Patriotism today tends to conjure notions of loyalty to country and battlefield courage, but little more. Partisan attempts to capture patriotism for one side and to accuse the other of lacking it is one reason for the narrowness of the current definition, but another is not looking to history for other examples. One of the most significant comes from this country’s founding era, when small numbers of Americans, most of them very wealthy, practiced an “economic patriotism” that put their country’s interests ahead of their own, risking—and sometimes losing—their financial well-being.
An early version surfaced during the late colonial period, among a handful of wealthy merchants in Boston; Charleston, South Carolina; and other American cities. The American Revolution began with the urban working class, mostly in the northeastern colonies. But only when a few wealthy merchants threw their weight behind the fledgling movement did resistance to British rule gain momentum.
Most of the wealthy took no action at all. More than 40 percent of the colonists were Tories, and among the well-off the percentage of Tories was higher. Even those wealthy colonists who favored the rebels’ cause were reluctant to get involved. The reason was not subtle: They derived their fortune almost exclusively from trade with Great Britain, as part of what Adam Smith would soon label the British mercantile system.
The spur for change among the colonists began when Parliament, following the French and Indian War, became greedy. Noting how well the Americans were paying back the mother country for protection during that war, Parliament decided to raise even more money from the colonies through the Stamp Act of 1765. A few leading traders—John Hancock in Boston, Henry Laurens in Charleston, and others in Philadelphia, New York, and Newport, Rhode Island—then led the resistance against the tax. While the tax would have hit them harder than the lower classes, their objections were not only personal. They took issue with “taxation without representation,” and with a rate that felt arbitrary and out of proportion with the costs of the British protection of American soil and resources. Many of them refused to pass the tax on to their American customers, which is what their merchant colleagues suggested, and some stopped doing business with Great Britain altogether, which severely decreased their income.