PILLAR #4 

Free market economy

     Both Jamestown and Plymouth began with a form of socialist economy. Each had common lands to be cultivated. Each had common grain storage. Both failed.

     They call 1609-1610 the "starving time" in Jamestown. William Bradford lamented that perhaps he and his fellow colonists had thought themselves wiser than God. 

     Plymouth didn't suffer as deeply. Gov. Carver divided up the land and seed. Within one planting season they enjoyed abundance. That led Bradford to proclaim a day of Thanksgiving. 

     Adam Smith, concerned with finding the most moral system of economics, developed what is considered the theory of capitalism in 1776. But this was well after Plymouth. By 1630, Plymouth's colonists had so many crops coming in they needed a full-time miller. In one of the first "divisions of labor," they agreed to pay a miller (with crops) for milling their grains. 

     In both Jamestown and Plymouth there were two of the pillars - common law and private property with written titles and deeds. Only in Plymouth did a bottom-up Protestant religion take root. And it was Plymouth that had the first free-market economy. Virginia had top-down Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. 

     No other nation in the world has all four pillars, and only Plymouth, not Jamestown, had all four. American exceptionalism was born in Plymouth, with a bottom-up religious structure that stressed local control, participation by everyone, private property and a free market economy. 

     Those four pillars, not the Declaration or Constitution, make us exceptional. Those two amazing documents merely placed into the written record what Americans had already known for more than 150 years. 

Next: What to make of it today?