suggests "The struggle over slavery and white supremacy is the dominant single theme in American history." https://sundown.tougaloo.edu/corrected.php?file=corrected02.html

The author James Loewen was interviewed by Ralph Nader on his podcast this week (30 min into it). Interesting conversation. No transcript yet though...
https://ralphnaderradiohour.com/sports-politics-and-the-lies-of-history/

not only into the territories of the United States, but Cuba and South America as well, was a contentious political battle that began after the Mexican-American war and informed how the fight between those invested in slavery and an agrarian economy were pitted against those invested in the future of an industrial economy and a large immigrant labor force.

Masters of a different kind of Universe but still fighting for the same thing they are fighting for now: Power and money.

Best book on the subject I've ever read:

Fascinating reading if you are interested in the economic, political, social, as well as the battlefields that make up the story of the American Civil War.

Boston and New York banks financing slave mortgages, plantation mortgages, slave ship construction and generally profiting from slavery. Crop loans?

It was about 50 years ago so I don't remember the title of the book I read about the slave trade, but I believe the earliest slave purchase was made in Massachusetts or New Hampshire from a Portuguese trading ship.

Focusing only on slavery and Jefferson is only half the story. It is certainly not inaccurate to argue that slavery was a primary factor in USA history. It is inaccurate to argue that slavery was the primary driver of USA national prosperity, because it simply was not. As many travelogues from the first half of the 1800s noted, the South was a much cruder, harsher, and less prosperous region than the North. Indeed, many opponents of slavery, both North and South, argued that slavery held back economic development because it forced free labor to compete with slave labor, thus undercutting the Doctrine of High Wages, which has been pretty much written out of USA history. Compare the Doctrine of High Wages with the "mudsill theory" held by the Southern oligarchs.

But I begin to digress.

The other half of the story is Alexander Hamilton and the American School of Political Economy. I would be very pleasantly surprised if Hamilton and what I discuss next were not wildly unpopular here at C99.

Contrary to what many on the left believe, the US Constitution is NOT solely designed to protect the rich. Our system of government definitely has been twisted to that end, but I do not believe that was the intent of Hamilton, the one Founder most responsible for laying the foundation of the USA economy.

(And remember, Washington used Treasury Secretary Hamilton basically as a prime minister, and agreed with or acceded to literally all of Hamilton’s economic beliefs and policies. This was in no small part a function of their shared experience at the pinnacle of American military command during the Revolutionary War: Hamilton served as Washington aide de camp, and drafted almost all the military correspondence and orders that were issued over Washington's signature . During the war, both Washington and Hamilton identified Britain’s major strategic advantage to be Britain’s ability to raise funds and float debt through its financial system. You cannot possibly understand what Hamilton does as first Treasury Secretary in regards to the national debt, and creating a national financial system, unless you understand this crucial, fundamental concern of Washington and Hamilton.

Culturally, the most important aspect of a republic is supposed to be equality, especially economic equality. I think leftists make a huge mistake ignoring the work on the ideology of the Revolution by historians such as Bernard Bailyn (The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1967) and J. G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, Princeton, 1975) This is of course contrary to the view that the government was set up solely to protect property and the accumulation thereof. It was not – at least, not by Hamilton. The key is to understand the difference between the creation of wealth, and the accumulation of wealth. And much of this will depend on how you define or think of "wealth."

Economic equality is basic to a republic because, the idea was, no person can be fully independent and be a good citizen if their livelihood depends to some extent or other on another person’s largess, benevolence, or tolerance. This was the basis of the fight between the Hamiltonians and the Jeffersonians. Jefferson believed that only farmers who owned their own land were independent enough to honestly exercise the duties of citizenship. Jefferson wanted to delay the advent of industrialization and subservient factory labor as long as possible. This is why Jefferson acceded to the Louisiana Purchase, which he would otherwise have opposed on the grounds that the federal government has no express power to acquire so vast territory. With the Louisiana Purchase, yeoman squeezed out of the established eastern seaboard would be able to cross the mountains, and buy, steal, or somehow take the land of the native Americans and set themselves up as independent farmers, thus extending in both space and time Jefferson’s ideal agrarian republic.

Hamilton, by contrast, understood that the economy should not be frozen in time and remain entirely agrarian. Industrialization HAD to not only proceed, but be encouraged, for the USA to have any chance of resisting the intrigues and hostility of the European powers – which remained committed to eradicating the American experiment in self-government until the US Civil War. (France and Spain landed troops in Mexico and Caribbean at the beginning of the war; the Mexican republic was eliminated; and Maximilian, younger brother of Austrian emperor Francis Joseph I, was installed as puppet emperor. The British government of Lord Palmerston was preparing to land troops in Canada in 1862, but was deterred by the pro-USA street fighting in London and elsewhere which was led by the British allies of Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi.)

Hamilton’s great insight was that economic development depended entirely on improving the productive powers of labor. This meant the development of science and technology, and the spread of machinery to replace muscle power, both animal and human. This is how wealth is fundamentally created: increasing the ability of humans to transform and use natural resources. A simple, extreme example, to make the point: Say you have ownership of a large tract of land, under which there are sizable deposits of valuable ores and metals. That land's full value depends entirely on the introduction of machinery and technology to find, locate, mine, extract, and refine those ores and metals

Or look at the screen in front of you. Did not all the materials in that screen exist on this planet 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago? Of course they did (unless you want to believe the materials were gifted to us the past few decades by the lizard people, or guardians of the universe, or whatever). Why then, were there not computer screens and cell phones 100 or 1,000 or 10,000 years ago? The materials existed in our physical universe to make them. But the machinery and technology did not.

The correct view of Hamilton must be precise: it was not that Hamilton sought to encourage and protect wealth, but to encourage and protect the CREATION of wealth. (See Section II, Subsection 2, “As to an extension of the use of Machinery...” in Hamilton’s December 1791 Report to Congress on the Subject of Manufactures.)

This is where Marxist analysis fails catastrophically. Yes, much of economic history is that of elites accumulating wealth through exploitation, fraud, and violence. BUT: how was that wealth which is stolen created in the first place? Thorstein Veblen, and his discussions of industrial organization versus business organization, are far more useful in understanding the COMPLETE economic story, not just the exploitation half of it.

This is not to say that slavery played no role in USA economic development. It most certainly did. It enriched a very small number of elites, some of whom used their expropriated wealth as seed money to fund colleges and companies that have had a direct impact on USA economic development. But, I would argue, the role of slavery is practically negligible when you look at the development of newer industries such as electronics and computers. That history conforms almost exactly to the role envisioned for government by Hamilton.

In the nineteenth century, it was generally understood that the system established by Hamilton was in opposition to the “classical economics” of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, and the other apologists for the death and destruction wrought on entire countries by the British East India Co. and the British empire. (I am always disgusted by the argument that the British were "good" or better than Americans because Britain outlawed the slave trade first.) In the 1820s, Henry Clay coined the term “American system” to distinguish it from the British system. It is the political economy of the American school that becomes the policies of the Whig Party. About the only good book on this I know of is Gabor S. Boritt's Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (University of Memphis, 1978)

Perhaps the unwillingess of Hamilton and Washington to engage in dirty politicking explains why the Jeffersonians and Jacksonians were triumphant?

It is easy to be confused by American history, because at the same time that the American System was being built and practiced, the British system was competing with it for control of the domestic economy and polity. To the extent that people today mistakenly believe that the American economy was founded on the ideas of Adam Smith (it most emphatically was not: Hamilton explicitly rejected the ideas of Smith) the British system is winning. The simplified history is that the British system was dominant in the slave South, and fought for free trade in opposition to the American System’s protective tariffs, but there were always connections between South and North that obscure this history. Note however, that the locus of opposition in the North to Lincoln and to the Civil War was exactly mapped by these connections.

After the Civil War, even more confusion is introduced as American railroads and industries were reorganized a number of times, placing them under ever greater control by bankers and financiers located in Boston, New York, and other large cities, almost always in partnership with firms and entities in the City of London. This period of economic consolidation is typified by the creation of the "trusts.”

In response, a number of populist political movements and parties arose in opposition: the Greenback Party, the Grange, the Farmers Alliances, the People’s Party, the Non-Partisan League, and the Democratic Farmer Labor Party of Minnesota. These populist political movements -- which were notably NOT right-wing, as Trump's populism is today -- are crucial for any history of the Democratic Party today, because their policies became the economic basis of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. This is noted explicitly by Rex Tugwell, an economist and one of the most important and innovative members of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's first Brain-Trust, at the very beginning of Tugwell's "The New Deal in Retrospect" (Western Political Quarterly, December, 1948).

How was the Doctrine of High Wages written out of USA history? More to the point, how was it replaced by the "race to the bottom" of free trade, and the Federal Reserve's obsession with "wage inflation"? The shallow answer focuses on the role of academic economics, and the rise of the such ideologies as "scientific management", "dynamic stochastic general equilibrium", and "shareholder value". Marxist analysis is extremely useful in discovering and identifying the economic interests behind the funding of these academic developments. With the interesting exception of what Peter Dale Scott termed "deep politics" (Deep Politics and the Death of JFK, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

I deliberately bring up Peter Dale Scott because his focus on how political establishments use organized crime and assassinations appears to freak out almost everyone, including leftists and even hardcore marxists. But I think one specific example will show why I think Scott has his targeting precisely correct. In Philip Mirowski's and Dieter Plehwe's history of the Mont Pelerin Society, Yves Steiner in Chapter 5 identifies the American Chamber of Commerce (ACC) as the primary transmitter into USA of Mont Pelerin's ideological attacks on organized labor. Steiner, Mirowski, Plehwe and all the other authors in the book fail spectacularly at taking the next obvious step: Who or what was running the American Chamber of Commerce at the time?

The chairman of ACC was William K. Jackson, chairman of United Fruit Corporation. United Fruit and the fruit importing business in general is notorious as being a front for organized crime's transportation and distribution of illegal narcotics, arms, human trafficking, and dirty money. This criminal history traces back to the docks of New Orleans immediately after the Civil War. Not coincidentally, the criminal networks of New Orleans were in the forefront of resisting the federal occupation, political participation by freed blacks, and Reconstruction. (Political activity by freed blacks threatened to displace the old Democratic Party machinery in the South that was controlled by, or had established cooperative arrangements with, the criminal networks).

This issue of organized crime and its support for conservative economic ideology goes even deeper. In his book, Mirowski noted that the first general secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society, and who served for nearly two decades, was Max Thurn. Again, Mirowski utterly fails to look into the historical background. Thurn was the scion of the Bavarian royal family Thurn und Taxis, which achieved its immense wealth and power by serving as the postal service for Europe's monarchs and oligarchs beginning in the 16th century. But no one I know has ever asked how this oligarchic background of the Mont Pelerin gang has directed, guided, or influenced its work on disseminating its neoliberal economic ideology. This is no small matter, because neoliberal economic ideology is fundamentally a repudiation of the classical republican ideas of the Enlightenment on which the USA was founded.

Why has the left been so ineffectual the past three quarters of a century? I think this refusal or unwillingness to look at this role of the old European oligarchy and organized crime, is a large part of the problem. It is probably much less distressing to focus on inanimate "historical forces" than to look pure evil in its human eye.