"Freeman Hunt and Commercial Civilization in Antebellum America"

Freeman Hunt, editor of Hunt’s Merchants’ Magazine from 1839-1858, was an enthusiastic chronicler of American “commercial civilization.” In the first issue of his magazine he wrote, ‘“commerce is not only a business, but a science, extremely intricate in some of its developments, and calculated to elevate the mind, and enlarge the understanding, when pursued upon legitimate principles, and with high and honorable views.” Hunt pursued his work with rigor: publishing articles that aimed to advance a science of commerce by enlisting statistics, graphs, and charts, and long explanatory articles to demystify the mechanics of business. He also published articles intended to improve the morality of a growing merchant class, including didactic biographies of merchants throughout history; historian Henrietta Larson called these biographies the “‘Plutarch’s Lives’ of Trade.” For the two decades he led the paper (up until his early death at age 58), Hunt used a constellation of statistics to inquire into the country’s economic health, such as exports and imports, shipping tonnage, customs revenue, specie reserves, banking and credit statistics, commodity prices, and land and population growth. Hunt saw merchants, entrepreneurs, and capital accumulation as the civilizing forces of society and believed that commerce and trade would drive progress, social improvement, and national greatness. This paper provides a biographical sketch of Hunt and his promotion of the early field of business analysis, an interest that grew significantly during his time and became foundational to the rise of American managerial capitalism. It also looks at Hunt’s interest in what today we’d call “human capital” industries—those dedicated to producing and institutionalizing business knowledge—which increasingly differentiated capitalism in Northern states from those in the South. Finally, this paper analyzes Hunt’s role in promoting the idea that America was primarily a commercial nation that would lead the world in trade, a narrative that grew in popularity during his years and yet was, in some ways, exceedingly narrow. This narrative effectively marginalized the story of indigenous Americans, th