alternatehistory.com

There's no shadow of a doubt that Jefferson was the most important president that the CAS ever had (though back then, before the Bills of Statehood and the Third Constitution, it was known as the 'United States of America'), setting the structure of the country's economy and society well up to today (well, aside from the whole slavery thing, thankfully). Of course, the CAS is a very odd country, possibly the last mercantile nation in the western world, funding almost its entire modern infrastructure through exporting food, hence memetic charts showing Haiti exporting more machine parts per year than a country covering four fifths of the land east of the Mississippi. It can be strange to remember that there was great opposition to this state of affairs when the country began, the Federalist Party pushed very heavily for local manufacturing, stronger government and financial institutions and closer links with the United Kingdom.

My question is, what if, say Thomas Jefferson never became president, or his ideals never became the standard for the young country? How might the first independent nation in the Americas grow?
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