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Short answer -- 
 
What was the impact of Wealth of Nations on Jefferson and Paine? 
 
Very little. 
 
Jefferson was a physiocrat.  The economic theories that explicitly  
informed his work were mostly French, not British or Scottish. 
 
Paine's most famous pamphlet, Common Sense, was written in the winter  
of 1775-76, so Smith's work wouldn't have been out yet.  Paine's arguments  
most likely stemmed from his experiences in the anti-monarchist movements  
within Britain before his migration to America earlier in the '70s.   
I don't know if it influenced Paine's later work (late 1790s),  
but I suspect Wealth was never a major influence on either of them 
if it was an influence at all. 
 
There is a connection, however, that is fascinating.  Many young 
Americans went to Scotland for their education -- particularly if 
they intended to be a doctor or a pharmacist.  The coffee houses 
were reproduced when they came back home -- Dr. Alexander Hamilton's 
(not THAT Alexander Hamilton) Annapolis coffeehouse being the 
most explicit imitation.   
 
The discussions in the Annapolis newspaper that led me to the 
impact of the Tobacco Inspection Act of 1747 (JEH article back 
in 1980) represented an EXPLICIT connection between the Scottish 
Enlightenment of the mid-1700s and the formation of policy 
WITHIN America BEFORE the Revolution.  But the information went 
in both directions -- if ideas spread from the Scottish 
Enlightenment (where Smith reigned as a young professor) to 
the British American colonies, the EXPERIENCES and INNOVATIONS 
of the colonial governments and economic practices were also 
brought back as information to Scotland.  Benjamin Franklin's 
cabals were an excellent breeding ground for this sort of 
mutual exchange and political innovation. 
 
So I would say that many of Smith's nascent theories DID have 
a great influence on the formation of economic policies within  
the several American governments during their period of 
effective independence in the early-mid 1700s, and this is 
where the influence came out during the revolution, the 
confederation, the writing and ratification of the Constitution, 
and the first national policies.   
 
There was, if I could say, co-determination here. 
 
But if you are familiar with the pamphlets and newspapers and  
letters of American policymakers (and pundits) through the 
1700s, it's obvious that Smith's basic CONCEPT -- that the 
wealth of nations lies in its trade rather than its capital -- 
was already well-accepted on this side of the Atlantic. 
 
The only place where a strong mercantilist approach was 
ever popular was New York. 
 
Ironically, in the 1760s and into the 1790s a heavy-handed 
mercantilist theory was re-introduced by educated and/or 
wealthy British immigrants BACK into the American commonwealths. 
 
But frankly, even the Hamilton-Jefferson debates that are 
taken so seriously by scholars in the present were not very 
significant at the time.  There are disputes that played well 
in the press -- this was not one of them. 
 
[My own conclusion is that each of the commonwealths had  
developed its own  set of working economic policies and accepted 
views -- there were four or five policy leaders, and the rest 
were followers -- but the reason for the absence of a strong 
national developmental policy once the debt was paid off was 
not the absence of developmental theories in the commonwealths, 
but rather the absence of ANY type of AGREEMENT among them. 
And it was not a dichotomous choice.  There were different 
traditions, different expectations, different assumptions, and 
different realities -- both WITHIN regions such as New England  
(Mass vs. RI) and BETWEEN regions (NE vs. middle colonies in 
general).   
    The only national developmental policy that EVERYONE seemed 
in agreement on was warfare with the nations possessing land 
between the Appalachians and the Mississippi so as to expand 
the effective boundaries of European-occupied farmland and hence 
the opportunities of an intensely agricultural economy. 
 
Mary Schweitzer, Dept.of History,  Villanova University 
(on medical leave 1995-?? with Ramsay's Disease, aka chronic 
fatigue syndrome.)  <[log in to unmask]> 
 
 
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