There is no question that Smith’s message resonated in the United States, primarily among the slaveholding landed elite. James Madison and Thomas Jefferson both agreed with Smith, but only for a time. In the late eighteenth century, America was in an existential struggle with Britain. The young United States was reeling from the Revolutionary War, and still faced economic and military threats from the British behemoth.
However, President George Washington did not think agrarianism provided a viable basis for American economic strategy. In 1790 he asked Congress to “promote manufactures” so that the country could be self-reliant, “particularly [in regard to] military supplies.” The rebellious colonies had suffered shortages during the Revolutionary War, and US leaders remained concerned by the British Prohibitory Act of 1775, which had enabled a commercial blockade that left the colonies unable to obtain basic supplies. Washington and his secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, came to believe that claims of adherence to free-trade policies were just a screen for British market domination and that only a strategy of national industrial development could protect the country and foster its economy.
Following Washington’s address, the House of Representatives asked Hamilton for a plan to grow American manufacturing and counter possible resultant security risks. In December 1791, the treasury secretary presented a program to Congress in the form of a short book titled Report on the Subject of Manufactures to Congress. In it, Hamilton pointedly rebutted the free-trade claims made in The Wealth of Nations and, as part of the argument that wealth did not simply grow from nature and free exchange, set about dismantling Smith’s theory that agriculture was more productive than manufacturing.
For Hamilton, manufacturing was not only more “productive” than farming but also sparked innovation and formed the basis of military strength. As he wrote in his report to Congress,
The farmer, from the peculiar fertility of his land, or some other favorable circumstance, may frequently obtain a livelihood, even with a considerable degree of carelessness in the mode of cultivation; but the artisan can with difficulty effect the same object, without exerting himself pretty equally with all those who are engaged in the same pursuit. And if it may likewise be assumed as a fact that manufactures open a wider field to exertions of ingenuity than agriculture, it would not be a strained conjecture, that the labor employed in the former being at once more constant, more uniform and more ingenious, than that which is employed in the latter, will be found at the same time more productive.