Contested Commerce: Free Trade and the Origins of the War of 1812
Comment: Drew McCoy, Clark University
"Contested Commerce" is one section of a long chapter of Gilje's current book project, "Free Trade and Sailors' Rights: The Origins, Rhetoric, and Memory of the War of 1812." The book itself builds on his presidential address for the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, which was published in the Journal of the Early Republic. Free trade did not emerge as a cause of the War of 1812 uncontested. In 1803 the British and the French resumed hostilities. Congress struggled to respond to this threat to American commerce, and Republicans and Federalists called upon their shared revolutionary heritage to control the language and legacy of free trade. As the Federalists attacked limitations on commerce established by the Embargo of 1807, they merged the concept of free trade as neutral trade with the idea of free trade as commerce without government limitations. In the end, however, the inability to solve the dilemma of sustaining American commerce in a world at war allowed the Republicans to proclaim free trade as a central reason for the War of 1812.