How Did The Revolutionary War Affect The Economy

Following the Revolutionary War, the American colonies were faced with uncertainty in their newfound independence. Now free from British rule, the people of colonial America wanted to avoid any form of government for fear that it would revert them back to the past. This left the founding fathers with an extremely difficult task. How do you govern a person who wants to govern themselves? Government is necessary, after all, for the war had left the colonies in extreme debt, requiring taxation that their makeshift government didn’t have the power to administer, leaving taxes in the hands of each state individually. Since states would often excuse taxes, the economy grew stagnant, threatening to completely destroy this young nation. As such, the
The practice of slavery was lucrative for both southern and northern states, causing the further protections of the institution by early decision makers. As the south dominated the cotton industry, the north focused on the textile industry. The town of Lowell, Massachusetts, a leading textile producer and distributor, “boasted the largest concentration of industry in the United States before the Civil War” (53). While the north might have verbally denounced the practice of slavery, they still benefited heavily from the slave labor in the south. Edward E. Baptist observed that, “the possibilities that enslaved people represented, the wealth they embodied, and the way they could be forced to move themselves would actually forge links that overrode internal divisions” (Document D). A key concern with the new nation was that there was too much division between the states, creating many small republics rather than one united front on the global scale. Founding father James Madison speaks of the inevitability of factions, his name for these small