The Empire of Debt and Liberty

From colonies to companies to states and still paying the bill.

Photo by The Cleveland Museum of Art on Unsplash. Pumpkins Among the Corn, 1878 Winslow Homer (American, 1836–1910) America wood engraving.

America didn’t just spring from liberty and ideals. Instead, it was born in ledgers, IOUs, and crop cycles. From the start, the United States carried the awkward inheritance of empire: debts to British merchants, speculative land schemes, and a plantation economy that mortgaged people as collateral.

Liberty was the sales pitch.

Debt was the operating system.

What Gordon Wood shows in Empire of Liberty is that before slavery became the all-consuming wedge, debt was already carving deep sectional scars. Southerners feared federal courts because they threatened to enforce debts planters hoped to bury. Northerners bristled at a system that made them carry burdens unequally. The nation’s very capital was traded for a financial fix. In short, the Republic was cobbled together less as a shining city on a hill and more as a debt-restructuring deal.