The purpose of this research is to examine the economic issues related to war in American history, beginning with the American Revolution through Vietnam, in the context of continuity and change. The plan of the research will be to set forth the way in which economic issues have arisen in the history of American wars, and then to discuss how those issues have made an impact on the development of American political, economic, and social structure.
What must first be noted about the economic aspects of the American Revolution is that the war eventually guaranteed the new nation territorial sovereignty. This was to prove decisive not only in the political sense but also in the sense that, geographically isolated from European politics, America could come into its own and develop its own economic as well as political character. The economic benefits and disadvantages of absolute independence were laid bare after the war, for it developed that, in the postwar period, America was groping for a rational economic structure that it could not support as a confederation. The end of the war forced the United States to develop an economic system that could support itself and validate its political standing in the world. During the war it had depended on France and on chance rather than on national economic policy: "French gold financed the war . . . Confiscated Loyalist property was sold for the benefit of the new State Governments; and Congress, unable to collect its requisitions, was forced to rely upon ever increasing issues of paper money" (Becker, 1915, pp. 259 60).
The sheer ineptitude of the American economy after the Revolution had not been solved when the War of 1812 came about. The War itself was due in part to the persistent British attempts to blockade American foreign trade, not so much against America as against France, with Britain and France "each manipulat[ing] the American trade as a weapon against the other" (Witlse, 19...