BOOK REVIEW
“Alexander Hamilton’s program of national industrial development could have made slavery obsolete without bloodshed, according to Spannaus’ provocative historical study.

The author, a historian, advances an economic analysis of American slavery as a brutal, backward system of production that was incompatible with a dynamic modern economy. Such an economy was envisioned, she observes, by Alexander Hamilton, America’s first Treasury Secretary, in his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures. His report advocated a national bank to channel government revenue into industrial investments, the nurturing of an industrial manufacturing economy with tariffs to protect domestic manufacturers, and federal spending on roads, canals, and other infrastructure. Hamilton believed that this “American System” would make labor more productive with technology and machinery while fostering creative innovations by workers and businessmen. This economic juggernaut, Spannaus argues, would have outcompeted and peacefully swept away a Southern slave economy that relied on unskilled labor and denied enslaved workers the opportunity to develop their talents. Unfortunately, the author contends, Hamilton’s agenda was fought by Southern planters and “sabotaged” by President Thomas Jefferson, a slave-owner who championed small farmers, hated industry, and cut federal infrastructure spending. Spannaus asserts that matters would only get worse under President Andrew Jackson, who eliminated the government’s Bank of the United States, cut protective tariffs, and canceled canal projects. Challenging The 1619 Project and other scholarship that puts slavery at the heart of American society and economic development, Spannaus instead locates the center of the American experiment in the abolitionist movement that started in the 17th century and in Hamilton’s tacitly anti-slavery industrial policy. She supports her argument by citing a wealth of statistics and period thinkers, from Cotton Mather to Frederick Douglass, conveying it all in lucid, down-to-earth prose infused with sparks of passionate advocacy, as when she denounces revisionist historians’ “lies, distortions, and…glaring omissions of the leading international battle many American patriots waged against the scourge of slavery from the earliest days.” Hamilton’s growing reputation as the most progressive of the Founders will be further enhanced by this trenchant interpretation of his economic thinking.

A stimulating take on the intersection of American slavery and economic policy.”
— Kirkus 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

“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