1776’s Late Arrivals, Gibbon and Smith in America
The Intellectual Consequences of the American Revolution’s Separation of the British Atlantic Mind
Dear Reader,
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the American Revolutionary War, and next year the 250th of the Declaration of Independence. I have enjoyed students’ questions about the resistance to Parliament and the War of Independence. 1776 is especially on the mind. That date, 1776, is big in our imaginations; it takes up space, represents the rise of a new nation, and the end of the First British Empire. And intellectual developments on both sides of the Atlantic came fast and furious. In January, Thomas Paine published Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, on the Following Interesting Subjects, in Philadelphia. A 47-page pamphlet, it was printed and reprinted because Paine had an agenda and wanted to galvanize the Americans against the monarchy. It was printed and distributed around the same time the colonists learned that King George III rejected their petitions, so Paine had the gift of market timing.
But some things got left out of the conversation, but not by Paine. To say the resistance to Parliament strained relations between the British and the Americans is, of course, an understatement. But what does that look like in operation? Reduced commercial contact. First, these were the days of sailing ships, meaning dependent on the wind. At best, you get from London to Philadelphia in 6 weeks; at worst, more like 3 months. But keep in mind you have to double that for cross-communication. Meaning a message from London to Philadelphia is around a month-and-a-half, and so is the message back from Philly to London town. So, around three months for the message there and back. Imagine you order a product from England, that message is carried physically by a person. That person then has to communicate the message in person or by courier, then the products have to be located at the expected price, payment made, then loaded on another ship that is headed toward the buyer’s home port or a market hub where it will be picked up and transported overland to the purchaser. Premodern logistics are a fascinating part of history. There was so much movement because all messages were in-person in some way. No telegraphs, no telephones, no radio, no television, no internet. In that sense, the world of 1776 was much more like the medieval world or the Roman world than our own.
And there was the embargo. We were, um, at war with the Parliament and soon officially at war with the king after July 4th. You don’t trade with the enemy! In 1774, the First Continental Congress urged colonists to prevent the importation or consumption of goods from Great Britain or the British West Indies, the Caribbean holdings of the Empire, after December 1, 1774. Patriots stopped buying things from the British. But there was a further threat that if the mother country did not get off our backs, the colonists would stop selling; they would cut off exports of colonial products, except for rice, to the same places after September 10, 1775. Consequently, if you were a patriot in the 13 Colonies, you were actively boycotting British goods. If you were a loyalist, you were trying to subvert the boycotts. By 1776, the colonial soon-to-be state governments were cracking down. The Founding Fathers were completely on board with not trading with the Empire, with even Virginia slaveholders saying, “whoa there, we are taking a break on buying more slaves from British traders until Parliament cools it.” And then were was a war on! At the time, the biggest British invasion force in history was dispatched to New York and the eastern seaboard to put down the rebellion. Warships were prioritized, and military-related goods took precedence for transportation across the Atlantic.
And then, in February, volume one of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published by Edward Gibbon. Then, in March, this guy Adam Smith published An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
So remember, at war, six weeks travel time at the best of times, assuming you knew to order it before it came out, and they were published in the bad place, London. While the works came out in 1776, they did not have the impact on the American Founding Fathers that the date makes folks think they did. We were cutting ourselves off from the Empire, intentionally. But that also meant that the British and American Enlightenments diverged further than they already had due to an ocean being between them.
Gibbon’s work was anti-Christianity, blaming it for the fall of Rome, something very, very, few scholars buy today. But he also influenced the modern writing of history because he wrote in a way that captured attention through his controversial interpretation of Roman history, replete with implicit critiques of religious orthodoxy, colorful personalities and anecdotes, and warnings about imperial hubris. Smith, however, was far more traditional in his morality, and Wealth of Nations was a systematic critique of mercantilism and proposed a bold vision of economic life grounded in individual liberty and market dynamics. Both works were products of the British Enlightenment's focus on empirical inquiry, skepticism of tradition, and the pursuit of rational systems to explain human affairs, but from different angles, though Gibbon was English and Smith was an exemplar of the brilliance of the Scottish Enlightenment. And yet practically no one in America read them in the first years. They were from the enemy country. And then the sea lanes became unsafe one France joined the war in 1778, and Spain sent its fleet into action on America’s side in 1779. The Atlantic and the Caribbean were war zones, and commerce raiding was frequent. This slowed all trade, not just the shipping of books.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is a huge work, and only Volume One came out in 1776. Volumes Two and Three came out only in 1781, and Volumes Four, Five, and Six were published in 1788–1789. All in England, meaning an average American reader, even a Founder would have had to either smuggle it, go to Europe themselves, or wait for the end of the war to order it. Volume One only covers the Roman Empire from the age of the Antonines around AD 98 to the reign of Constantine the Great in AD 324. What the Founders knew of Rome came from reading the classics directly, meaning the actual writings of the Greco-Roman world. Gibbon was not a classic in 1776; he was a contemporary offering hot takes from across the ocean and in the enemy country. Eventually, they would have been aware of him, but it was normal for America’s elites to already be well read in British and classical history and have their own opinions on the Romans and the Greeks. And it was an investment to print Gibbon’s work; the first edition printed in the USA was not until 1804, when Thomas Jefferson was president. But we know some copies trickled into American hands earlier, especially those who traveled to Europe.
How might things have been different if America had stayed in the Empire, and Parliament had been reasonable about taxation?
As for Smith’s Wealth of Nations, it is believed Thomas Jefferson got his hands on a copy sometime during his tenure as Minister to France from 1785-1789. The first American edition of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1789 by Thomas Dobson in Philadelphia. By that time, the Constitution was written, and General George Washington was elected the first President of the United States. America was formed and operating before the classic works of 1776 had an impact. Early American Hamiltonian economics and the success of America in the 18th and 19th centuries did not strictly follow Smithian economics, and often starkly departed from it. While Smith had known Benjamin Franklin, Franklin died in 1790 before the great economic debates of the following year, when James Madison, as a member of the House of Representatives from Virginia, quoted the Wealth of Nations against Alexander Hamilton’s plans for the national bank, whereas Hamilton deliberately contradicted Smith when he wrote his Report on the Subject of Manufactures, which is considered alongside the Federalist Papers, the great work of America’s first Treasury Secretary. Smith had much more influence on earlier American thought than Gibbon, but still not a commanding influence. In America, Hamilton > Smith. I mean, can you quote lines from a Smithian rap battle? I think not!
Smith and Gibbon had the greatest influence on the British Empire, the one the Americans fought to get out of; the British embraced free trade in ways the Americans did not, and the builders of the British Empire saw themselves as a new Rome and referenced Gibbon as they expanded and conquered worldwide, the Americans largely stayed on their continent while enaging the world in commerce not empire. And the American won, by 1877 the US had overtaken the British in industry, and by the mid-1890s the USA had the world’s largest economy.
Why be Rome when you can be America?