Building the Empire State. Brian Phillips Murphy
of British imperial rule—charters for business corporations and banks, and monopoly grants for technology and transportation, for example—were repurposed by American lawmakers to serve the republic’s domestic needs.20 By restructuring and selectively bestowing these useful instrumentalities on favored groups, New York State political leaders created an economy of political opportunity that linked private ambition to the public weal.
Flinging the doors of statehouse chambers open to petitioners eager to gain legal privileges and realize exclusive profits resurrected the familiar pre-Revolutionary practice of engaging private entities to finance, construct, and manage civic institutions and ostensibly public assets. The landscape of political opportunity in the early republic was dominated by an economy of influence in which financial capital readily purchased political and regulatory power; this incentivized coalition-building and rewarded legislative skill. It also empowered public officials to steer private capital toward building a financial and transportation infrastructure capable of encouraging further commercial ambition and hastening economic development. Government therefore got things done by deliberately bestowing public authority on individuals and institutions in order to tap private capital and channel selfinterest toward public goods and civic ends.21 As a consequence, legislators willingly—and in some cases inadvertently—sustained the influence of a cadre of unelected political actors whose stature flowed from their personal access to private capital: political entrepreneurs.22
Once they were organized into legally sanctioned and formalized partnerships and corporations, these out-of-doors unelected operatives and political entrepreneurs began curating their interests; they recruited supporters from the ranks of elected officials to deepen and widen their ties to voters. Though far from uniform or unanimous, support for politically oriented entrepreneurs among a growing interlocking directorate of citizen-shareholders and corporate directors frustrated the practical day-to-day efforts of constitution-writers and lawmakers to collar unelected individuals’ and associations’ capabilities to bend the vast power of the state’s rule-making regulatory apparatus in their favor. Successful political entrepreneurs actively interested people in their enterprises by building networks of credit that offered access to debt and capital, by transforming the transactional relationship between modest citizen-shareholder investors and high-born corporate officers into durable long-term political alliances, and by constructing a partisan infrastructure to bring institutional discipline to the state’s official sources of political authority. In the new nation’s political economy, therefore, the energies of government, subordinate political institutions, and political parties were all fueled in large measure by extra-legislative, out-of-doors mobilizations undertaken for economic and material reasons.23
For elected officials and appointees, catering to constituents’ material interests was no distraction; it was the daily grind of the business of governing. Perusing the journals of legislative houses and statute books makes clear that such work consumed a great deal of attention from New York’s political class in the early republic. Across a spectrum of letters of affection and agitation, it is clear that there was a consensus position shared among a broad swath of political entrepreneurs in the early republic—George and DeWitt Clinton, Robert R. Livingston, Robert Fulton, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton, accompanied by a large and wide cohort of less-studied figures—that a chief purpose of politics and government was to advance citizens’ material interests and promote a commercial agenda. Creating a dynamic marketplace required the interposition of state power, and in the view of this cohort, government was supposed to be actively aiding the ambitions of the ambitious; for them, the controversy most often concerned whose enterprising plans merited support.
Although it is not surprising that capital and corporations exercised political power in the early republic (as they still do) or that political actors responded to them (ditto), it was not a given that the institutional ecology of New York State would evolve to revolve around the community of political entrepreneurs at the center of these enterprises. These experiments in privilege and monopoly were tests of the public’s patience for private enterprises entrusted with exclusive rights to execute a public mission. And the political intensity of American corporations’ early origins—particularly banks and transportation enterprises—helps explain why contemporaries and historians alike frequently cast a skeptical eye toward their emergence in the early republic.
This story is, after all, a paradox: corporations morphed from being objects of suspicion and symbols of monarchy in the late eighteenth century to being the dominant tool for capital formation and business organization by the middle of the nineteenth century.24
From the seemingly anti-bank, anticorporate, and antimonopoly political-economy rhetoric of the 1780s, an interwoven set of incorporated banks emerged in the United States that financed a set of semi-exclusive transportation initiatives. It is easy to explain this development as an enlargement of privileges among an already privileged cadre of self-dealing political leaders who succumbed to corruption and materialist temptations. Certainly the metaphysical efforts of political-economy theorists to sort out distinctions between public and private spheres of action was undermined by the state’s adoption of corporations and monopoly grants to run mixed-economy enterprises.25 Most efforts to use politics to restrain the influence of capital in early America were struggles that seem destined to fail.
Yet the subtle, often unspoken assumption underlying many histories of the politics and political economy of the early republic is that angst concerning corporations and concentrations of capital was widespread across thirteen states’ legislatures and the public.26 Through the ideological prisms of republicanism and liberalism, our unfortunate present-day predicament can seem avoidable and even accidental.27 The shorthand narrative goes something like this: starting with the creation of incorporated banks after the Revolution, capital was unleashed with the emergence of rapacious railroads, a “Market Revolution,” and a more laissez-faire marketplace that came to be dominated by trusts and monopolies in the Gilded Age.28 Economic histories of the period often rely on the same narrative to reach a strikingly different conclusion: one celebrating laissez-faire as the demise of the anticapitalist radicalism of the American Revolution and the blossoming of a more nearly perfect and correct set of institutional arrangements between the public and private sectors.29
Historians have identified a spectrum of “good founders” who presciently recognized that corporations, monopolies, and other institutions for capital formation and the aggregation of influence had the potential to endanger the institutions of government and civil society; some believed they had no place in the nation’s political economy, while others thought they could be unleashed only after first being mastered.30 A cadre of state legislators in Pennsylvania held firm in opposing all incorporated banks and trying to repeal an existing bank’s charter, while in Massachusetts lawmakers sought to housetrain corporations by tinkering with the details and complexities of corporate charter language.31 These histories of politics and political economy look to the founding generation for the answers they formulated to questions concerning how interests were to be managed in the young republic, poring over warning signs our forebears missed in this “lost moment” when history could have unfolded in a different way.
But this is precisely why context is key.
Early American lawmakers considering petitions for legal privileges needed to look no further than the 1773 Tea Act for an example of how a corporation’s shareholders could sway parliamentarians’ votes, distorting an empire’s political economy and propelling its colonies into open rebellion. The East India Company, however, was a unique institution without a North American equivalent.32
By contrast, American historians writing in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries approach this subject with their own particular constellation of references. Whenever most people are asked what the word corporation means to them—whether they are detached scholars and journalists, interested policy makers and politicos, or students considering the question for the first time—they conjure answers that reference the signposts of our era. They do not think of the British East India Company or its favored position in the eighteenth-century tea market but settle their brains on the twenty-first-century companies they interact with on a regular basis. To live in the United States today is