By Kenneth G. Pringle

It all began with the Declaration of Independence.

America's founding document started a political revolution that sent democracy sweeping across the globe over the past 250 years. Just as impactfully, Thomas Jefferson's 1,320-word expression of national self-determination — adopted unanimously by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776 — ignited a financial revolution.

A colonial economy that had been controlled by the British crown was set free. One big problem: The fledgling United States, strung out across 1,000 miles of Atlantic seaboard, started at zero — no industry, no currency, no banks or stock markets.

It didn't stay that way for long. Led by progressive thinkers including Alexander Hamilton, commerce was soon flowing on Wall Street in New York, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia, the Boston Common, Baltimore's Inner Harbor, and everywhere demand met supply.

A new, freewheeling way of doing business took root in the U.S., matching the frontier spirit that was pushing an expanding population across the continent. American investing was characterized from the start by long-shot bets, get-rich-quick schemes, and reckless speculation.

Yet even while punctuated with frequent crashes, the American economy soared, surpassing Britain's as the largest in the world by 1870 as Wall Street overtook London's City as the center of global finance.

Britain had jealously guarded the secrets of its Industrial Revolution (1760-1840), based on steam power. But the U.S.-centered Second Industrial Revolution (1870-1914), based on the internal combustion engine and electricity, spread as fast as money could change hands.

Wall Street was the facilitator and driver of growth, from the railroad and telegraph to steel, oil, automobiles, computers, and artificial intelligence. It was a financial revolution.

And it all began with Jefferson's Declaration of Independence.

Starting a financial revolution was the furthest thing from Jefferson's mind. The future president, 33 years old during the summer of 1776, was a slaveholding Virginian with an agrarian vision for America. Jefferson believed independence was essential. But, afterward, he would have been content for the U.S. to remain an economic colony.

"While we have land to labour then, let us never wish to see our citizens occupied at a work-bench," Jefferson wrote in 1784. "Let our work-shops remain in Europe."

It was Hamilton, Jefferson's political rival, who was the force behind the financial revolution.

The Caribbean-born Hamilton was just 17 but already a seasoned trader when he stepped foot on Wall Street in 1772. He would later found the city's first bank there, and as initial U.S. Treasury secretary steer the nation toward his vision of an industrial future.

"Industry is increased, commodities are multiplied, agriculture and manufactures flourish: and herein consists the true wealth and prosperity of a State," Hamilton wrote to Robert Morris in 1781.

In the summer of 1775, however, Hamilton was headed to war.

The Battles of Lexington and Concord on April 19 had turned hostile rebellion into armed insurrection. The Second Continental Congress established the Continental Army, under the command of Gen. George Washington, who would soon note the exploits of young Capt. Hamilton.

Jefferson was in Philadelphia in the summer of 1775, a junior man in Virginia's delegation to the Second Continental Congress.

He was chosen to pen the declaration on the strength of earlier writings including the pamphlet A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774), which came to a startling conclusion: "[T]he British parliament has no right to exercise authority over us."

This fit the mood of 1776. The war had been going on for a year, and King George III's " Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, " issued on Aug. 23, 1775, ensured he would stop at nothing to achieve American submission.

The call for independence had never been louder. Jefferson's job was to add an exclamation point to it.

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government."

These words from the declaration's preamble are among the best known and most quoted in the world. They underpin American concepts of democracy, justice, and civil rights.

They also embody truly revolutionary concepts. Since time immemorial, the people had been told that power flowed down to the king from heaven. Jefferson said, no! Power flows up, from the people. The king is just another bloke. And if he doesn't do his job, he's out.

This was Jefferson's exclamation point.

The preamble is followed by a list of 27 grievances directed against King George III for "repeated injuries and usurpations." They are mainly economic in nature. Young America was chafing under the yoke of colonialism.

Many are financial, castigating the king "For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world" and "For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent."

Others are less obviously about pocketbook issues: "He has endeavored to prevent the population of these States...and rais[ed] the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands."

Many of the Founding Fathers were wealthy merchants and land speculators, dependent on growth. Crown-imposed limits on immigration hit profits.

Worse, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 forbade settlement beyond the Appalachian Mountains, reserving it for "the several Nations or Tribes of Indians" as part of a larger European peace treaty. Land speculators like Washington suddenly found their claims worthless.

By 1776, anger over these costs and restrictions had reached a head. Americans were building a new world with no help from the king, and they had had enough.

"Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury," Jefferson writes, summing up the Indictment. "A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people."

The Declaration wasn't treated as a big deal at first. Most signers didn't put pen to parchment for another month. But the world took notice. The Declaration inspired revolutions in France, Haiti, and Russia. Today, most people live in a nation that is, or claims to be, a democratic republic. In 1775, no one did. Virtually all of these same countries practice some version of capitalism.

This wasn't all Jefferson's work. But his summation of the American revolutionary spirit, and argument for the rights and dignity of every individual, captured in the declaration, have echoed down the centuries.

Jefferson plays down the accomplishment in his 1821 autobiography. John Adams, a committee member with Ben Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert Livingston, recalled Jefferson writing it in "a day or two."

Jefferson could do the work so quickly because he had been expressing these same ideas in his writing for years. The Declaration was something of a cut-and-paste job.

But, more, Jefferson was distilling the arguments of humanist philosophers from ancient Greece and Rome through the Age of Enlightenment and thinkers including Locke and Voltaire. These ideas were in the air.

A few months earlier, Jefferson's contemporary, Scottish economist Adam Smith, published an equally revolutionary work, The Wealth of Nations, which would play a profound role in shaping the growth of American capitalism.

We will take a deeper look at the influence of Smith's radical concept of free enterprise in the next America 250 installment. Beyond that, the series will examine how the American investor has been shaped by technology, from the stock ticker to online platforms and phone apps; how homeownership turned into the biggest investment of most people's lives; and how retirement, once unknown, reshaped all the equations.

The continuing influence on investing of the 13th-century Italian mathematician known as Fibonacci will be considered, as will the eternal struggle between labor and capital, just in time for Labor Day.

As for Jefferson, he came to appreciate some of the economic forces he had unleashed. Even Wall Street, which he derisively termed "the Alley," had its uses. Hamilton's Bank of New York lent the U.S. $200,000 in 1794 so it could start a Navy. Turned out to be a good investment.

Jefferson was no socialist. He believed in private property. But he was suspicious of the accumulation of great wealth, writing in 1785 that "legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....The small landholders are the most precious part of the state."

And despite Jefferson's later modesty about the Declaration of Independence and his own contribution to the American experiment, he believed the Founding Fathers built something vital and lasting.

"A just and solid republican government maintained here, will be a standing monument and example for the aim and imitation of the people of other countries," he wrote to John Dickinson in 1801. "[O]ur revolution and its consequences, will ameliorate the condition of man over a great portion of the globe."

This is Jefferson's world. We just live in it.

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