Illuminating a Puzzling Career

...Reviewed by Ernest H. Schell Department of History, Temple University Tench Coxe (1755-1824), Philadelphia merchant, land speculator, publicist, politician, and public administrator, is best known for his prescient works on political economy and for the role he played in Washington's Administration as Hamilton's assistant secretary of the Treasury...

...While Cooke shows that Coxe was indeed influential, he does not demonstrate that his influence was generally greater than anyone else's...

...Scholars pursuing research in the Coxe Papers will find his book an excellent guide...

...His family and friends were particularly useful after the Revolution in helping him to stave off a treason trial for his earlier loyalty to the British...

...Given a scarcity of personally revealing documents, Cooke wisely avoids any but the most "well-known psychoanalytic postulates" in discussing Coxe's personality...

...The first political position Coxe held was as a delegate to the Annapolis Convention of 1786, precursor of the following year's Constitutional Convention...

...When the post of assistant secretary for the Treasury became available in 1790, he won the appointment, owing as much to the influence of the Pennsylvania delegation to Congress, Cooke believes, as to his outstanding abilities as a lobbyist for Hamilton's fiscal program...

...As a strategist and polemicist, "Coxe is the forgotten man of the Democratic-Republican Party in Pennsylvania...

...In the first fully authoritative biography of this prophet of industrialization one hoped for a reeval-uation of the intellectual significance of the campaign he waged in the name of technological progress...

...Though contemporaries thought otherwise, Coxe deserves none of the blame...

...It is Cooke's assessment of Coxe as an economist that is least inspired...

...He relies instead on identifying behavioral cues, like Coxe's adeptness at flattery, that betray the character of a man who was born into the business and social elite and who felt the effects of this privileged environment throughout his life...

...Cooke offers a sure-footed analysis of why Coxe, a resourceful and imaginative administrator, remained a second-string player and a perpetually disappointed office-seeker...

...Cooke points out clearly where he disagrees with Julian Boyd's interpretations of the Coxe-Jefferson relationship, without successfully bringing his own interpretations beyond the realm of conjecture...

...Aside from encouraging manufacturing as the basis of development, Coxe's writings on the political economy were too discursive, too disorganized, too cluttered with undigested statistics, and too short on organizing principles to earn for their author a secure place in any school of American economic thought...

...Equally illuminating is the efficiency Coxe displayed as Purveyor of Public Supplies from 1803-12...

...Government sponsorship for a systematic program of industrial growth lay at the heart of all of Coxe's economic prescriptions...

...This certainly casts doubt on their having urged Coxe's appointment...

...Although the author occasionally overstates Coxe's importance by presenting some controversial and ultimately unconvincing interpretations of his role in public life, he shows him to be a more formidable politician and administrator than previous historians had suspected...

...It also calls into question the author's contention that their correspondence with Coxe was so important that "no other private citizen exercised a greater influence" on the First Congress...

...His description of Coxe's commercial pursuits, in fact, is a superb synopsis of the mercantile life of the day...

...By tracing in some detail the difficulties Coxe had to contend with, Cooke has not only increased our understanding of the functional aspects of the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison but also clarified how Congress allowed the nation to drift militarily unprepared into a war with England in 1812...

...The less endearing aspects of Coxe's personality do not prevent Cooke, however, from giving him credit for his "unflagging intellectual curiosity, desire to excel, remarkable industry, and contagious optimism...

...Consequently, his published works on American economic development have received more attention than the failure of the man to achieve the success he sought as a public figure...

...Cooke manages to incorporate extensive summaries of his subject's activities as a real estate speculator and merchant, too...

...stemmed from Coxe's own exaggeration of what was in fact an uncommon talent and from his continual demand that others regard him as he estimated himself...

...But he did influence the Nationalist School of the next generation, including men like Henry Carey and Friedrich List...

...Those interested primarily in Coxe's ideas on political economy, however, will be as well served by the briefer treatment available in Marx...

...Less convincing is Cooke's argument that Coxe may have exerted a decisive influence on Jefferson in the Secretary of State's report on American commerce...

...Conditioned by the habitual forbearance of his father and often displaying "the aristocrat's hauteur," Coxe constantly importuned the leading politicians of his day, only to alienate those on whom he had to rely for advancement...

...Moreover, his views were seminal and went far beyond those of any other contemporary in the belief "that change was an inevitable and welcome condition of American development, and that the inevitable result of change was moral as well as material progress...

...Hamilton's assistant has generally been credited with helping to compose the Treasury Secretary's famous reports on public credit, a national bank and manufactures, but Cooke has demonstrated for the first time how much Hamilton relied upon Coxe, especially for the "Report of Manufactures...

...In favor of a protective tariff, a national bank and domestic industry, Coxe rejected the Federalists' pro-British commercial and fiscal policies...

...Now that the tens of thousands of documents in the Tench Coxe Papers are available for research, we can look forward to a number of studies explicating the career of one of the country's most important secondary figures...

...Coxe's ideas, in other words, were more innovative than Cooke acknowledges...

...Jacob E. Cooke, MacCracken Professor of History at Lafayette College and at one time an editor of the papers of Alexander Hamilton, has produced the first of these, a valuable biography that focuses on Coxe as politician, administrator and economist...

...We are in Cooke's debt for bringing this aspect of Coxe's career to light...

...Such influential assistance confirmed in Coxe the conviction thai somehow he would always be rescued from political and financial embarassment...

...Cooke is nevertheless at a loss to explain why most of Pennsylvania's congressmen spoke of Coxe "with great asperity...

...Beginning in 1787, when he advised the delegates to the Constitutional Convention in a series of essays that Cooke considers even more influential than The Federalist Papers, Coxe repeatedly urged in letters, articles, pamphlets, and books the development of a "balanced economy" featuring the promotion of manufacturing alongside the agricultural and commercial pursuits considered so natural to the American environment...

...Cooke is justified in declaring that no one at the time "was a more indefatigable advocate of Hamilton's brand of economic nationalism than was Coxe...

...Had he not also been a purblind opportunist, twice shifting his political loyalties, he might have earned a place of greater honor in his own time...

...On the contrary, he "deserves recognition as one of the few Americans of his day who sought to resolve by means of a government-sponsored and systematic national program of industrial growth the paradox of a militarily weak, underdeveloped nation recklessly courting war with a strong and economically more mature adversary...

...Instead of examining with a fresh eye the way Coxe glorified manufacturing, Cooke relies too heavily on (without doing justice to) the pioneering interpretations of Leo Marx, whose The Machine in the Garden (1964) addresses this issue brilliantly...

...In that post, and his books and articles, he was one of the earliest, most enthusiastic promoters of industrial development in the United States...

...At Annapolis, he met Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and others who would further his political career...

...Coxe abandoned the Federalists in 1796 because of a falling out with Hamilton, a growing distrust of the leading Federalists as crypto-monarchists, a late-blooming Anglophobia, and an increasingly idealistic faith in American republicanism...

...Many of his contemporaries rewarded him instead with their reproach...

...The torrent of political commentary and innuendo he produced to fill the columns of Philadelphia newspapers, his silent partnerships in several of those publications, and his role in painting John Adams as an unreconstructed monarchist have not heretofore been sufficiently appreciated...

...Cooke handles this political transition both sensibly and sensitively, pointing out that the contrast between Jefferson and Hamilton has been exaggerated, and reminding us that Coxe was "representative of the speculative-entreprenurial [sic] wing of the Republican party...

...For although Cooke has succeeded admirably in taking the full measure of the character and public career of Tench Coxe, he has not fully penetrated the man's mind...

...For that reason alone this gracefully written book is a welcome addition to the literature on our early national period...

...Historians have been prevented from making a judicious evaluation of his puzzling career because the archival collection of Tench Coxe manuscripts at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania has been closed to scholars until only recently...

...Cooke has given us a solid portrait of an important figure and his time, replacing Harold Hutcheson's earlier work...

...The problem," notes Cooke...

...One of the most important revelations in the book is the extent to which Coxe, after switching panics, lent his organizational skills and his inexhaustible pen to the Jeffersonian Republicans in the Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaign of 1799 and the Presidential election of 1800...