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HistoryCh5.docxTWO STRUGGLES OCCURRED SIMULTANEOUSLY during the eight years of war that began in April 1775. The first was the military conflict with Great Britain. The second was a political conflict within America.
The military conflict was, by the standards of later wars, a relatively modest one. By the standards of its own day, however, it was an unusually savage conflict, pitting not only army against army but the civilian population against a powerful external force. The shift of the war from a traditional, conventional struggle to a new kind of conflict—a revolutionary war for liberation—is what made it possible for the United States to defeat the more powerful British.
At the same time, Americans were wrestling with the great political questions that the conflict necessarily produced: first, whether to demand independence from Britain; second, how to structure the new nation they had proclaimed; and third, how to deal with questions that the revolution had raised about slavery, the rights of Indians, the role of women, and the limits of religious tolerance in the new American society.
THE STATES UNITED
Although some Americans had long expected a military conflict with Britain, the actual beginning of hostilities in 1775 found the colonies generally unprepared for war against the world’s greatest armed power.
Defining American War Aims
Three weeks after the Battles of Lexington and Concord, when the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia, delegates from every colony (except Georgia, which had not yet sent a representative) agreed to support the war. But they disagreed about its purpose. At one extreme was a group led by the Adams cousins (John and Samuel), Richard Henry Lee of Virginia, and others, who already favored independence. At the other extreme was a group led by such moderates as John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, who hoped for a quick reconciliation with Great Britain.
Most Americans believed at first that they were fighting not for independence but for a resolution of grievances against the British Empire. During the first year of fighting, however, many colonists began to change their minds. The costs of the war were so high that the original war aims began to seem too modest to justify them. Many colonists were enraged when the British began trying to recruit Indians, African slaves, and German mercenaries (the hated “ Hessians ”). Particularly galvanizing for slaveowners in the southern colonies was the royal governor of Virginia’s announcement of late 1775 that enslaved people owned by rebels—not those enslaved by colonists loyal to the crown—could win freedom if they abandoned their masters and joined the British forces, known as Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation . When the British government blockaded colonial ports and rejected all efforts at conciliation, many colonists concluded that independence was the only remaining option.Page 110
Thomas Paine’s impassioned pamphlet Common Sense crystallized these feelings in January 1776. Paine, who had emigrated from Britain less than two years before, sought to turn the anger of Americans toward parliamentary overreach as well as the British monarchy more broadly. It was simple common sense, Paine wrote, for Americans to break completely with a political system that could inflict such hardships on its own people. Written in plain terms and in English, rather than French or Latin like some treatises, Common Sense sold more than 100,000 copies in only a few months and helped build support for the idea of independence in the early months of 1776. (For more on the origins of the rebellion, see “ Debating the Past: The American Revolution .”)
DEBATING THE PAST
The American Revolution
Almost from the moment it ended, historians have debated the character, meaning, and origins of the American Revolution. For the first several generations after 1776, they developed what historians call a “whiggish” view of the rebellion. In this narrative, the colonists proceeded inexorably and with God’s approval toward independence from Britain, scoring a preordained victory for Enlightenment ideals and progress, for liberty over tyranny. Later, in the decades before and during the Civil War, the perpetuation of this vision of the Revolution by George Bancroft and others served a contemporary need to emphasize American unity and greatness at a time of roiling division and sectional violence.
In the early twentieth century, historians downplayed the importance of ideology in the Revolution, attributing it, rather, to social and economic forces. Carl Becker, J. Franklin Jameson, Arthur M. Schlesinger, and other “progressive” historians, so named for the period in which they wrote, characterized the Revolution as a burst of radical, populist outrage against not just the monarchy or Parliament but against colonial elites with property, prestige, and power. Thus, said Becker (in 1909), there were really two revolutions, one against Britain, the other against colonial aristocrats, each animated by a different question: “The first was the question of home rule; the second was the question . . . of who should rule at home.”
Beginning in the 1950s, with the nation once again searching for unity in the Cold War era, a new generation of scholars began to reemphasize the role of consensus and ideology over class warfare and economic interests. Edmund S. Morgan (in 1956) argued that most eighteenth-century Americans shared common political principles and that the social and economic conflicts other historians had identified were not severe. Bernard Bailyn, in The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967), found Revolutionary rhetoric rooted in deeply and widely held resentments against British imperial oppression. For Bailyn and for Pauline Maier in From Resistance to Revolution (1972), the independence movement still tipped radical but in its resentment of monarchical corruption and abuse of power rather than of elite property holders. Scholars of this period argued over what to name the ideologies that drove the rebellion, but they returned to the privileging of ideas over economic motivators.
By the late 1960s, for a new generation of historians, many influenced by the New Left, the pendulum was swinging back to class-based interpretations and to the internal struggles of the Revolutionary generation. Historians like Gary Nash in The Urban Crucible (1979) cited economic distress and the actions of mobs in colonial cities, the economic pressures on colonial merchants, and other changes in the character of American culture and society as critical prerequisites for the growth of the Revolutionary movement. Echoing Becker, Nash argued for two revolutions, one by common people against colonial elites and one by colonial elites bent on maintaining their status and power in a post-British environment.
According to many scholars up to the present day, colonial elites succeeded in reclaiming economic and political authority after the British left. These scholars point to the crafting of the Constitution, with its protections for the propertied white male elite and exclusion of everyone else from citizenship rights, as evidence for the victory of an essentially conservative revolution. Along these same lines, groundbreaking work on women during the Revolution by Mary Beth Norton (Liberty’s Daughters, 1980) and Linda Kerber (Women of the Republic, 1980) turned attention to the women who played a major role in the rebellion. They worked in auxiliary functions for the army or as wartime maintainers of home and industry, but in a deeper sense, as cultivators of civic virtue in the home, or “republican mothers.” And they lamented that these contributions did not merit citizenship rights in the country’s first constitutions.
THE BRITISH SURRENDER This contemporary drawing depicts the formal surrender of British troops at Yorktown on October 19, 1781. Columns of American troops and a large French fleet flank the surrender ceremony, suggesting part of the reason for the British defeat. General Cornwallis, the commander of British forces in Virginia, did not himself attend the surrender. He sent a deputy in his place.
(©MPI/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
The pendulum swung again with Gordon Wood, who argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) for a socially radical revolution, whereby the Founders undermined time-worn social patterns of deference, patriarchy, and gender hierarchies. “Americans had become,” Wood wrote, “almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” The Revolution did not end slavery or the second-class status of women, he granted, but laid the foundations for those future transformations and should not have its radicalism undercut by those failures.
Others have found the picture Wood painted too rosy. They counter that a new democratic order was short-lived, or came much later, or was driven not by the framers but by societal actors left out of earlier histories of the Revolution. Edward Countryman (A People in Revolution, 1989), Woody Holton (Forced Founders, 1999; Unruly Americans, 2007), and T. H. Breen (The Marketplace of Revolution, 2004) argued for a radical Revolution that saw common people, for a time, shape the course of independence. These scholars see in the rebellion rhetorical groundwork for later change or the momentary ignition of possibilities for marginalized groups, but then a retrenchment of elite white rule.
Similarly, scholars of enslaved peoples, women, and Native Americans during the Revolution have tracked the contributions of these groups to the war as well as their appropriation of liberating rhetoric from Revolutionary political culture, but ultimately they have a bleak story to tell. Colin Calloway’s The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash (2007), Douglas Egerton’s Death or Liberty (2009), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s This Violent Empire (2012), and many others have located in the nation’s birth foundational commitments to white supremacy, male dominance, and the destruction of indigenous peoples, despite various efforts by these groups to claim the Revolution’s transformative potential for themselves. For these and other scholars, America’s gradual (and still incomplete) inclusion of marginalized groups came in spite of, rather than because of, the intentions of the country’s founders.
The pendulum swung again with Gordon Wood, who argued in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1992) for a socially radical revolution, whereby the Founders undermined time-worn social patterns of deference, patriarchy, and gender hierarchies. “Americans had become,” Wood wrote, “almost overnight, the most liberal, the most democratic, the most commercially minded, and the most modern people in the world.” The Revolution did not end slavery or the second-class status of women, he granted, but laid the foundations for those future transformations and should not have its radicalism undercut by those failures.
Others have found the picture Wood painted too rosy. They counter that a new democratic order was short-lived, or came much later, or was driven not by the framers but by societal actors left out of earlier histories of the Revolution. Edward Countryman (A People in Revolution, 1989), Woody Holton (Forced Founders, 1999; Unruly Americans, 2007), and T. H. Breen (The Marketplace of Revolution, 2004) argued for a radical Revolution that saw common people, for a time, shape the course of independence. These scholars see in the rebellion rhetorical groundwork for later change or the momentary ignition of possibilities for marginalized groups, but then a retrenchment of elite white rule.
Similarly, scholars of enslaved peoples, women, and Native Americans during the Revolution have tracked the contributions of these groups to the war as well as their appropriation of liberating rhetoric from Revolutionary political culture, but ultimately they have a bleak story to tell. Colin Calloway’s The American Revolution in Indian Country (1995), Rosemarie Zagarri’s Revolutionary Backlash (2007), Douglas Egerton’s Death or Liberty (2009), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s This Violent Empire (2012), and many others have located in the nation’s birth foundational commitments to white supremacy, male dominance, and the destruction of indigenous peoples, despite various efforts by these groups to claim the Revolution’s transformative potential for themselves. For these and other scholars, America’s gradual (and still incomplete) inclusion of marginalized groups came in spite of, rather than because of, the intentions of the country’s founders.
UNDERSTAND, ANALYZE, & EVALUATE
1. In what way was the American Revolution an ideological struggle?
2. In what way was the American Revolution a social and economic conflict?
3. Was the Revolution a fundamentally liberating or constricting event for the nation’s people?
The Declaration of Independence
In the meantime, the Continental Congress in Philadelphia was moving toward a complete break with Britain. At the beginning of the summer, it appointed a committee to draft a formal declaration of independence; and on July 2, 1776, it adopted a resolution: “That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, free and independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them and the state of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.” TwoPage 111 days later, on July 4, Congress approved the Declaration of Independence itself, which provided formal justifications for this resolution.
The Declaration launched a period of energetic political innovation, as one colony after another reconstituted itself as a “state.” By 1781, most states had produced written constitutions for themselves. At the national level, however, the process was more uncertain. In November 1777, finally, Congress adopted a plan for union, the Articles of Confederation . The document confirmed the existing weak, decentralized system.
Thomas Jefferson , a thirty-three-year-old Virginian lawyer and former member of the state House of Burgesses, wrote most of the Declaration. He had help from the Pennsylvania political theorist, inventor, and scientist Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams, a lawyer and Massachusetts delegate to the Second Continental Congress. The Declaration expressed concepts that had been circulating throughout the colonies over the previous few months in the form of at least ninety other, local “declarations of independence”—declarations drafted up and down the coast by town meetings, artisan and militia organizations, county officials, grand juries, Sons of Liberty, and colonial assemblies. Jefferson borrowed heavily from these texts.
The final document had two parts. In the first, the Declaration restated the familiar contract theory of John Locke: that governments were formed to protect what Jefferson called “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Although these lines have become the most famous part of the document, at the time, the second part loomed larger in the minds of the rebels. It listed the alleged crimes of the king, who, with the backing of Parliament, had violated his contract with the colonists and thus had forfeited all claim to their loyalty.
Mobilizing for War
Financing the war was difficult. Congress had no authority to levy taxes on its own, and when it requisitioned money from the state governments, none contributed more than a small part of its expected share. Congress had little success borrowing from the public, since few Americans could afford to buy bonds. Instead, Congress issued paper money. Printing presses turned out enormous amounts of “Continental currency,” and the states printed currencies of their own. The result, predictably, was soaring inflation, and Congress soon found the Continental currency was virtually worthless. Ultimately, Congress financed the war mostly by borrowing from other nations.
After a surge of revolutionary spirit in 1775, volunteer soldiers became scarce. States had to pay bounties or use a draft to recruit the needed men. At first, the militiamen remained under the control of their respective states. But Congress recognized the need for a centralized military command, and it created a Continental army with a single commander in chief: George Washington . An early advocate of independence with considerable military experience, Washington was admired, respected, and trusted by nearly all American Patriots , as supporters of independence came to be known. He took command of the new army in June 1775. With the aid of foreign military experts such as the Marquis de Lafayette from France and the Baron von Steuben from Prussia, he built a formidable force.
Though Britain successfully lured many slaves to join its side in exchange for freedom (including some owned by George Washington), several thousand black men fought alongside the colonists, particularly in New England and other parts of the North. Almost all southern states refused to allow slaves to serve, even when Congress offered them money in exchange.
THE WAR FOR INDEPENDENCE
As the War for Independence began, the British seemed to have overwhelming advantages: the greatest navy and the best-equipped army in the world, the resources of an empire, a coherent structure of command. Yet the United States had advantages, too. Beginning in 1777, Americans received substantial aid from abroad. They were fighting on their own ground. They were more committed to the conflict than the British, who made a series of early miscalculations. The transformation of the war—through three regions—made it a new kind of conflict that the imperial military, for all its strength, was unable to win.
New England
For the first year of the conflict—from the spring of 1775 to the spring of 1776—many British authorities thought their forces were not fighting a real war, but simply quelling pockets of rebellion in the contentious area around Boston. After the redcoats withdrew from Lexington and Concord in April, American forces besieged them in Boston. In the Battle of Bunker Hill (actually fought on Breed’s Hill) on June 17, 1775, the Patriots suffered severe casualties and withdrew. But they inflicted even greater losses on the enemy. The siege continued. Early in 1776, finally, the British decided that Boston was a poor place from which to fight. It was in the center of the most anti-British part of America and tactically difficult to defend because it was easily isolated and surrounded. And so, on March 17, 1776, the redcoats evacuated Boston for Halifax, Nova Scotia, with hundreds of Loyalist , or Tory , refugees (Americans still loyal to Britain and the king).
In the meantime, the Americans began an invasion of Canada. After General Benedict Arnold and Ethan Allen seized Fort Ticonderoga in May 1775, Arnold and General Richard Page 113Montgomery unsuccessfully threatened Quebec in late 1775 and early 1776 in a battle in which Montgomery was killed and Arnold was wounded.
By the spring of 1776, it had become clear to the British that the conflict was not just a local phenomenon. The American campaigns in Canada, along with new agitation in the mid-Atlantic colonies and the South and growing evidence of colonial unity, all suggested that Great Britain must prepare to fight a much larger conflict.
The Mid-Atlantic
During the next phase of the war, which lasted from 1776 until early 1778, the British were in a good position to win. Indeed, only a series of errors and misfortunes prevented them from crushing the rebellion.
The British regrouped quickly after their retreat from Boston. During the summer of 1776, hundreds of British ships and 32,000 British soldiers arrived in New York, under the command of General William Howe . He offered Congress a choice: surrender with royal pardon or face a battle against apparently overwhelming odds. To oppose Howe’s great force, Washington could muster only about 19,000 soldiers and had no navy at all. Even so, the Americans rejected Howe’s offer. The British then pushed the Patriot forces out of Manhattan and off Long Island and drove them in slow retreat over the plains of New Jersey, across the Delaware River, and into Pennsylvania.
The British settled down for the winter in northern and central New Jersey, with an outpost of Hessians at Trenton, on the Delaware River. But Washington did not sit still. On Christmas night 1776, he recrossed the icy Delaware River, surprised and scattered the Page 114Hessians, and occupied Trenton. Then he advanced to Princeton and drove a force of redcoats from their base in the college there. But Washington was unable to hold either Princeton or Trenton and finally took refuge in the hills around Morristown. Still, the campaign of 1776 came to an end with the Americans having triumphed in two minor battles and with their main army still intact.
For the campaigns of 1777, the British devised a strategy to divide the colonies in two. Howe would move from New York up the Hudson to Albany, while another force would come down from Canada to meet him. John Burgoyne , commander of the northern force, began a two-pronged attack to the south along both the Mohawk and the upper Hudson approaches to Albany. But having set the plan in motion, Howe strangely abandoned his part of it. Instead of moving north to meet Burgoyne, he went south and captured Philadelphia, hoping that his seizure of the rebel capital would bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Philadelphia fell with little resistance, and the Continental Congress moved into exile in York, Pennsylvania. After launching an unsuccessful attack against the British on October 4 at Germantown (just outside Philadelphia), Washington went into winter quarters at Valley Forge.
Howe’s move to Philadelphia left Burgoyne to carry out the campaign in the north alone. He sent Colonel Barry St. Leger up the St. Lawrence River toward Lake Ontario. Burgoyne himself advanced directly down the upper Hudson Valley and easily seized Fort Ticonderoga. But Burgoyne soon experienced two staggering defeats. In one of them—at Oriskany, New York, on August 6—Patriots and Oneidas held off a force of Mohawks, Senecas, Loyalists, and British (all those tribes had once been allied in the Iroquois Confederacy). That allowed Benedict Arnold to close off the Mohawk Valley to St. Leger’s advance. In the other battle—at Bennington, Vermont, on August 16—New England militiamen mauled a detachment that Burgoyne had sent to seek supplies. Short of materials, with all help cut off, Burgoyne fought several costly engagements and then withdrew to Saratoga , where General Horatio Gates surrounded him. On October 17, 1777, Burgoyne surrendered.
The campaign in upstate New York was not just a British defeat. It signaled the splintering of the Iroquois Confederacy, which had declared its neutrality in 1776 but now saw members ally themselves with both sides. Among those joining the British were a Mohawk brother and sister, Joseph and Mary Brant . This ill-fated alliance further divided the already weakened Iroquois Confederacy, because only three of the Iroquois nations (the Mohawks, Senecas, and Cayugas) followed the Brants in support of the British. A year after the defeat at Oriskany, Iroquois forces joined British troops in a series of raids on white settlements in upstate New York.
In late 1779, Patriot forces under the command of General John Sullivan harshly retaliated, burning homes and towns, destroying crops, and leaving the land uninhabitable. The harsh winter that followed saw mass Iroquois starvation and disease. The Patriots wreaked such destruction on Indian settlements that large groups of Iroquois allied with the British fled north into Canada to seek refuge. Many never returned.
Meanwhile the fighting in the North settled into a stalemate. Sir Henry Clinton replaced the unsuccessful William Howe in May 1778 and moved what had been Howe’s army from Philadelphia back to New York. The British troops stayed there for more than a year. In the meantime, George Rogers Clark led a Patriot expedition over the Appalachian Mountains and captured settlements in the Illinois country from the British and their Indian allies. On the whole, however, there was relatively little military activity in the North after 1778. There was, however, considerable intrigue. In the fall of 1780, American forces were shocked by the exposure of treason on the part of General Benedict Arnold. Convinced Page 115that the American cause was hopeless, Arnold conspired with British agents to betray the Patriot stronghold at West Point on the Hudson River. When the scheme was exposed and foiled, Arnold fled to the safety of the British camp, where he spent the rest of the war.
The Mid-Atlantic
During the next phase of the war, which lasted from 1776 until early 1778, the British were in a good position to win. Indeed, only a series of errors and misfortunes prevented them from crushing the rebellion.
The British regrouped quickly after their retreat from Boston. During the summer of 1776, hundreds of British ships and 32,000 British soldiers arrived in New York, under the command of General William Howe . He offered Congress a choice: surrender with royal pardon or face a battle against apparently overwhelming odds. To oppose Howe’s great force, Washington could muster only about 19,000 soldiers and had no navy at all. Even so, the Americans rejected Howe’s offer. The British then pushed the Patriot forces out of Manhattan and off Long Island and drove them in slow retreat over the plains of New Jersey, across the Delaware River, and into Pennsylvania.
The British settled down for the winter in northern and central New Jersey, with an outpost of Hessians at Trenton, on the Delaware River. But Washington did not sit still. On Christmas night 1776, he recrossed the icy Delaware River, surprised and scattered the Page 114Hessians, and occupied Trenton. Then he advanced to Princeton and drove a force of redcoats from their base in the college there. But Washington was unable to hold either Princeton or Trenton and finally took refuge in the hills around Morristown. Still, the campaign of 1776 came to an end with the Americans having triumphed in two minor battles and with their main army still intact.
For the campaigns of 1777, the British devised a strategy to divide the colonies in two. Howe would move from New York up the Hudson to Albany, while another force would come down from Canada to meet him. John Burgoyne , commander of the northern force, began a two-pronged attack to the south along both the Mohawk and the upper Hudson approaches to Albany. But having set the plan in motion, Howe strangely abandoned his part of it. Instead of moving north to meet Burgoyne, he went south and captured Philadelphia, hoping that his seizure of the rebel capital would bring the war to a speedy conclusion. Philadelphia fell with little resistance, and the Continental Congress moved into exile in York, Pennsylvania. After launching an unsuccessful attack against the British on October 4 at Germantown (just outside Philadelphia), Washington went into winter quarters at Valley Forge.
Howe’s move to Philadelphia left Burgoyne to carry out the campaign in the north alone. He sent Colonel Barry St. Leger up the St. Lawrence River toward Lake Ontario. Burgoyne himself advanced directly down the upper Hudson Valley and easily seized Fort Ticonderoga. But Burgoyne soon experienced two staggering defeats. In one of them—at Oriskany, New York, on August 6—Patriots and Oneidas held off a force of Mohawks, Senecas, Loyalists, and British (all those tribes had once been allied in the Iroquois Confederacy). That allowed Benedict Arnold to close off the Mohawk Valley to St. Leger’s advance. In the other battle—at Bennington, Vermont, on August 16—New England militiamen mauled a detachment that Burgoyne had sent to seek supplies. Short of materials, with all help cut off, Burgoyne fought several costly engagements and then withdrew to Saratoga , where General Horatio Gates surrounded him. On October 17, 1777, Burgoyne surrendered.
The campaign in upstate New York was not just a British defeat. It signaled the splintering of the Iroquois Confederacy, which had declared its neutrality in 1776 but now saw members ally themselves with both sides. Among those joining the British were a Mohawk brother and sister, Joseph and Mary Brant . This ill-fated alliance further divided the already weakened Iroquois Confederacy, because only three of the Iroquois nations (the Mohawks, Senecas, and Cayugas) followed the Brants in support of the British. A year after the defeat at Oriskany, Iroquois forces joined British troops in a series of raids on white settlements in upstate New York.
In late 1779, Patriot forces under the command of General John Sullivan harshly retaliated, burning homes and towns, destroying crops, and leaving the land uninhabitable. The harsh winter that followed saw mass Iroquois starvation and disease. The Patriots wreaked such destruction on Indian settlements that large groups of Iroquois allied with the British fled north into Canada to seek refuge. Many never returned.
Meanwhile the fighting in the North settled into a stalemate. Sir Henry Clinton replaced the unsuccessful William Howe in May 1778 and moved what had been Howe’s army from Philadelphia back to New York. The British troops stayed there for more than a year. In the meantime, George Rogers Clark led a Patriot expedition over the Appalachian Mountains and captured settlements in the Illinois country from the British and their Indian allies. On the whole, however, there was relatively little military activity in the North after 1778. There was, however, considerable intrigue. In the fall of 1780, American forces were shocked by the exposure of treason on the part of General Benedict Arnold. Convinced Page 115that the American cause was hopeless, Arnold conspired with British agents to betray the Patriot stronghold at West Point on the Hudson River. When the scheme was exposed and foiled, Arnold fled to the safety of the British camp, where he spent the rest of the war.
Securing Aid from Abroad
The leaders of the American effort knew that victory would not be likely without aid from abroad. Their most promising allies, they realized, were the French, who stood to gain from seeing Britain lose a crucial part of its empire. At first, France provided the United States with badly needed supplies. But France remained reluctant to formally acknowledge the new nation, despite the efforts of Benjamin Franklin in Paris to lobby for aid and diplomatic recognition. France’s foreign minister, the Count de Vergennes, wanted evidence that the Americans had a real chance of winning. The British defeat at Saratoga, he believed, offered that evidence.
When the news from Saratoga arrived in London and Paris in early December 1777, a shaken Lord North made a new peace offer: complete home rule within the empire for Americans if they would quit the war. Vergennes feared the Americans might accept the offer and thus destroy France’s opportunity to weaken Britain. Encouraged by Franklin, he Page 116agreed on February 6, 1778, to give formal recognition to the United States and to provide it with greatly expanded military assistance.
France’s decision made the war an international conflict, which over the years pitted France, Spain, and the Netherlands against Great Britain. That helped reduce the resources available for the British effort in America. But France remained America’s most important ally.
The South
The American victory at Saratoga and the intervention of the French transformed the war. Instead of mounting a full-scale military struggle against the American army, the British now tried to enlist the support of those elements of the American population who were still loyal to the crown. Since Loyalist sentiment was strongest in the South, and since the British also enticed slaves to rally to their cause, the main focus of their effort shifted there. In the Carolinas in particular, something like a civil war between Loyalists and Patriots had already been brewing.
Late in 1775, colonials fought the British army at Kemp’s Landing in Virginia. Three months later, on February 27, 1776, a band of southern Patriots crushed an uprising of Loyalists at Moore’s Creek Bridge in North Carolina. The British tried and failed to take Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1776, but were more successful at a different port, Savannah, Georgia, on December 29, 1778. They captured Savannah despite the opposition of a contingent of Patriots, Frenchmen, and black soldiers from Saint-Domingue. British forces then spent three years (from 1778 to 1781) moving through the South, ultimately taking Charleston in May 1780, and then advancing into the interior.
But the British overestimated the extent of Loyalist sentiment, and underestimated the logistical problems they would face. Patriot forces could move at will throughout the region, blending in with the civilian population. Although the southern Continental army had been decimated by the loss of Charleston, the British faced constant harassment from such Patriots as Thomas Sumter, Andrew Pickens, and Francis Marion, the “Swamp Fox.” British attempts to destabilize the South by offering refuge to slaves drew tens of thousands of escapees, but also had the effect of galvanizing white southern dedication to the Revolution. With neighbors fighting neighbors in the Carolina backcountry, both regular armies sent commanders to direct the action. Lord Cornwallis was named by Clinton to head British forces in the South, Horatio Gates of Saratoga fame to lead the Patriots. Penetrating to Camden, South Carolina, Cornwallis met and crushed a Patriot force under Gates on August 16, 1780. That October, at King’s Mountain (near the North Carolina–South Carolina border), a band of Patriot riflemen from the backwoods killed, wounded, or captured every man in a force of 1,100 New York and South Carolina Loyalists upon whom Cornwallis had depended.
Congress recalled Gates, and Washington replaced him with Nathanael Greene, one of the ablest American generals of his time. Once Greene arrived, he confused and exasperated Cornwallis by dividing the American forces into fast-moving contingents while avoiding open, conventional battles. One of the contingents inflicted what Cornwallis admitted was “a very unexpected and severe blow” at Cowpens, near the border between the Carolinas, on January 17, 1781. Finally, after receiving reinforcements, Greene combined all his forces and maneuvered to meet the British at Guilford Court House, North Carolina. After a hard-fought battle there on March 15, 1781, Greene was driven from the field; but Cornwallis had lost so many men that he decided to abandon the Carolina campaign. Instead, he moved north, hoping to conduct raids in the interior of Virginia. But Clinton, Page 117fearful that the southern army might be destroyed, ordered him to take up a defensive position at Yorktown .
American and French forces quickly descended on Yorktown along with the battle-hardened, all-black First Rhode Island regiment. Washington and the Count de Rochambeau marched a French-American army from New York to join the Marquis de Lafayette in Virginia, while Admiral de Grasse took a French fleet with additional troops up Chesapeake Bay to the York River. These joint operations caught Cornwallis between land and sea. After a few shows of resistance, he surrendered on October 17, 1781, the First Rhode Island having taken part in a key assault on Redoubt 10 a few nights earlier. Two days later, as a military band played “The World Turned Upside Down,” he surrendered his whole army of more than 7,000.
Winning the Peace
Cornwallis’s defeat provoked outcries in Britain against continuing the war. Lord North resigned as prime minister, Lord Shelburne emerged from the political wreckage to succeed Page 120him, and British emissaries appeared in France to talk informally with the American diplomats there: Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay.
The Americans were under instructions to cooperate with France in their negotiations with Britain. But Vergennes insisted that France could not agree to any settlement with the British until its ally Spain had achieved its principal war aim: winning back Gibraltar from British control. There was no real prospect of that happening soon, and the Americans began to fear that the alliance with France might keep them at war indefinitely. As a result, the Americans began proceeding on their own, without informing Vergennes, and soon drew up a preliminary treaty with Great Britain, which was signed on November 30, 1782. Benjamin Franklin, in the meantime, skillfully pacified Vergennes and avoided an immediate rift in the French–American alliance.
The final treaty, signed September 3, 1783, was, on the whole, remarkably favorable to the United States. It provided a clear-cut recognition of independence and a large, though ambiguous, cession of territory to the new nation—from the southern boundary of Canada to the northern boundary of Florida and from the Atlantic to the Mississippi. The American people had good reason to celebrate as the last of the British occupation forces left New York. Dissenters around the world, too, found inspiration in news of the Revolution.
AMERICA IN THE WORLD
The Age of Revolutions
The American Revolution was a result of tensions and conflicts between imperial Britain and its North American colonies. But it was also both a part, and a cause, of what historians have come to call an “age of revolutions,” which spread through much of the Western world in the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first decades of the nineteenth.
The modern idea of revolution—the overturning of old systems and regimes and the creation of new ones—was to a large degree a product of the ideas of the Enlightenment. Among those ideas was the notion of popular sovereignty, articulated by, among others, the English philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that political authority did not derive from the divine right of kings or the inherited authority of aristocracies, but from the consent of the governed. A related Enlightenment idea was the concept of individual freedom, which challenged the traditional belief that governments had the right to prescribe the way people act, speak, and even think. Champions of individual freedom in the eighteenth century—among them the French philosopher Voltaire—advocated religious toleration and freedom of thought and expression. The Enlightenment also helped spread the idea of political and legal equality for all people—the end of special privileges for aristocrats and elites and the right of all citizens to participate in the formation of policies and laws. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a Swiss-French theorist, helped define these new ideas of equality. Together, Enlightenment ideas formed the basis for challenges to existing social orders in many parts of the Western world, and eventually beyond it.
The American Revolution was the first of the Enlightenment-derived uprisings against established orders. It served as an inspiration to people in other lands who opposed unpopular regimes. In 1789, a little over a decade after the beginning of the American Revolution, dissenters rebelled in France—at first through a revolt by the national legislature against the king, and then through a series of increasingly radical challenges to established authority. The monarchy was abolished (and the king and queen publicly executed in 1793), the authority of the Catholic Church was challenged and greatly weakened, and at the peak of revolutionary chaos during the Jacobin period (1793–1794), over 40,000 suspected enemies of the revolution were executed and hundreds of thousands of others imprisoned. The radical phase of the revolution came to an end in 1799, when Napoleon Bonaparte, a young general, seized power and began to build a new French Empire. But France’s ancien regime of king and aristocracy never wholly recovered.
Together, the French and American Revolutions helped inspire uprisings in many other parts of the Atlantic World, which in many ways sought to expand Enlightenment promises of liberty and equality to all people, not just property-holding whites. In 1791, a major slave revolt began in Saint-Domingue, or Haiti, the greatest sugar-producing colony in the world, and soon attracted over 100,000 rebels. The army of enslaved people defeated both the white settlers of the island and the French colonial armies sent to quell their rebellion, then British and Spanish forces attempting to claim the lucrative colony for themselves. Under the leadership of Toussaint-Louverture, they began to agitate for independence, which they obtained on January 1, 1804, a few months after Toussaint’s death in a French prison.
The ideas of these revolutions spread next into Spanish and Portuguese colonies in the Americas, particularly among the so-called Creoles, people of European ancestry born in the Americas. In the late eighteenth century, they began to resist the continuing authority of colonial officials from Spain and Portugal and to demand a greater say in governing their own lands. When Napoleon’s French armies invaded Spain and Portugal in 1807, they weakened the ability of the European regimes to sustain authority over their American colonies. In the years that followed, revolutions swept through much of Latin America. Mexico became an independent nation in 1821, and provinces of Central America that had once been part of Mexico (Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica) established their independence three years later. Simón Bolívar, modeling his efforts on those of George Washington, led a movement that helped inspire revolutionary campaigns in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Peru, all of which won their independence in the 1820s. At about the same time, Greek patriots, drawing from the examples of other revolutionary nations, launched a movement to win their independence from the Ottoman Empire, which finally succeeded in 1830.
STORMING THE BASTILLE This illustration portrays the storming of the great Parisian fortress and prison, the Bastille, on July 14, 1789. The Bastille was a despised symbol of royal tyranny to many of the French because of the arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned people who were sent there. The July assault was designed to release the prisoners, but in fact the revolutionaries found only seven people in the vast fortress. Even so, the capture of the Bastille—which marked one of the first moments in which ordinary Frenchmen joined the Revolution—became one of the great moments in modern French history. The anniversary of the event, “Bastille Day,” remains the French national holiday.
(©Everett Historical/Shutterstock)
The age of revolutions left many new, independent nations in its wake. It did not, however, succeed in establishing the ideals of popular sovereignty, individual freedom, and political equality in all the nations it affected. Slavery survived in the United States and in many areas of Latin America. New forms of aristocracy and even monarchy emerged in France, Mexico, Brazil, and elsewhere. Women—many of whom had hoped the revolutionary age would win them new rights—made few legal or political gains in this era. But the ideals that the revolutionary era introduced to the Western world continued to shape the histories of nations throughout the nineteenth century and beyond.
WAR AND SOCIETY
Historians have long debated whether the American Revolution was a social as well as a political revolution, whether it was radical or conservative, whether it arose from economic or ideological agendas. But whatever the intention of those who launched and fought the war, the conflict implicated people from every corner of American society, and accelerated, as wars tend to do, certain kinds of social change, even if temporarily.
Loyalists and Religious Groups
Estimates differ as to how many Americans remained loyal to Britain during the Revolution, but it is clear that there were many—at least one-fifth (and some historians estimate as much as one-third) of the white population. Some were officeholders in the imperial government. Others were merchants whose trade was closely tied to the imperial system. Still others were people who lived in relative isolation and had simply retained their traditional loyalties. And there were those who, expecting the British to win the war, were currying favor with the anticipated victors. However they came to their positions, Loyalists held what had been the dominant and respected view until rather recently: that colonists should remain faithful to their sovereign.
Many of these Loyalists were hounded by Patriots in their communities and harassed by legislative and judicial actions. Up to 100,000 fled the country. Those who could afford it moved to Britain. Others moved to Canada, establishing the first English-speaking community in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Some returned to America after the war and gradually reentered the life of the nation.
The war weakened other groups as well. The Anglican Church, headed officially by the king and counting many Loyalist members, lost its status as the official religion of Virginia and Maryland. By the time the fighting ended, many Anglican parishes could no longer even afford clergymen. Also weakened were the Quakers, whose pacifism generated widespread derision.Page 121
Other Protestant denominations, however, grew stronger. Presbyterian, Congregational, and Baptist churches successfully tied themselves to the Patriot cause. Most American Catholics also supported the Patriots and won increased popularity as a result. Shortly after the peace treaty was signed, the Vatican provided the United States with its own hierarchy and, in 1789, its first bishop.
The War and Slavery
For some African Americans, the war meant freedom because the British enabled escaped slaves to leave the country as a way of disrupting the American war effort. The Dunmore Proclamation was aimed at slaves owned by Patriots, not Loyalists, but many enslaved peoples made no such distinction once they learned of the policy. In South Carolina, for example, nearly one-third of all slaves defected during the war. White southerners in Virginia and Maryland even permitted slaveowners to free—“manumit”—their slaves if they wished, and some southern churches flirted briefly with voicing objections to the system. But these trends, nor the revolutionary ideals of which they were parts, never seriously threatened slavery or white supremacy in the South.
In much of the North, the combination of revolutionary sentiment and evangelical Christian fervor helped spread antislavery ideology widely. But even there, white supremacy flourished, and qualifications to the laws limited the character or speed of emancipation, which tended to be either “absolute” or “gradual.” Vermont seceded from New York in 1777 and became the first colony to abolish slavery outright (though it was technically an independent republic until admitted to the union in 1791). Soon New Hampshire and Massachusetts joined on the side of absolute emancipation. In Massachusetts, an enslaved woman named Mum Bett, servant to wealthy revolutionaries, heard talk of freedom and equality and understood her condition to violate such precepts. She successfully sued for her freedom in 1781, taking the name Elizabeth Freeman, and others followed suit, leading to abolition in that state in 1783. (Freeman’s great-grandson was civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, born in 1868.) Meanwhile Pennsylvania had become the first state to pass gradual emancipation in 1780, and Rhode Island and Connecticut followed suit in 1784. Gradual emancipation generally meant curtailing the importation of new slaves and granting freedom to those born in bondage after the passage of the laws. Current enslaved people tended to stay enslaved unless states passed full abolition—in the case of Pennsylvania, sixty-seven years later, in 1847.
At war’s end, slavery was intact in New York and New Jersey, where the institution played a larger role in the economy than in New England. Both states passed gradual abolition in 1799 and 1804, respectively, but the New York law demonstrated the incomplete and cruel nature of such emancipation. The 1799 measure subjected children born after that date to indentured servitude until young adulthood. Then, the legislature decreed in 1817 that slaves born before 1799 would be freed—but not until 1827. Across the North, a significant though dwindling number of slaves could be found for several decades after the Revolution, and of course they remained in massive numbers in the South. At some point during the war, almost all states in both regions banned the transatlantic slave trade, but in many cases as part of a broader prohibition of commerce with Britain. It resumed after the war, and southern slaveowners succeeded in pushing back a national ban on the importation of slaves until 1808. But the heartbreaking, family-splitting internal traffic in enslaved peoples continued as long as bondage was legal.
Thus the Revolution exposed the continuing contradiction between the nation’s commitment to liberty and its simultaneous commitment to slavery, with many colonists even using Page 122(without irony) the terminology of “enslavement” to characterize their subjugation by Britain. To people in our time, and even to some people in Revolutionary times like Mum Bett, liberty and slavery were incompatible. But to many white Americans in the eighteenth century, that did not seem obvious. Many white southerners and some northerners believed, in fact, that enslaving Africans—whom they considered inferior and unfit for citizenship—was the best way to ensure liberty for white people. They feared that without slaves, it would be necessary to recruit a servile white workforce in the South, and that the resulting inequalities would jeopardize the survival of liberty. Even men such as Washington and Jefferson, who had moral misgivings about slavery, struggled to envision any alternative to it. Washington, in fact, insisted his slaves be returned to him at war’s end by the British, under whom they had served by the terms of Lord Dunmore’s Proclamation of 1775, and Jefferson did little to manumit the hundreds of enslaved people in his possession. If slavery was abolished nationwide, these and other white Americans asked, what would happen to black people in America? Few whites, North or South, believed freed men and women could be integrated into American society as equals.
Native Americans and the Revolution
Indians viewed the American Revolution with considerable trepidation, sensing that the battle between white forces was essentially a battle over their own lands. Most tribes chose to stay out of the war, but those who fought did so for their own purposes, purposes in fact shared by the colonists: to secure freedom from encroachment and interference. But because Indians feared the Revolution would replace a somewhat trustworthy ruling group (the British, who had tried to limit the expansion of white settlement) with one they considered hostile to them (the Patriots, who had spearheaded the expansion), most Indians who chose sides joined the British cause. Thus despite their similar agendas, the colonists developed a searing resentment of indigenous groups during the Revolution. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson even counted the inflaming of “merciless Indian Savages” among the British king’s crimes.
In the western Carolinas and Virginia, Cherokees led by Chief Dragging Canoe launched a series of attacks on outlying white settlements in the summer of 1776. Patriot militias responded in great force, ravaging Cherokee lands and forcing the chief and many of his followers to flee west across the Tennessee River. Those Cherokees who remained behind agreed to a new treaty by which they gave up still more land. Some Iroquois, despite the setbacks at Oriskany, continued to wage war against Americans in the West and caused widespread destruction in agricultural areas of New York and Pennsylvania. The retaliating American armies inflicted heavy losses on the Indians, but the attacks continued.
In the end, the Revolution generally weakened the position of Native Americans in several ways. The Patriot victory increased white demand for western lands. Many whites resented the assistance such nations as the Mohawk had given the British and insisted on treating them as a conquered people. Others drew from the Revolution a paternalistic view of the tribes. Jefferson, for example, despite his earlier venom, came to view the Indians as “noble savages,” uncivilized in their present state but redeemable if they were willing to adapt to the norms of white society.
The triumph of the Patriots in the Revolution contributed to the ultimate defeat of the Indian tribes. To white Americans, independence meant, among other things, their right to move aggressively into the western lands, despite the opposition of the Indians. To the Page 123Indians, American independence was “the greatest blow that could have been dealt us,” one tribal leader warned.
Women’s Rights and Roles
The long Revolutionary War had a profound effect on white American women. The departure of so many men to fight in the Patriot armies left women in charge of farms and businesses. Often, women handled these tasks with great success. But inflation, the unavailability of male labor, or the threat of enemy troops posed significant challenges. Some women whose husbands or fathers were called away to war did not have even a farm or shop to fall back on. Cities and towns had significant populations of impoverished women, who on occasion led protests against price increases, rioted, or looted food. At other times, women launched attacks on occupying British troops, whom they were required to house and feed at considerable expense.
Not all women stayed behind when the men went off to war. Some joined their male relatives in the camps of the Patriot armies. These female “camp followers” increased army morale and provided a ready source of volunteers to cook, launder, nurse, and do other necessary tasks. In the rough environment of the camps, traditional gender distinctions proved difficult to maintain. Considerable numbers of women became involved, at least intermittently, in combat. A few women even disguised themselves as men to be able to fight. The former indentured servant Deborah Sampson of Massachusetts refashioned herself as Robert Shurtleff and served as a scout and combatant in New York and at the final siege of Yorktown. Her sex was later discovered but the state of Massachusetts granted her an army pension.
The emphasis on liberty and the “rights of man” led some women to begin to question their own position in society. Abigail Adams wrote to her husband, John Adams, in 1776, “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.” (See “ Consider the Source: The Correspondence of Abigail Adams on Women’s Rights. ”) Adams was simply calling for new protections against abusive and tyrannical men. A few women, however, went further. Judith Sargent Murray, one of the leading essayists of the late eighteenth century, wrote in 1779 that women’s minds were as good as those of men and that girls as well as boys therefore deserved access to education.
CONSIDER THE SOURCE
THE CORRESPONDENCE OF ABIGAIL ADAMS ON WOMEN’S RIGHTS (1776)
Between March and May 1776, Abigail Adams exchanged letters with her husband John on the matter of women’s rights in revolutionary America. She was the daughter of a minister and read widely despite lacking a formal education. The couple kept up a regular correspondence on political and social issues of the day.
Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776:
I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors. Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands. Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the [150] ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.
That your sex are naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute; but such of you as wish to be happy willingly give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend. Why, then, not put it out of the power of the vicious and the lawless to use us with cruelty and indignity with impunity? Men of sense in all ages abhor those customs which treat us only as the vassals of your sex; regard us then as beings placed by Providence under your protection, and in imitation of the Supreme Being make use of that power only for our happiness.
John Adams to Abigail Adams, April 14, 1776:
As to your extraordinary code of laws, I cannot but laugh. We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and negroes grew insolent to their masters. But your letter was the first intimation that another tribe, more numerous and powerful than all the rest, were grown discontented. This is rather too coarse a compliment, but you are so saucy, I won’t blot it out. Depend upon it, we know better than to repeal our masculine systems. Although they are in full force, you know they are little more than theory. We dare not exert our power in its full latitude. We are obliged to go fair and softly, and, in practice, you know we are the subjects. We have only the name of masters, and rather than give up this, which would completely subject us to the despotism of the petticoat, I hope General Washington and all our brave heroes would fight; I am sure every good politician would plot, as long as he would against despotism, empire, monarchy, aristocracy, oligarchy, or ochlocracy.
Abigail Adams to John Adams, May 7, 1776:
I cannot say that I think you are very generous to the ladies; for, whilst you are proclaiming peace and good-will to men, emancipating all nations, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives. But you must remember that arbitrary power is like most other things which are very hard, very liable to be broken; and, notwithstanding all your wise laws and maxims, we have it in our power, not only to free ourselves, but to subdue our masters, and, without violence, throw both your natural and legal authority at our feet;—
“Charm by accepting, by submitting sway, Yet have our humor most when we obey.”
But little changed as a result. Under English common law, an unmarried woman had some legal rights, but a married woman had virtually no rights at all. Everything she owned and everything she earned belonged to her husband. Because she had no property rights, she could not engage in any legal transactions on her own. She could not vote. She had no legal authority over her children. Nor could she initiate a divorce; that, too, was a right reserved almost exclusively for men. After the Revolution, it did become easier for women to obtain divorces in a few states. Otherwise, there were few advances and some setbacks—including the loss of widows’ rights to regain their dowries from their husbands’ estates. The Revolution, in other words, did not really challenge, but actually confirmed and strengthened, the patriarchal legal system.
Still, the Revolution did encourage people of both sexes to reevaluate the contribution of women to the family and society. As the new republic searched for a cultural identity for itself, it attributed a higher value to the role of women as mothers. The new nation was, many Americans liked to believe, producing a new kind of citizen, steeped in the principles of liberty. Mothers had a particularly important task, therefore, in instructing their children in the virtues that the republican citizenry now was expected to possess.Page 124
The War Economy
The Revolution also produced important changes in the structure of the American economy. After more than a century of dependence on the British imperial system, American commerce suddenly found itself on its own. British ships no longer protected American vessels. In fact, they tried to drive them from the seas. British imperial ports were closed to American trade. But this disruption in traditional economic patterns strengthened the American economy in the long run. Enterprising merchants in New England and elsewhere began to develop new commercial networks in the Caribbean and South America. By the mid-1780s, American merchants were also developing an important trade with Asia.
When British imports to America were cut off, states desperately tried to stimulate domestic manufacturing. No great industrial expansion resulted, but there was a modest increase in production. Trade also increased substantially among the American states.
THE CREATION OF STATE GOVERNMENTS
At the same time as Americans were struggling to win their independence on the battlefield, they were also struggling to create new institutions of government to replace the British system they had repudiated.
The Principles of Republicanism
If Americans agreed on nothing else, they agreed that their new governments would be republican. To them, republicanism meant a political system in which all power came from the people, rather than from some supreme authority like a king. The success of such a government depended on the character of its citizenry. If the population consisted of sturdy, independent property owners imbued with civic virtue, then the republic could survive. If it consisted of a few powerful aristocrats and a great mass of dependent workers, then it would be in danger. From the beginning, therefore, the ideal of the small freeholder (the independent landowner) was basic to American political ideology. Jefferson, the great champion of the independent yeoman farmer , once wrote: “Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”
Another crucial part of republican ideology was the concept of equality. The Declaration of Independence had given voice to the idea in its most ringing phrase: “All men are Page 126created equal.” This idea would provide a powerful rhetorical framework for claimants to the rights of American citizenship for generations to come.
But for now, those rights went to a limited population of Americans. The United States was not a nation in which all men were independent property holders, and those who were not found their citizenship rights circumscribed. From the beginning, there was a sizable dependent labor force, white and black. White women remained both politically and economically subordinate. Native Americans were systematically exploited and displaced. Nor was there ever full equality of opportunity. American society was more open and fluid than that of most European nations, but the condition of a person’s birth was almost always a crucial determinant of success. As we have seen, even in northern states that abolished slavery, emancipation could be a slow process.
Important Revolutionary leaders, including John Adams, continued to defend a very narrow vision of citizenship and suffrage beyond the year 1776 and shuddered at the increasingly egalitarian calls for truly democratic government from the people of the young country. One day, he predicted with fear, “new claims will arise; women will demand a vote; lads from twelve to twenty-one will think their claims not closely attended to; and every man who has not a farthing will demand an equal voice with any other, in all acts of state.”
The First State Constitutions
Two states—Connecticut and Rhode Island—already had governments that were republican in all but name. They simply deleted references to England and the king from their charters and adopted them as constitutions. The other eleven states, however, produced new documents.
The first and perhaps most basic decision was that the constitutions were to be written down, unlike Britain’s unwritten constitution. The second decision was that the power of the executive, which Americans believed had grown too great in Britain, must be limited. Pennsylvania eliminated the executive altogether. Most other states inserted provisions limiting the power of governors over appointments, reducing or eliminating their right to veto bills, and preventing them from dismissing the legislature. Most important, every state forbade the governor or any other executive officer from holding a seat in the legislature, thus ensuring that, unlike in Britain, the executive and legislative branches of government would remain separate.
Even so, most new constitutions did not embrace direct popular rule. In Georgia and Pennsylvania, the legislature consisted of one popularly elected house. But in every other state, there were upper and lower chambers, and in most cases the upper chamber was designed to represent the “higher orders” of society. There were property requirements for voters—some modest, others substantial—in all states. All of this roughly mimicked the workings of Parliament in Great Britain.
Revising State Governments
By the late 1770s, Americans were growing concerned about the apparent instability of their new state governments. Many believed, once again, the problem was one of too much democracy. As a result, most of the states began to revise their constitutions to limit popular power. Massachusetts, which ratified its first constitution in 1780, became the first state to act on the new concerns.
Two changes in particular differentiated the Massachusetts and later constitutions from the earlier ones. The first was a change in the process of constitution writing itself. Most of the first documents had been written by state legislatures and thus could easily Page 127be amended (or violated) by them. Massachusetts created the constitutional convention: a special assembly of the people that would meet only for the purpose of writing the constitution.
The second change was a significant strengthening of the executive. The 1780 Massachusetts constitution made the governor one of the strongest in any state. He was to be elected directly by the people; he was to have a fixed salary (in other words, he would not be dependent on the legislature each year for his wages); he would have significant appointment powers and a veto over legislation. Other states followed. Those with weak or nonexistent upper houses strengthened or created them. Most increased the powers of the governor. Pennsylvania, which had no executive at all at first, now produced a strong one. By the late 1780s, almost every state had either revised its constitution or drawn up an entirely new one in an effort to produce greater stability in government.
Most Americans continued to believe that religion should play some role in government, but they did not wish to give special privileges to any particular denomination. The privileges that churches had once enjoyed were now largely stripped away. In 1786, Virginia enacted the Statute of Religious Liberty, written by Thomas Jefferson, which called for the separation of church and state. But in Massachusetts, state-sponsored religion and religious constitutional clauses survived well into the nineteenth century.
THE SEARCH FOR A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT
Americans were much quicker to agree on state institutions than they were on the structure of their national government. At first, most believed that the central government should remain relatively weak and that each state would be virtually a sovereign nation. It was in response to such ideas that the Articles of Confederation emerged.
The Confederation
The Articles of Confederation, which the Continental Congress had adopted in 1777, provided for a national government much like the one already in place before independence. Congress remained the central—indeed the only—institution of national authority. Its powers expanded to give it authority to conduct wars and foreign relations and to appropriate, borrow, and issue money. But it did not have power to regulate trade, draft troops, or levy taxes directly on the people. For troops and taxes, it had to make formal requests of the state legislatures, which could—and often did—refuse them. There was no separate executive; the “president of the United States” was merely the presiding officer at the sessions of Congress. Each state had a single vote in Congress, and at least nine of the states had to approve any important measure. All thirteen state legislatures had to approve any amendment of the Articles.
During the process of ratifying the Articles of Confederation (which required approval by all thirteen states), broad disagreements over the plan became evident. The small states had insisted on equal state representation, but the larger states wanted representation based on population. The smaller states prevailed on that issue. More important, the states claiming western lands wished to keep them, but the rest of the states demanded that all such territory be turned over to the national government. New York and Virginia had to give up their western claims before the Articles were finally approved. They went into effect in 1781.Page 128
The Confederation, which existed from 1781 until 1789, was not a complete failure, but it was far from a success. It lacked adequate powers to deal with interstate issues or to enforce its will on the states.
Diplomatic Failures
In the peace treaty of 1783, the British had promised to evacuate American territory, but British forces continued to occupy a string of frontier posts along the Great Lakes within the United States. Nor did the British honor their agreement to make restitution to slave-owners whose slaves had made their way to British lines. Disputes also erupted over the northeastern boundary of the new nation and over the border between the United States and Florida. Most American trade remained within the British Empire, and Americans wanted full access to British markets. The government in London, however, placed sharp restrictions on that access.
In 1784, Congress sent John Adams as minister to London to resolve these differences, but Adams made no headway with the British, who were never sure whether he represented a single nation or thirteen different ones. Throughout the 1780s, the British government refused even to send a diplomatic minister to the American capital.
Confederation diplomats agreed to a treaty with Spain in 1786. The Spanish accepted the American interpretation of the Florida boundary. In return, the Americans recognized the Spanish possessions in North America and accepted limits on the right of U.S. vessels to navigate the Mississippi for twenty years. But southern states, incensed at the idea of giving up their access to the Mississippi, blocked ratification.
The Confederation and the Northwest
The Confederation’s most important accomplishment was its resolution of controversies involving the western lands. The Confederation had to find a way to include these areas in the political structure of the new nation.
The Ordinance of 1784, based on a proposal by Thomas Jefferson, divided the western territory into ten self-governing districts, each of which could petition Congress for statehood when its population equaled the number of free inhabitants of the smallest existing state. Then, in the Ordinance of 1785, Congress created a system for surveying and selling the western lands. The territory north of the Ohio River was to be surveyed and marked off into neat rectangular townships, each divided into thirty-six identical sections. In every township, four sections were to be reserved by the federal government for future use or sale (a policy that helped establish the idea of “public land”). The revenue from the sale of one of these federally reserved sections was to support creation of a public school.
The precise rectangular pattern imposed on the Northwest Territory—the grid—became a model for all subsequent land policies of the federal government and for many other planning decisions in states and localities. The grid also became characteristic of the layout of many American cities. It had many advantages. It eliminated the uncertainty about property borders that earlier, more informal land systems had produced. It sped the development of western lands by making land ownership simple and understandable. But it also encouraged a dispersed form of settlement—with each farm family separated from its neighbors—that made the formation of community more difficult. The 1785 Ordinance made a dramatic and indelible mark on the American landscape.Page 129
LAND SURVEY: ORDINANCE OF 1785 In the Ordinance of 1785, the Congress established a new system for surveying and selling western lands. These maps illustrate the way in which the lands were divided in an area of Ohio. Note the highly geometrical grid pattern that the ordinance imposed on these lands. Each of the squares in the map on the left was subdivided into 36 sections, as illustrated in the map at the lower right.
Why was this grid pattern so appealing to the planners of the western lands?
These ordinances proved highly favorable to land speculators and less so to ordinary settlers, many of whom could not afford the price of the land. Congress compounded the problem by selling much of the best land to the Ohio and Scioto Companies before making it available to anyone else. Criticism of these policies led to the passage in 1787 of another law governing western settlement—legislation that became known as the “ Northwest Ordinance .” The 1787 Ordinance maintained the grid system, but it abandoned the ten districts established in 1784 and created a single Northwest Territory out of the lands north of the Ohio. The territory could be divided subsequently into three to five territories. It also specified a population of 60,000 as a minimum for statehood, guaranteed freedom of religion and the right to trial by jury to residents of the region, and prohibited slavery throughout the territory.
The western lands south of the Ohio River received less attention from Congress. The region that became Kentucky and Tennessee developed rapidly in the late 1770s as slaveowning territories, and in the 1780s began setting up governments and asking for statehood. The Confederation Congress was never able to resolve the conflicting claims in that region successfully.Page 130
Indians and the Western Lands
On paper, the western land policies of the Confederation brought order and stability to the process of white settlement in the Northwest. But in reality, order and stability came slowly and at great cost because much of the land belonged to Indians. Congress tried to resolve that problem in 1784, 1785, and 1786 by persuading Iroquois, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee leaders to sign treaties ceding lands to the United States. However, those agreements proved ineffective. In 1786, the leadership of the Iroquois Confederacy repudiated the treaty it had signed two years earlier. Other tribes had never really accepted the treaties affecting them and continued to resist white movement into their lands.
Violence between whites and Indians on the Northwest frontier reached a crescendo in the early 1790s. In 1790 and again in 1791, the Miamis, led by the famed warrior Little Turtle, defeated U.S. forces in two major battles. Efforts to negotiate a settlement failed because of the Miamis’ insistence that no treaty was possible unless it forbade white settlement west of the Ohio River. Negotiations did not resume until after General Anthony Wayne led 4,000 soldiers into the Ohio Valley in 1794 and defeated the Indians in the Battle of Fallen Timbers .
A year later, the Miamis signed the Treaty of Greenville, ceding substantial lands in present-day Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan to the United States in exchange for a formal acknowledgment of their claim to territory beyond the new lines. But that hard-won assurance proved a frail protection against the pressure of white expansion.
Debts, Taxes, and Daniel Shays
The postwar depression, which lasted from 1784 to 1787, increased the perennial American problem of an inadequate money supply, a burden that weighed particularly heavily on debtors. The Confederation itself had an enormous outstanding debt, accumulated during the Revolutionary War, and few means with which to pay it down. It had sold war bonds that were now due to be repaid, it owed money to its soldiers, and it carried substantial debts abroad. But with no power to tax, it could request money only from the states, and it received only about one-sixth of the money it asked for. The fragile new nation was faced with the grim prospect of defaulting on its obligations.
This alarming possibility brought to prominence a group of leaders who would play a crucial role in the shaping of the republic for several decades. Robert Morris, the head of the Confederation’s treasury, Alexander Hamilton, his young protégé, James Madison of Virginia, and others—all called for a “continental impost,” a 5 percent duty on imported goods to be levied by Congress and used to fund the debt. Many Americans, however, feared that the impost plan would concentrate too much financial power in the hands of Morris and his allies in Philadelphia. Congress failed to approve the impost in 1781 and again in 1783.
The states had war debts, too, and they generally relied on increased taxation to pay them. But poor farmers, already burdened by debt, considered such policies unfair. They demanded that the state governments issue paper currency to increase the money supply and make it easier for them to meet their obligations. Resentment was especially high among farmers in New England, who felt that the states were squeezing them to enrich already wealthy bondholders in Boston and other towns. Elite merchants and their allies controlled the state legislatures implementing the taxes in places like Massachusetts, further exacerbating class conflict. Here, in microcosm, were some of the tensions that Page 131had concerned the revolutionary generation since 1776. In crafting a decentralized government and favoring the states, the framers of the Confederation made a weak Congress with debts and responsibilities but no way to meet them. When the states exercised their power to tax, it fell on common people to fund the public debt, a burden rather resembling ones of the colonial period. Farmers may have been technically “represented” in the legislatures, but elites still controlled them. Like before 1776, all of this might erupt into mob rule.
True to those fears, throughout the late 1780s, bands of distressed farmers rioted periodically in various parts of New England. Dissidents in the Connecticut Valley and the Berkshire Hills of Massachusetts rallied behind Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental army representing farmers already impoverished by the dislocations of the war. Shays issued a set of demands that included paper money, tax relief, a moratorium on debts, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. During the summer of 1786, the Shaysites prevented the collection of debts, private or public, and used force to keep courts from convening and sheriffs from selling confiscated property. When winter came, the rebels advanced on Springfield, hoping to seize weapons from the arsenal there. In January 1787, an army of state militiamen set out from Boston, met Shays’s band, and dispersed his ragged troops.
DANIEL SHAYS AND JOB SHATTUCK Shays and Shattuck were the principal leaders of the 1786 uprising of poor Massachusetts farmers demanding relief from their indebtedness. Shattuck led an insurrection in the east, which collapsed when he was captured on November 30. Shays organized the rebellion in the west, which continued until it was finally dispersed by state militia in late February 1787. The following year, state authorities pardoned Shays; even before that, the legislature responded to the rebellion by providing some relief to the impoverished farmers. This drawing is part of a hostile account of the rebellion published in 1787 in a Boston almanac.
(©Hi-Story/Alamy)
As a military enterprise, Shays’s Rebellion was a failure, although it did produce some concessions to the aggrieved farmers. Shays and his lieutenants, at first sentenced to death, were later pardoned, and Massachusetts offered the protesters some tax relief and a postponement of debt payments. But the rebellion had important consequences for the future of the United States, for it added urgency to the movement to produce a new, national constitution.
CONCLUSION
Between a small, inconclusive battle on a village green in New England in 1775 and a momentous surrender at Yorktown in 1781, the American people fought a great and terrible war against the mightiest military nation in the world. Few would have predicted in 1775 that the makeshift armies of the colonies could withstand the forces of the British Empire. But a combination of luck, determination, costly errors by the British, and timely aid from abroad allowed the Patriots, as they began to call themselves, to make full use of the advantages of fighting on their home soil and to frustrate British designs.
This historic military event also propelled the colonies to unite, to organize, and to declare their independence. Having done so, they fought with even greater determination, defending an actual, fledgling nation. By the end of the war, they had created new governments at both the state and national level and had begun experimenting with new political forms.
Yet although the Revolution hinged rhetorically on the notion of freedom from the British monarchy, many of its architects harbored a narrow vision of that concept when it came to the actual practices of governance and power. Many of them openly believed only the best minds and the economically independent should enjoy the rights of citizenship, and in their view, such standards limited those rights to white males and usually just ones with property. But in the republic’s first days, the rhetoric of equality was already underwriting murmurings to expand the electorate, frightening some of the founders. And cracks were forming in the edifice of slavery, though it would be many generations before the institution would crumble.
Victory in the American Revolution thus solved many of the problems of the new nation, but it also produced others. What should the United States do about its relations with the Indians and with its neighbors to the north and south? What should it do about the distribution of western lands? What should it do about slavery? How should it balance its commitment to liberty with its need for order? These questions bedeviled the new national government in its first years of existence.
