Tench Coxe - Biography

Biography

Coxe was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on May 22, 1755. His mother was a daughter of Tench Francis, Sr. His father came of a family well known in American affairs. His great-grandfather was the governor of West Jersey, Dr. Daniel Coxe.

Tench received his education in the Philadelphia schools and intended to study law, but his father determined to make him a merchant, and he was placed in the counting-house of Coxe & Furman, becoming a partner at the age of twenty-one.

Coxe was initially a Loyalist during the American Revolution when he left the Pennsylvania militia in 1776 and joined the British Army under General Howe in 1777. He was later arrested, paroled, and joined the patriot cause and supported the new government.

He became a Whig, and began a long political career. In 1786 he was sent to the Annapolis Convention, and in 1788 to the Continental Congress.

Coxe next became a Federalist. A proponent of industrialization during the early years of the United States, Coxe co-authored the famous Report on Manufactures (1791) with Alexander Hamilton and provided much of the statistical data. He had been appointed Assistant Secretary of the Treasury on September 11, 1789 under Alexander Hamilton when Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. Coxe also headed a group called the Manufacturing Society of Philadelphia. He was appointed revenue commissioner by President George Washington on June 30, 1792, and served until removed by President John Adams.

Coxe then turned Democratic-Republican, and in the canvass of 1800 published Adams's famous letter to him regarding Pinckney. For this he was reviled by the federalists as a renegade, a tory, and a British guide, and was rewarded by President Thomas Jefferson with an appointment as purveyor of public supplies and served from 1803 to 1812.

In 1804 Coxe organized and led a group at Philadelphia opposed to the election to congress of Michael Lieb, and this brought him again into public notice. Though a Democratic-Republican, he was for three months daily abused by the Aurora. He was called a tory, a Federal rat, a British guide who had entered Philadelphia in 1777 with laurel in his hat, and his group was nicknamed the “quids.” The term is commonly supposed to have been first applied to the little band led by John Randolph in 1806, but this is a mistake.

Coxe was a writer on political and economic subjects and a champion of the use of tariffs to protect the new nation's growing industries. He wrote also on naval power, on encouragement of arts and manufactures, on the cost, trade, and manufacture of cotton, on the navigation act, and on arts and manufactures in the United States. He deserves, indeed, to be called the father of the American cotton industry. He was the first to attempt to bring a Arkwright machine to the United States, and first urged the people of the South to give their time to raising cotton.

Coxe died July 17, 1824 in Philadelphia, where he is interred in Christ Church Burial Ground.

His grandson, Eckley Coxe, founded MMI Preparatory School in Freeland, Pennsylvania.