National System

The American School, also known as the "National System", represents three different yet related constructs in politics, policy and philosophy. It was the American policy from the 1860s to the 1970s, waxing and waning in actual degrees and details of implementation. Historian Michael Lind describes it as a coherent applied economic philosophy with logical and conceptual relationships with other economic ideas.

It is the macroeconomic philosophy that dominated United States national policies from the time of the American Civil War until the mid-twentieth century. Closely related to mercantilism, it can be seen as contrary to classical economics. It consisted of these three core policies:

It is a capitalist economic school based on the Hamiltonian economic program. The American School of capitalism was intended to allow the United States to become economically independent and nationally self-sufficient.

The American School's key elements were promoted by John Q. Adams and his National Republican Party, Henry Clay and the Whig Party, and Abraham Lincoln through the early Republican Party which embraced, implemented, and maintained this economic system.

During its American System period the United States grew into the largest economy in the world with the highest standard of living, surpassing the British Empire by the 1880s.

The American School of economics represented the legacy of Alexander Hamilton, who in his Report on Manufactures, argued that the U.S. could not become fully independent until it was self-sufficient in all necessary economic products. Hamilton rooted this economic system, in part, in the successive regimes of Colbert's France and Elizabeth I's England, while rejecting the harsher aspects of mercantilism, such as seeking colonies for markets. As later defined by Senator Henry Clay who became known as the Father of the American System because of his impassioned support thereof, the American System was to unify the nation north to south, east to west, and city to farmer.

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