The Man Who Faced Both Ways

The composing table is black with old ink, and the long arm of the press waits in the half-light of a Philadelphia print shop. A merchant in good clothes bends over a sheet of rag paper, writing fast, signing the work with a name that is not his own.

It is 1787.

He does not just pick a side in the Revolution. He leaves the Pennsylvania militia in 1776, joins General Howe’s army when the British seize Philadelphia in 1777, goes on trading with British and American clients alike, and earns from his enemies the name that will follow him for the rest of his life, Mr. Facing Bothways.

He does not just survive the suspicion of treason. He writes for the new Constitution under the borrowed name An American Citizen, wins a seat in the Continental Congress in 1788, and by the autumn of 1789 sits as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Alexander Hamilton.

He does not just hold an office. He gathers the figures and builds much of the argument behind Hamilton’s Report on Manufactures in 1791, then spends the next thirty years pressing the same case in pamphlet after pamphlet, that tariffs, machinery, and American factories are the road to a true independence.

He does not just promote industry. He urges Southern planters to plant cotton on every acre they can spare, ties the wealth of the young nation to the crop, and helps raise a manufacturing economy whose engine, for generations to come, would be the labor of the enslaved.

His Spark of Liberty was an America that could make its own way in the world.

He saw a nation that could feed and clothe and arm itself, and he spent his life arguing it into being. He also saw cotton as the means, and the bondage that grew the cotton was the part of the design he was willing to leave in place.

Now, “Where History Comes to Life.”

Born in Philadelphia on May 22, 1755, into a prosperous merchant family, he made partner in the family trading firm at twenty-one. At the outbreak of the Revolution he wavered, briefly joining the British after their occupation of the city, before turning into a public champion of the Constitution under the pen name An American Citizen. Named Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in 1789 and Commissioner of the Revenue in 1792, he supplied much of the data behind Hamilton’s economic program and promoted the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures. Through his pamphlets and his book A View of the United States of America, he argued for tariffs, machinery, and the spread of cotton, and from 1803 to 1812 he served as Jefferson’s Purveyor of Public Supplies. Later writers called him a father of American cotton manufacturing, a title that credits the vision and stays quiet on its cost. He died in Philadelphia on July 17, 1824.

His name was Tench Coxe.

Now We Know Em
by Christopher B. Gordon

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