehood and Union, 33.
89. Merritt, Masterless Men, 6.
90. Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Specimen Days and Collect (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2014), 252.
91. On the goal of full economic independence, Douglass wrote: “My politics in regard to the negro is simply this … Give him fair play and let him alone, but be sure you give him fair play [as] a man before the law.… If you see a negro wanted to purchase land, let him alone; let him purchase it. If you see him on the way to school, let him go; don’t say he shall not go into the same school with other people.… If you see him on his way to the workshop, let him alone; let him work; don’t say you will not work with him” (David Blight, Frederick Douglass, Prophet of Freedom [New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018], 563). On having the same voting power as white citizens: ibid., 264. On sharing the principles of the Declaration: “I have said that the Declaration of Independence is the ring-bolt to the chain of your nation’s destiny; so, indeed, I regard it. The principles contained in that instrument are saving principles. Stand by those principles, be true to them on all occasions, in all places, against all foes, and at whatever cost” (Douglass, “The Meaning of July Fourth, for the Negro,” July 5, 1852, Selected Speeches and Writings, 188).
92. Blight, Frederick Douglass, 304. A fan of Lord Byron, Douglass often quoted Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage: “Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow.” Blight, Frederick Douglass, 287.
93. Ibid., 395.
94. Ibid., 637.
95. Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), 84.
96. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction, 30.