On July 4, the United States will celebrate its semiquincentennial – a very clunky word that basically means half of 500 years. In short, our 250th birthday.
Our founding fathers’ audacious act of declaring independence from England was both an extraordinary leap of faith and the launch of the greatest entrepreneurial enterprise the world has ever seen.
Consider the circumstances in 1776, which were anything but ideal for a bold new venture.
At that time, the 13 colonies comprised a thin strip of eastern North America stretching from present-day Maine to Georgia. The total population was 2.5 million; if that seems like a lot, consider that England’s population at that time was 6.5 million.
For starters, the new nation had no money and was in fact deeply in debt. As there was no central government, no authority or mechanism existed for raising revenues. Further, the ongoing resistance to Britain had been funded with money borrowed from other countries for several years with no obvious means for repayment. The Continental Congress printed substantial amounts of currency, but with nothing to back it up, it depreciated almost instantly.
Consequently, much of the burgeoning nation’s economic burden fell on individual states, many of which had been issuing their own currency and/or levying their own taxes. However, most of them were also struggling financially, and taxes were generally paid in goods rather than cash. Adding to the problem, counterfeiting and smuggling were rampant — to the degree that when payments were made by the Congress, they were typically made in nearly worthless cash.
To make matter worse, no manufacturing infrastructure existed in any modern sense. The economy at that time was almost entirely farming-based. Blacksmiths, coopers, shipbuilders and other tradespeople were individual artisans operating in independent workshops with very limited mechanization. To outfit the War of Independence, a small quantity of weapons, ammunition and uniforms were made, but most supplies were imported from abroad, even from England.
In fact, the colonies struggled to craft 27 American warships in 1776 — a total equal to roughly one-tenth of the British navy.
There was, however, one useful infrastructure asset in place at the time: a decent road system, largely developed by the nascent U.S. Postal Service under the guidance of Benjamin Franklin. But even with that, travel was entirely on horseback or in horse-drawn conveyances, meaning that it took between one and three days just to get from New York to Philadelphia. This seriously impeded everything from shipping of supplies to basic communications, which had to be hand-delivered. In some places, waterways provided useful alternatives, but transit by water was even slower than by land.
Compounding the near-total absence of meaningful resources were the vast cultural dissimilarities between the colonies. Settled at different times by people from different places, they had their own customs, practices, religions, economies and institutions. Finding enough common ground among these disparate entities — and the many different personalities that represented them in the Continental Congress — to form a single nation may have been the greatest achievement of all.
To top it all off, the founding fathers chose a thoroughly radical “business model” for their entrepreneurial venture: democratic government. At the time it was the only significant democracy on the planet; the concept was completely untried and unproven.
While we can look back from the present and point out numerous deficiencies in the democracy they constructed, the fact remains that this was an unprecedented experiment in nation-building.
No money. Precious few other resources. Virtually no infrastructure. Extensive disharmony. A totally unproven organizational structure, competing violently with the most powerful country in the world. And somehow, the founding fathers turned these United States into the greatest success story in history.
