The content on this page was all written by our blog’s founder, Nancy Spannaus, between 2019 and 2025.
July 17, 2025 – My book-writing career could be characterized as a campaign to rescue the soul of the United States of America. It began in the mid-1970s when I embarked on a serious study of the work of leading Revolutionaries Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton. I was truly shocked to find that the men who served as the architects of our republic were not the brash, pragmatic individualists they were often presented as, but rather a collection of statemen, well-educated in the classics, and motivated by higher ideals for the improvement of mankind – economic, political, and cultural. What had happened to us?
My first book was a collaborative effort with historian Christopher White, entitled The Political Economy of the American Revolution. Coming out during the period of celebration of America’s 200th birthday (1777), this book sought to set the record straight on the deeper ideas, especially in political economy, which formed the essential backdrop for the creation of our nation. I opened the 500-page volume with an essay entitled “Uncovering the Treason School of American History,” in which I countered the narratives of Charles Beard and other historians who sought to castrate our history by omitting its essential ideas.
My opening quote came from Alexander Hamilton and has served as a kind of guiding star for my work. As he wrote in his Report on the Subject of Manufactures, “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”
Part I of the main text was compiled by White, beginning with an elaboration of his original discoveries on the ground-breaking political economy of Jean-Baptist Colbert, and followed by a series of excerpts from other European predecessors of the American founders. Part II included select quotes from Franklin, Washington, Paine, Hamilton, and Jefferson. The most substantial came from Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures.
In its second edition (1996), the PEAR book (as it was called) included more analysis of the European roots of our republic, especially the work of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, but was essentially a reprint.
I believe the first sentence in my Preface to the second edition captures the spirit of not only that volume, but all my books. To wit: “It would be only a small exaggeration to say that the American population has undergone a lobotomy relative to its real history. Americans in general has absolutely no knowledge of the distinct and positive qualities of the Declaration of Independence, the U.S. Constitution, and the American System of Economics, and where they come from.”
Hamilton Versus Wall Street: The Core Principles of the American System of Economics (2019)
My opening quote came from Alexander Hamilton and has served as a kind of guiding star for my work. As he wrote in his Report on the Subject of Manufactures, “To cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind, by multiplying the objects of enterprise, is not among the least considerable of the expedients, by which the wealth of a nation may be promoted.”
You may think because you read Ron Chernow’s famous biography that you understand Hamilton’s crucial contributions to history. I assure you that my book will add a new degree of clarity, and show how Hamilton’s thought is still relevant to today.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter I: Alexander Hamilton would have been the foremost opponent of Wall Street today
Chapter 2: Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures is the Rosetta Stone of his economics
Chapter 3: What the Report on Manufactures proposes
Chapter 4: Hamilton’s ideas of political economy formed the basis for America’s prosperity
Chapter 5: Abraham Lincoln, Hamiltonian
Chapter 6: Franklin Roosevelt chose Hamilton
Chapter 7: Hamilton was a vigorous opponent of Adam Smith
Chapter 8: Hamilton’s banking system was not British!
Chapter 9: The spread of Hamilton’s economics threatened to bring down the British Empire!
Chapter 10: Hamilton’s political economy is key to saving the American Constitutional Republic
Chapter 11: A Hamiltonian Vision for Today
Reviews
“A thoughtful, well-written argument for Alexander Hamilton’s financial system as a guard against tyranny.” — Kirkus Reviews
“In our time of crumbling infrastructure, anemic economic growth, and dysfunctional government, Spannaus points to a better path, the American System of economic policy initiated by Alexander Hamilton more than two centuries ago. … His policies made America great, and a return to them can make America great again.”
—Richard Sylla, author of
Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography
“An excellent book that for me brought clarity to several threads that made up the fabric of Hamilton’s vision of a political economy for the post-war United States, a national country and not a collection of states….”
—Douglas S. Hamilton, fifth great-grandson
of Alexander Hamilton
“Spannaus meticulously traces the origins and describes Hamilton’s system (in contrast to the Jeffersonian/British system) and shows how it resulted in the economic growth that defines American enterprise. … This book is a definite must-read.”
—David J. Kent, author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius; President, Lincoln Group of D.C.
“Nancy Spannaus properly lifts Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures to a place of supreme importance in the annals of American economic history….”
—Leonard Zax, Founder/President Emeritus,
Partnership for Paterson
Note Concerning Book Reviews- More are available here for all three books.
Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way (2023)
When the race issue exploded politically once again in 2020, coinciding with a new wave of falsification of our country’s past, I began working on book two, Defeating Slavery: Hamilton’s American System Showed the Way. (2023) The book begins with the history of the early anti-slavery movement in America, and then describes the intersection of the abolition movement with Hamilton’s industrialization program. The polemic is two-fold: 1) there was always a strong anti-slavery movement in this country, actually in the late 1700s, the strongest in the world; and 2) to defeat slavery, you have to have an industrial economy that values and improves the human mind….
This is a more substantial and scholarly work, ranging to 400 pages. It includes an appendix containing 14 documents (or excerpts thereof) from the abolitionist movement. The narrative essentially concludes in 1833, when President Andrw Jackson successfully overturns and/or weakens the major elements of Hamilton’s American System – the National Bank, federal support for internal improvements, and protection for industry (tariffs and subsidies).
The British-American colonies and young United States were always the site of a strong anti-slavery movement, beginning long before the 1830s. You’ll learn a lot about that movement, and why it failed until Lincoln, in this book.
Table of Contents
Preface
- Slavery in the European Colonial Period
- Slavery Takes Hold in the American Colonies
- South Carolina Crushes Georgia’s Anti-Slavery Foundation
- Massachusetts’s Role in Galvanizing the Anti-Slavery Movement
- Pennsylvania’s Leading Role Against Slavery
- Anti-Slavery Agitation Meets British Resistance
- The Declaration of Independence: A Promissory Note
- Slavery on the Road to Extinction?
- The Constitution: Promise and Compromises
- Hamilton’s Economic Pathway to Ending Slavery
- Jeffersonian Sabotage
- The Battle over Slavery Heats Up
- The 1820s: Industrialization Creates Hope
- The Abolition Movement of the 1820s
- Slavery: America’s Economic Cancer
- Slavery Versus Wealth
- The Jackson Turning Point
- Lincoln’s Hamiltonian Revival
- Facing Slavery’s Legacy Today
- Appendices
Reviews
“Nancy Spannaus demonstrates how the South’s slavocracy for decades used its grip on U.S. political power to stymie both a rising abolitionist movement and Alexander Hamilton’s comprehensive 1790s plans for nationwide economic modernization. The slavocracy’s victory was pyrrhic; Abraham Lincoln’s 1860s administration smashed it, abolished slavery, and promoted Hamiltonian modernization. The United States quickly became the world leader in manufacturing. Sadly, more than a century and a half later, some wounds of these old battles still have not healed. That makes Defeating Slavery a timely read.” — Richard Sylla, author of Alexander Hamilton: The Illustrated Biography
“Impressively researched, Spannaus’s book offers a history of how slavery defined the early constitutional and national debate, as well as insight into how the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians sabotaged Alexander Hamilton’s American System of economic development and derailed the antislavery path of the Founders. It came down to the Whigs and Abraham Lincoln to resurrect Hamilton’s principles – and an inevitable Civil War – to bring an end to slavery. That discussion is cause enough to read this book, but Spannaus also enlightens readers on the degree our current political dilemma relies on this same ‘free labor’ vs ‘free trade’ dynamic and proposes a framework for restoring political and economic systems that work for all Americans. This book is not to be missed.” – David J. Kent, author of Lincoln: The Fire of Genius: How Abraham Lincoln’s Commitment to Science and Technology Helped Modernize America.
“Nancy Spannaus shows that Alexander Hamilton founded the City of Paterson NJ to launch his ambitious plan to begin transforming a rural agrarian economy based in slavery into a modern industrial economy based in freedom, promoting not discrimination against some but opportunities for all.” – Leonard Zax, city planner and lawyer who was a leader of the effort to create the Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park
“In this book Nancy Spannaus offers us an accessible, well-researched, and sophisticated take on the contradictory political economy of slavery and its role in American economic history.” – Christian Parenti, Professor of Economics John Jay College, CUNY, author of Radical Hamilton: economic lessons from a misunderstood founder
“A stimulating take on the intersection of American slavery and economic policy.” — Kirkus Reviews
“Excellent book on an Important topic: As America returns to a more nationalist economic policy with Donald Trump (and even many of the things Joe Biden did, such as the tariff on electric cars, it behooves Americans to understand where this is all going. Contrary to the globalist consensus of the US economics profession, economic nationalism can, in fact, work, as shown by the success of foreign nations, quintessentially in the Far East, that practice it. But what many Americans don’t know is that they learned it from us! That’s right: economic nationalism was, in fact, the American Way for most of US history. The man who started it was Alexander Hamilton, the one economist among the Founding Fathers and an intellectual sophisticate who was conversant in the key ideas about economic development that were in circulation in his day. Without Hamilton, the US might well have remained an agricultural “colony” of Great Britain, as the South ultimately did until the Civil War. The North, on the other hand, industrialized, and thus developed beyond the point where slavery was an attractive economic strategy. This is the prime topic of this book: how the destruction of slavery was the result of a deliberate economic strategy (hatched largely by Hamilton) to out-grow and out-develop the slave economy by cultivating manufacturing, using tariffs and other policy tools. (NB: I am the author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work and Industrial Policy for the United States, so I can humbly claim to know a thing or two about these matters, and I personally vouch that Ms. Spannaus is well informed about them. — Ian Fletcher, author of Free Trade Doesn’t Work and Industrial Policy for the United States
From Subject to Citizen: What Americans Need to Know about Their Revolution (2025)
Implicitly, as you can see, all my books have addressed the question of American identity. With the 250th anniversary of our republic fast upon us, I decided that I should address that question directly with a book on the American Revolution. But where would I start?
Fortunately, I realized that I had a resource at hand – my blog AmericanSystemNow. Over the course of eight years, I had had the occasion to write many incisive, and some extensive, stories about aspects of the American Revolution which have been ignored or unknown. It would require some additional writing to put these articles in context, but…
they actually amounted to a coherent whole – a challenge to Americans to get a deeper understanding of the causes and objectives of the American Revolution.
Thus, with little difficulty – and the invaluable addition of a speech on the First Continental Congress by Shawn McGhee – I was able to put together From Subject to Citizen by the end of March 2025. I believe it can help provide a deeper understanding of what it means to be a citizen of a republic – and thus help us deal with the current upheavals we are experiencing in our own.
Table of Contents
Forward
- Revolutionary Fervor Grows
The Causes of the Revolution: An Overview
The Revolutionary Committees of Correspondence: Engines of National Unity
The Significance of the Fairfax Resolves
The Continental Association: From Royal Subjects to Republican Citizens
“To the Future Grandeur and Glory of America”: Alexander Hamilton’s Vision
1775: Year of Revolution
1775: Americans Take the Lead on Slavery
We Americans Rejected Monarchy, Remember?
- The Declaration
Abraham Lincoln on the Declaration
The Fight Behind the Declaration
Frederick Douglass Did Not Trash the Declaration
Freedom, Not Libertarianism
Why We Declared the Right to Happiness
- The Constitution
How Revolutionary was the American Revolution? From the Declaration to the Constitution
Our Constitutional Commitment to Economic Progress
‘A Republic if You Can Keep it’: George Washington’s Timely Advice
Frederick Douglass on the Constitution
The Confederate Constitution, or Alexander Hamilton’s?
What Is an American System Foreign Policy?
Vattel, Leibniz, and the American System
- The Challenge
Lincoln on Saving Our Institutions
Frederick Douglass: “Knowledge Unfits a Man to be a Slave”
Reviews
“This is a must-read for all Americans as we approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. An expert on the early American republic and Alexander Hamilton’s American System, Spannaus lends her considerable writing talents to helping the populace understand the origins of the national experiment, as well as the challenges it faced then, during the Civil War era, and, sadly, again today.” – David J. Kent, author, Lincoln historian
“I read with great interest the volume “From Subject to Citizen – What Americans Need to Know about Their Revolution.” Especially at this time history, and certainly the history of the United States of America, is important.
With gratitude,
Giulio Tremonti, Chairman, Aspen Institute Italia; President, Foreign and European Community Affairs Committee, Italian Chamber of Deputies
Seemingly settled history comes alive with renewed vigor in this incisive overview.
“The Die is cast.” With four simple words in his diary—written in 1773 after the dumping of 342 boxes of tea from three British ships into Boston Harbor—Founding Father John Adams voiced a growing sentiment that the 13 American colonies had had enough of British taxation and domination. However, few conflicts are more poorly understood that the American Revolution, argues Spannaus, the author of multiple books on the era, including Political Economy of the American Revolution (1977). Here, she expands on a series of blog posts, which she began in 2017 as “a challenge to my fellow American citizens” to look beyond persistent legends about the struggle. For instance, the Boston Tea Party—often presented as a tipping point—actually capped a decade of simmering anger over increasingly draconian restrictions on business and civil liberties. Nor was the revolutionary impulse shared by everyone, as Spannaus notes when she points out that the initial proposal to craft the Declaration of Independence passed by a mere 7-6 majority in the Second Continental Congress. Spannaus is at her most eloquent when refuting that the ideas of philosopher John Locke exerted the greatest influence on the Declaration; she confers that distinction on Swiss legal scholar Emer de Vattel. She notes that many Americans now interpret the Declaration to mean that citizens should “seek freedom from government, rather than the freedom to use government’s powers in order to pursue the common good.” This interpretation, she says, “violates the foundation of our liberty, which relies on our cooperation as a people for the general welfare and rights of all.” First and foremost, Spannaus’ book is a clarion call to “clear our heads” regarding the foundations of American ideals, especially during times in which the government ships citizens, against their will, to third countries, which parallels how King George III shipped colonists to England to quell what he saw as his subjects’ treasonous impulses. Spannaus makes such realities of history clear in her crisp narrative style.
Seemingly settled history comes alive with renewed vigor in this incisive overview.
“I highly recommend From Subject to Citizen by Nancy Bradeen Spannaus to understand the ideological precedents and principles, economic motivation, political abuses, grievances, and personalities that led to the American Revolution and the establishment of the first republic of the modern era. Spannaus has created a readable, scholarly, dispassionate achievement which every citizen, journalist, public servant, soldier, elected representative and citizen young and old, should read. Her book, a curated collection of her own American System Now blogs, scholarly essays and the eternally wise insights of Abraham Lincloln and Frederick Douglas, exceed the ballyhoo of traditional histories of the Revolution and trite patriotica of American exceptionalism. It is also not history of the military campaign as important as it was in uniting the colonies and securing independence.
Subject to Citizen succinctly covers perspectives on the growth of revolutionary fervor through committees of correspondence, resolutions of colonial legislators, economic grievances, overreach by the King and parliament, and slavery. Spannaus describes the salient issues of creating a government for the new republic, of melding the former colonies and their sovereign expectations into a viable federal framework and exploring the question whether federalism was revolutionary or counterrevolutionary. Spannaus elegantly summaries a subject dear to her heart, Alexander Hamilton’s “American System”, the key to sustained national independence and economic growth. Hamilton also considered slavery an economic and moral disaster. On this subject surprisingly the Americans and notably Anthony Benezet in 1775 created the first abolition society in Philadelphia. Even before Benezet, the First Continental Congress (1774) delegates targeted trade of human beings with any nation.
Nancy Spannaus also delves into the dark side of the fervor to wrest independence from Britain. The exposition of the Committees of Inspection and Observation and later the Committees of Safety instituted by the First Continental Congress in October 1774. The committee were to be formed in every county, city and town to initially enforce a boycott of British goods but quickly took over the functions of the colonial and royal governments as respect and their authority waned. They became community forums where loyalties were exposed, tested and punished. The committees administered revolutionary justice, relied on neighbor accusing neighbor, developed investigative procedures, interrogated people suspected of undermining the American cause and punished as they deemed appropriate.
In the section “Happiness as a Right and Duty”, Spannaus debunks the oft touted claim that the major philosophical influence on the nation’s founding fathers was the English philosopher, John Locke. Locke is espoused as inalienable natural rights, the rights to life, liberty, and property. Yet the Continental Congress, composing the Declaration of Independence chose “pursuit of happiness” as the third right. Where did the pursuit of happiness originate? Look no further than the German polymath philosopher, Gottfried Leibniz (1646-1716) and the Swiss lawyer and philosopher Emer de Vattel (1714-1767) and the Genevan legal and political theorist, Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui (1669-1748). Spannaus summarizes the Leibniz, Vattel, Burlamaqui view on “happiness” as opposed to Locke’s right of “property” with historian John Schmeeckle’s argument that “happiness” is a mutual duty of citizens to promote the happiness of others and is to be governed by reason. In Locke’s world view government is more of a policeman preventing individuals from violating each other’s freedoms.
Nancy Spannaus’ slim volume is not a catechism of patriotism. She quotes Frederick Douglass: “True knowledge unfits a man to be a slave”. From Subject to Citizen is a primer for creating “Capital of mind”, the level of education and culture, which is not only the responsibility of government, but of every citizen to be effective citizens of the republic.
Snag a copy of From Subject to Citizen; it’s well worth the money and your time!”
Michael Zapf, Lovettsville, Virginia
September 15, 2025Purchase Books
Hamilton Versus Wall Street
Defeating Slavery
From Subject to Citizen
Help by Getting the Books in Your Local Library
