consider the history of capitalism in the United States. While most Americans tend to believe that capitalism arrived in America with the Pilgrims, some Southern historians point to the "pre-bourgeois" character of plantation life and the limited market attachment of the white yeomanry in the West (The New Republic 34). Undoubtedly, Americans engaged in capitalist enterprise before 1820, but it is not clear that capitalism was the ruling economic system in the United States. For example, many scholars focusing on the colonial and early national rural North have outlined a subsistence world largely governed not by family inheritance, barter exchange and household production rather than by profit-oriented market individualism (The New Republic 34).
Thus, historians treat early American economic development as a transition to capitalism rather than as the unleashing of a pre-existing capitalist economy (The New Republic 34). This is significant because the transition of America's economic system to free-market capitalism would be paralleled by the expansion of democracy within her borders.
Today, many historians contend that antebellum America was far from being the egalitarian society touted by writers such as Alexis De Tocqueville in his book Democracy in America, which described political life in America under the presidency of Andrew Jackson. In fact, historians maintain that, from its beginning, the American republic was a land carved into social strata (IWB 2000). Such wealth-based social stratification inevitably led to economic stratification and social conflict. For example, slave-owners, small farmers and the working classes tended to conflict with northern merchants and industrialists (IWB 2000). Slave-owners often feared that the northern capitalists' growing power threatened their own political domination and economic unity. On the other hand, the small farmers hated the high interest rates and low prices offe...