What did Protestants in America think about capitalism when capitalism was first something to be thought about? The Bible told antebellum Christians that they could not serve both God and mammon, but in the midst of the market revolution most of them simultaneously held on to their faith while...

This essay addresses the question of what happened when the Adam Smith problem of industrializing Europe met the faculty psychology of antebellum America. Although it was not called the Adam Smith problem until the late nineteenth century, the fact that Smith wrote two books instead of one has...