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CONCEIVED IN LIBERTY
and you may take every thing else! But I am fearful I have lived long
enough to become an old-fashioned fellow. ... Twenty-three years ago was
I supposed a traitor to my country? I was then said to be the bane of sedi-
tion, because I supported the rights of my country. I may be thought sus-
picious when I say our privileges and rights are in danger. ... Guard with
jealous attention the public liberty. Suspect every one who approaches
that jewel. Unfortunately, nothing will preserve it but downright force.
Whenever you give up that force, you are inevitably ruined. ... Consider
what you are about to do before you part with the government. Take
longer time in reckoning things; revolutions like this have happened in al-
most every country in Europe; similar examples are to be found in ancient
Greece and ancient Rome—instances of the people losing their liberty by
their own carelessness and the ambition of a few.
~ Patrick Henry, 1788
Th e meeting at Philadelphia in 1787 for the sole and express purpose
of revising the Articles of Confederation, got the name of a Convention
(I believe before long that of a Conspiracy would have been more Sig-
nifi cant), [and] paid no more regard to their orders and credentials than
Caesar when he passed the Rubicon. Under an Injunction of Secrecy they
carried on their works of Darkness until the Constitution passed their
usurping hands.
~ Abraham Yates, 1789
Contents
Foreword by Judge Andrew P. Napolitano . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Preface by Thomas E. Woods, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .21
Introduction by Patrick Newman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .25
Part I—The Economic Legacy of the American Revolution . . . . 45
1. Changes in Foreign Trade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47
2. The Depression of the 1780s and the Banking Struggle . . . . . 52
3. Th e Drive for State and Federal Protective Tariffs . . . . . . . . . 57
4. Th e Burdens of State Public Debt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66
5. Th e Issuance of State Paper Money . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73
6. Th e Burdens of Federal Public Debt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78
Part II—The Western Lands and Foreign Policy. . . . . . . . . . . . . 83
7. Th e Old Northwest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85
8. Th e Old Southwest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93
9. Th e Jay-Gardoqui Treaty and the Mississippi River . . . . . . . . 97
10. Th e Diplomacy of the Confederation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105
Part III—The Nationalists Triumph:
Th e Constitutional Convention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109
11. Shays’ Rebellion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111
12. Th e Annapolis Convention . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127
13. Th e Delegates of the Convention and America’s
Great Men. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133
Part IV—The Nationalists Triumph: The Constitution . . . . . . 143
14. Elections in the Bicameral Congress . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
15. Th e Nature of National Power. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153
7
16. The Debate over Representation in Congress. . . . . . . . . . . . 159
17. Strengthening the Executive and Judiciary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177
18. Th e Preliminary Draft . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181
19. The Corrupt Bargain and the Preservation of Slavery. . . . . . 192
20. Th e Ratification and Amendment Process . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 199
21. Th e Election of the President. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204
Part V—Th e Nationalists Triumph:
The Constitution Ratified . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
22. Congress and the First Step . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211
23. Federalist Control of the Mail and Newspapers . . . . . . . . . . 215
24. Little Delaware and New Jersey Ratify. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219
25. Th e Battle for Pennsylvania . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221
26. Georgia and Connecticut Follow. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231
27. Th e Setback in New Hampshire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234
28. Th e Battle for Massachusetts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236
29. Rhode Island Holds Out . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 247
30. Maryland and South Carolina Ratify. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249
31. New Hampshire Follows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253
32. Th e Battle for Virginia. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255
33. Th e Battle for New York and the Twilight
of the Antifederalists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267
34. Th e Constitution Takes Effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 282
35. North Carolina Postpones and then Ratifies . . . . . . . . . . . . 288
36. Th e Coercion of Rhode Island. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291
Part VI—The Nationalists Triumph:
Th e Constitution’s Legacy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295
37. Th e Bill of Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297
38. Was the U.S. Constitution Radical?. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315
Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321
Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327
8
When Professor Patrick Newman first asked me to write the Fore-
word to his painstakingly and brilliantly crafted fifth volume of Mur-
ray N. Rothbard’s iconic Conceived in Liberty, I had two initial reac-
tions. Th e first was “What fifth volume?” By now, the reader knows
that Rothbard wrote the guts of volume five by hand and Professor
Newman—who, in addition to his economic expertise, is now an
expert in Rothbard’s unique handwriting—“translated” it all for us.
My second reaction was my perceived need to re-read the first four
volumes in order to do justice to a foreword to the fifth. This was a
happy task and one that refreshed my memory from having read the
fi rst four volumes shortly after my graduation from law school. I wish
they had been available to me when I was studying colonial American
history under the late Professor Wesley Frank Craven at Princeton Uni-
versity. Just as Rothbard’s work on the Progressive Era was not appreci-
ated by my Princeton professors, his work on the colonial era would
have been treated similarly.
Yet the Conceived in Liberty that we all have known is quite simply
the most thorough recitation and analysis of the events, forces, and
personalities leading up to and triumphing in the American Revolu-
tion that has ever been written in the English language. The research
is so prodigious that it eclipses even academia’s favorite versions of
these events, Lawrence Henry Gipson’s Th e British Empire Before the
Foreword
9
American Revolution (1936) and Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the
American Republic (1969).
Professor Craven, a white southern liberal, with commendable
disdain for his slave-owning forbearers, gave all the credit for all the
good in American society not to personal liberty but to the post-Civil
War federal government. He instilled that awe—or attempted to—in
his students. Rothbard, of course, saw the battle for secession from
Great Britain as a classic one of Liberty versus Power. It is through that
lens that he created in 1,600 pages the four-volume masterpiece with
which all who love the early history of American liberty should gener-
ally be familiar.
Th e fourth volume ends with the adoption of the Articles of Con-
federation, and numerous descriptions of the chicanery that brought
about this “halfway house to central government,” as only Rothbard
could have called it. Yet, the pages of volumes one through four recount
basically a happy story: A story that ends with the unambiguous tri-
umph of Liberty over Power; and, but for that halfway house which
followed, a story of the most just war in the history of the western
world.
Th ere is little joy in volume five.
Volume five recounts the counterrevolution that culminates in the
halfway house becoming a jail for Liberty, and a triumph for Power. It
shows that some of the heroes of the first four volumes became conser-
vative corporatists, power hungry politicians, and even central bankers
yearning for big government to enrich them, and utilizing the Consti-
tution as their instrument for that enrichment.
Rothbard’s incredible ability to absorb information is as apparent
in volume five just as it was in his first four. He read everything. He
will tell you, for example, not only the views of the major delegates to
the Constitutional Convention—and how victory over Great Britain
altered those views—but the opinions of the principal participants to all
the state ratification conventions as well. Rothbard’s powers of analysis
and synthesis account for the book’s freshness. As Tom Woods points
out in his fascinating and insightful preface to this volume, Rothbard
often was able to anticipate historiography, owing to the depth of his
learning and the powers of his analysis.
Rothbard sets the stage for the secret drafting and unscrupulous
ratification of the Constitution by analyzing the economic impact and
10
11
legacy of the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution—a
time when Americans finally became freed from the shackles of Brit-
ish mercantilism and, for the first time, could trade freely with the
rest of the world. Any economist or historian will appreciate the back-
drop Rothbard provides of the postwar period, as he sheds light on
the boom-bust cycle of bank credit expansion and contraction that
occurred, which eventually brought about a depression in mid-1784
and 1785. Such conditions set the stage for state protective tariffs and
monopolies, which by 1786, Rothbard explains, virtually every state
had enacted.
In fascinating detail, Rothbard then describes the early struggle
between the states to determine whether a strong central government
was an attractive goal or a future disaster. Rothbard lays out the inner
negotiations within each state and between the states on important
issues such as congressional taxing power versus state control of pro-
posed imposts. He moves on to the burdens of state debt, the issuance
of paper money, as well as an analysis of the banking difficulties in
the early post-Revolutionary Era. Interestingly, Rothbard dispels the
common myth that identified proponents of inflation with “farmer-
debtors” and hard-money men as “merchant-creditors” by explaining
that merchants were even more likely than farmers to be heavily in debt
since they had better credit ratings and could borrow more.
He discusses Congress’ difficulties in paying its bills and its inability
to enact any impost; it was even unable to pay the interest on its debts
to its American and foreign creditors. As a result, by the end of 1786,
the nationalist push for a new central government was in full swing.
Congress had failed to aggrandize itself into the dominant power. It
could not achieve a federal navigation act or more importantly a federal
impost for its own source of tax revenue.
At the same time, Rothbard unpacks the expansion of the new
country into western lands as well as the foreign policy accompanying
that expansion. Starting with the passage of its Ordinance of 1784,
and later of 1785, Congress had nationalized the public domains and
pledged itself to allow full self-government to any settlers of new ter-
ritory whenever the territory should amass a population of 20,000 or
more. In those settled areas with fewer than 20,000, there was no cen-
tral government reach! Rothbard contrasts Thomas Jefferson’s highly
liberal Ordinance with the disdain felt by greatly inconvenienced
12
land speculation companies, which lobbied and paved the way for the
Northwest Ordinance, replacing settler self-government with territo-
rial government in the hands of Congress and corporatists.
Meanwhile, in the Southwest, the Spanish claim, by conquest and
occupation, was in fact far more tenable and moral than that of Amer-
ica, which had sent no settlers there. Nevertheless, Rothbard describes
the flood of migration westward, and in turn, the drive by persons of
these regions—this is how Kentucky seceded from Virginia—for inde-
pendence and statehood. He details reasons for the sharp North-South
sectional split on the western issue, and of course on slavery, rapidly
disappearing in the northern states but still rampant in the South.
Rothbard rejects the commonly held view that America needed
a stronger national government than the Articles of Confederation
allowed. To the contrary, he maintains that the Articles gave too much
power to the central government. In particular, he stresses the dangers
of a standing army. This is a lesson lovers of liberty should bear in
mind today: “The Continental Army had disbanded with the advent
of peace, and the states would not stand for such a gross assumption of
central power as a peacetime standing army. But Congress evaded this
clear policy by creating a temporary western force, made up of militia
from several states [under congressional control] interested in grabbing
the Northwest.”1
What aroused the fears of those who sought through the Constitu-
tion to establish a strong national government? In part, the nationalists
were afraid of tax resistance. Rothbard details the key libertarian upris-
ing in Massachusetts, Shays’ Rebellion, a revolt against excessive bur-
dens on the taxpayer for the benefit of public creditors, mainly eastern
merchant-speculators who had purchased the state’s debt at a great dis-
count. Oppressed by taxes and frustrated by the imprisonment of those
who could not pay them, mobs throughout western Massachusetts
and their supporters seized courthouses and closed the courts until a
redress of the people’s grievances were achieved. Why the courthouses?
Because that’s where creditors went to find friendly judges and secure
orders to seize debtors’ properties and imprison the debtors themselves;
1See below, p. 90.
13
and that’s where the state government pursued those who could not
pay their taxes.
But this outburst of anarchist freedom had a counter-reaction. Shays’
Rebellion conservatized many state leaders who felt that the state gov-
ernments and the Confederation were too weak to prevent such tax
uprisings from recurring. Rothbard expertly demonstrates that such
events served to spur nationalist sentiment by providing fuel for dema-
gogic attacks about the dangers of weak government under the Con-
federation.
True, democracy may be turbulent, as presumably in the
Shays episode, “But weigh this against the oppression of mon-
archy, and it becomes nothing ... [and] even this evil is pro-
ductive of good. It prevents the degeneracy of government and
nourishes a general attention to the public affairs. ... It is a
medicine necessary for the sound health of government.”2
Urban merchants and artisans, as well as many slaveholding plant-
ers, came together in support of a strong nation-state that would use
the coercive power of a distant central government to grant them privi-
leges and subsidies. With such a backing, nationalist forces were able
to execute a political coup d’état which illegally liquidated the Articles
of Confederation and replaced it with the Constitution.
James Madison of all people—the scrivener of the Constitution
and, later, the author of the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Framer who
would become an Antifederalist president—began this coup when he
pushed through the Virginia legislature a “proposal for a convention
of commissioners from all states to provide for uniform commercial
regulations and for ‘the requisite augmentation of the power of Congress
over trade.’”3 Madison was so cautious about what he was really plan-
ning for Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 that he revealed his true
objectives only to his close personal friends. What were those plans?
Not enhanced commercial arrangements, but instead the beginning
of radical political reform. Rothbard explains that Madison called for
an all-state convention in Philadelphia, to propose a comprehensive
2See below, pp. 125–26.
3See below, p. 131.
14
revision of the Articles of Confederation so as “to render the Consti-
tution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the
Union.”4 He sounded here more like his successor Woodrow Wilson
than his one day predecessor Thomas Jefferson.
Th e Constitutional Convention opened on May 25, 1787 in Phila-
delphia, and Rothbard methodically traces each topic of discussion and
breaks down the debates between the major players, recounting their
impassioned speeches and fascinating back-and-forth. He focuses on
the recommendations from each of the state delegations regarding all
the basic attributes of the Constitution that would form the basis of the
nascent central government.
In particular, Madison and the Virginians meant political revolu-
tion rather than reform of the Articles of Confederation. Th ey had
wanted “not a ‘merely federal’ union, but a ‘national government ...
consisting of a supreme judicial, legislative, and executive.’”5 We learn
that these revelations, to many, like Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of
South Carolina and Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts, were “illegal,
revolutionary, and violated the express instructions of Congress.”6 But
nevertheless, eventually, those delegates who attended the Convention
agreed on certain broad objectives, crucial for a new government, and
designed to remodel the United States into a country with the Brit-
ish political structure; albeit, contrary to Alexander Hamilton’s wishes,
without a monarchy.
Yet another crucially important point to settle was the procedure
for ratification of the Constitution—submit the new Constitution to
the state legislatures or to ad hoc popular state conventions? Not only
does Rothbard detail the debate over the procedure, he then goes into
detail about the negotiations and compromises that occurred behind
the scenes to get the deal done—by bypassing the state legislatures.
Ultimately, we see that the nationalists, though forced to make a few
concessions, carried the substance of their program: The creation of a
supreme national government, supreme national judiciary with inferior
courts established by Congress and appointed by the president all for
4See below, p. 132.
5See below, p. 147.
6See below, p. 147.
https://cdn.mises.org/Conceived%20in%20Liberty%20Book%20Five.pdf