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Despite Smith's influence on Hamilton, they came to be invoked as 
authorities by rival parties on trade issues. Joseph Dorfman (Economic 
Mind in American Civilization, I, 326) noted that in 1809 The Wealth of 
Nations was reprinted by Federalists in Hartford while the Republican 
Congress ordered a reprint of Hamilton's Report on Manufactures and 
directed Treasury Secretary Gallatin to prepare a Report on American 
Manufactures along with a plan to "protect and promote the same."  
 
What Hamilton took from Hume and Smith was transformed and reinterpreted by  
Hamilton's reading. Arguing in 1783 against what he considered a free-trade 
misreading of Hume's "Of the Jealousy of Trade," Hamilton (as paraphrased 
by Dorfman, I, 407-8) held that "neither Hume, `that ingenious and 
sensible thinker,' nor any other authority questions that government 
interposition is one of those moral influences often necessary to rectify 
an unfavorable balance of trade and to restore commerce to the natural, 
invariable laws of profitable activity." (!)  
 
One prominent American who would have been acquainted with Smith's political 
economy before the publication of The Wealth of Nations was Benjamin  
Franklin, a friend of Hume and Smith who lived in London as agent for the  
Pennsylvania Assembly and other colonies and as Deputy Postmaster-General  
of the Colonies for most of the years between 1757 and 1775, and 
visited Scotland in 1759 (when he met Smith) and 1771 (when he stayed with  
Hume in Edinburgh for three weeks). Franklin also encountered physiocracy  
during his visit to France in 1767 (with Turgot  writing a summary of  
physiocratic taxation theory for him), as Smith had while he was in France  
1764-66. 
 
Robert Dimand 
Department of Economics 
Brock University 
St. Catharines, Ontario L2S 3A1 
Canada 
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