"The Right to Purchase Is as Free as the Right to Sell": Defining Consumers as Citizens in the Auction-house Conflicts of the Early Republic
This article explores the commercial turf war over auction houses in the 1820s, a dispute which inadvertently altered how Americans imagined the civic rights and obligations of consumers. Beginning in 1817, east coast merchants embarked on a self-interested crusade to convince Congress to tax auction houses out of existence. As the auctioneers retaliated, this private conflict over profits escalated into a public debate on the state of the nation's political economy. Seeking public sympathy, both sides quickly focused on the needs of purchasers, arguing that their business alone upheld the rights of the consumer in a chaotic and corrupt marketplace. But this strategy failed as the choices and desires of individual shoppers forced both sides to reformulate their understanding of the consumer. As Americans continued to flock to shops that stocked goods bought at auction, merchants in particular conceded that championing the consumer did not serve their cause. Abandoning hope that a tariff would curb the success of the auction-house, the merchants began to argue that consumers must regulate themselves for the good of the nation. By 1828, this argument hardened into a new understanding, that placed the "right to purchase" alongside a set of new obligations, ones that made consumer choice and taste a requirement of good citizenship.
What Counts?: Political Economy, or Ways to Make Early America Add Up
The field of early American political economy has quietly grown in the last decade, as historians have used a flexible framework to analyze how a wide variety of economic practices and ideas related to formal and informal political formations. Using capacious definitions of “political economy,” historians have followed in the footsteps of their sources, early American political economists, who, unsure of the range of the mechanisms and forces they were trying to describe, were wary of too narrowly delimiting their field of investigation. In contrast to other methodological approaches to early American economic practice, historians investigating political economy have largely been keen to “keep early America weird,” recognizing the unfamiliar and the dissonant in the past while generating important new perspectives on topics of perennial interest, such as the links between slavery and economic growth, and opening new inquiries into state-formation, market-creation, and the import of the early republic’s global connections. This essay highlights some of the common themes and questions driving recent work, delineates how histories of political economy both fit within and diverge from new histories of capitalism, and offers suggestions for further study.
A history of the people of the United States during Lincoln's administration
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