building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

Industrial America
One’s‐Self I Sing, a simple separate person,
Yet utter the world Democratic, the world En‐Masse.
Walt Whitman
The expansion of the railroad and industry actually represented the landscape of
the colonial, economic capitalist/mercantilist model developed and augured by
Alexander Hamilton.
Hamilton believed the development of manufacturing to be of such importance as
to consider state support of the sector to be indispensable. His Report on
manufactures (1791) described a hypothetical society, the purpose of which was to
produce and accumulate capital by investors. Moreover, as we have hinted at
previously, Hamilton believed that certain circumstances, which would encourage
industrial development, were necessary: “1) the division of labor; 2) an extension of
the use of machinery; 3) additional employment to classes of the community not
ordinarily engaged in the business; 4) the promoting of emigration from forcing
countries; 5) the furnishing greater scope for diversity of talents and dispositions
which discriminate men from each other; 6) the affording a more ample and various
field for enterprise; 7) the creating in some instances a new, and securing in all a
more certain and steady demand for the surplus produce of the soil” 154 .
This clear idea of a society perfectly divided into classes was a forerunner of an
economic system which at the time of the Report was as yet in its early stages. For
this reason, Hamilton dwelt on certain rapidly growing sectors of production, of
which he listed 17, which in his opinion could offer encouraging guarantees of
success in their attempts to increase: the sectors of skins, iron, wood, flax and
hemp, bricks, ardent spirits and malt liquors, of writing and printing papers, hats of
fur, wool and silk, shoes, and of refined sugars, etc…
In his description of the structured proposal of rules, awards, duties and incentives,
Hamilton also dwells on cotton processing:
154 HAMILTON, Alexander, “Report on Manufactures”, published in Taussig, Frank William (ed.) State
papers and speeches on the tariff, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Harvard University Press, 1893, p. 15
91