41 “One Of The Great American State Papers, ‘The Magna Carta Of Industrial America’” The rare second edition of Hamilton’s famous report urging Congress to promote manufacturing, “one of the great American state papers, ‘the Magna Carta of industrial America’” (Howes). After Washington was elected President in 1789, “the first thing he had to do was to get the national finances in order. That meant appointing Hamilton the first Secretary of the Treasury, and giving him a free hand to get on with the job. The financial mess… was a result of the Revolutionary War and the subsequent failure to create a strong federal executive… by the beginning of 1790 the federal government’s debt had risen to $40.7 million domestic and $13.2 million foreign… The debt-funding was the first of Hamilton’s policies to be put forward because it was the most urgent. But he followed it with three other reports to Congress, on the excise, on a national bank, and on manufactures… [In his report on manufactures,] Hamilton, building on Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, but going well beyond it, proposed that the federal government should deliberately and systematically promote the industrialization of the United States. Smith had opposed such state interference in the free-enterprise, capitalist economy as a throwback to mercantilism. Hamilton did not disagree in general, but thought that ‘priming the pump’ was necessary for a small, new nation, overshadowed by the manufacturing power of its former imperial ruler, Great Britain” (Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, 211-215). This Dublin printing is the second edition of this important report, preceded only by the extraordinarily rare (and virtually unobtainable) 1791 first edition, printed in Philadelphia by Childs and Swaine. Ford, Bibliotheca Hamiltoniana 202. Light scattered foxing, faint dampstaining to preliminary and final leaves. A very good copy. Exceptionally rare. 53HAMILTON, Alexander. Report of the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States, on the Subject of Manufactures. Dublin, 1792. Octavo, modern half brown calf. $37,000
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