Who laid the intellectual foundations of American political economy in the early Republic—the Jeffersonians or the Hamiltonians? This article argues that American economic thought developed primarily along Jeffersonian lines, shaped through a transatlantic exchange with the French liberal school. Beginning with an 1803 correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and Jean-Baptiste Say, Jeffersonian thinkers drew on French liberal economic theory to defend free trade. Say, in turn, incorporated Jefferson’s insights into the second and later editions of his Treatise on Political Economy, which became one of the most influential economics texts in the United States. American economists such as Condy Raguet and Francis Wayland adopted and expanded Say’s framework, helping to shape a distinctly American tradition of political economy. By the Civil War, American economic thought was predominantly Jeffersonian and French liberal in orientation. Jeffersonian statesmen and academics, together with French liberal economists, sustained a transatlantic conversation that nourished an intellectual free-trade tradition in the US.
Today, Thomas Jefferson and his followers are remembered as tragic heroes in the history of American political thought. Scholars have traditionally portrayed the Jeffersonians as doctrinaire agrarians who resisted economic modernization in favor of a moral vision rooted in land, virtue, and republicanism (Rothbard 2006, 213). By contrast, Alexander Hamilton and his followers are cast as the architects of industrialization and commerce, aligned with the principles of modern economics (Sylla 2024, 112). Within this framing, the Hamiltonians are the intellectual forerunners of the American economic system, while the Jeffersonians are relegated to a noble but outdated alternative.
This tragedy may be more myth than history. The Jeffersonians were not simply agrarians; they participated in a transatlantic dialogue with French thinkers such as Jean-Baptiste Say, rooting their political program in economic logic that combined agrarian specialization with free trade. This article traces that development. It begins with Jefferson’s 1804 letter to Say, in which he speculates on how international trade could solve Europe’s Malthusian crisis. The article first reviews Say’s law and its implications for population, then examines Jefferson’s answer to overpopulation, shows how Say turned Jefferson’s speculations into arguments for free trade, and finally traces how those arguments were adopted by later Jeffersonians.
