US History Lecture 2

American History
Lecture 2
From the Declaration of Independence
to the Constitutional Convention (1776-1787)

KEY THEME:

What took place in this period, a revolution, or something else?

THE STATUS QUO IN 1776
Population (1780): 2,780,000

Political:
Thirteen of Britain's 30 or so colonies in North America were in rebellion.
War had broken out in 1775, and it was becoming clear that the breach was
irreconcilable.

Military:
The American rebels controlled most of the heavily populated hinterland of
English-speaking North America.

The British and their loyalist supporters in the North American population
retained control of those parts of the North American mainland (Florida,
Nova Scotia, Quebec and the lands controlled by the Hudson's Bay Company)
that were lightly populated, lacked infrastructure, and therefore were
controllable by the sea (and thus the Royal Navy) rather than by land.

For the same reason, Britain retained control of its island colonies:
Newfoundland, Bermuda, and the sugar islands of the Caribbean.

THE PROGRESS OF THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE
The nature of the conflict:
From the beginning of the war, the rebels (who called themselves
"Patriots") controlled the hinterland, and the British controlled the Seas
and those urban centres which could be controlled by means of naval
power---New York City for example. Any colony which could be controlled by
means of sea power remained firmly under British control, regardless of the
sympathies of the local inhabitants, and any colony that could be
controlled from the land remained under American control, with occasional
lapses as the British armies of occupation passed through.

The wartime situation was a military analogue to the pre-existing political
situation: The colonists had always controlled their own affairs, with only
occasional bouts of British interference. When Britain had tried to take
over their internal politics, the colonists had jettisoned the largely
illusory system of British sovereignty in their colonies. As a result, the
patriots had controlled the hinterland even before the fighting had begun.
The very first battle, at Lexington, had been fought when a British column
had attempted to enter territory already held by the rebels.

The war is not much heralded by those who like to romanticize or recreate
battles---it has not been the source material for very many movies, for
example, when compared to the Civil War of 1860-1865. However, it was every
bit a real war. It was not , most of the time, a war of pitched battles
between standing armies. It was a guerrilla war, in which George
Washington---one of history's greatest guerrilla leaders---spent most of
his time avoiding direct conflict with the superior forces of the British,
and waiting for them to tire of spending endless sums of money to fight a
war that seemed to have no conclusion. These tactics worked as effectively
for Washington as they would for the Finns in the Winter War against the
Soviets and for the Vietnamese when fighting the Americans in the 1960s and
1970s.

Here's how Johnson characterizes the war:
" The issue was: could the Americans hold out long enough, and maintain an
army in the field of sufficient caliber and firepower, to wear out and
destroy Britain's willingness to continue a struggle, and pay for it, which
was actually begun in order to save the British taxpayer money? Here was
the basic paradox of the war, which in the end proved decisive ".1

Johnson is right. Prescient observers in Britain had figured out this
conundrum from the start, and urged their government to avoid war by
tossing America out of the empire, regardless of whether it wanted to
leave. Adam Smith, who I quoted last week as a defender of the British
position that America should pay its own way in the empire, went on to say
this---on the very next page after last week's quote:

" If the colonies, notwithstanding their refusal to submit to British taxes,
are still to be considered as provinces of the British empire, their
defence in some future war may cost Great Britain as great an expence as it
ever has done in any former war. . . . If any of the provinces of the
British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the
whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from
the expence of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting
any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace . . .".2
In other words, throw the bums out.

Moreover, there were many in Britain who sympathized with the American
cause. Edmund Burke certainly sympathized, and is quoted at length by
Johnson (p. 131) who is a big Burke fan. To a considerable degree, the
divide in opinion in Britain ran straight down party lines. Tories, who
were supporters of an activist monarch, wanted to crush the rebels. Whigs,
who thought that the king should cease to play an active role in politics,
sympathized with the rebels (and not coincidentally, hoped that the war
might crush the fortunes of the Tories). In general, Englishmen were
decidedly unenthusiastic about volunteering to fight other English-speakers
on the far side of the Atlantic, so the king was unable to raise a decent
army at home and had to turn to foreign mercenaries for help. Much of the
British expeditionary force therefore consisted of soldiers from the German
principality of Hesse, as well as several nearby principalities.3

Many colonists in other British North American and Caribbean colonies also
sympathized (they too were subject to the Stamp Act and all the rest of
Britain's new taxes and impositions). Some would have rebelled, had they
not been overawed by British sea power.4
So it was, in some senses, a domestic revolution by proxy.
Similarly, there were those in the rebelling colonies who did not agree
with the Patriot cause. These people, known as "loyalists" or "Tories",
were probably as numerous as the active patriots. This too ensured that the
war was more than a simple Britain vs. America combat (as the War of 1812
would be).

In addition to the ideological divide, there were many who turned the war
into an opportunity to settle local scores. This was certainly most
bloodily true in the Carolinas, where the small farmers often joined with
the British to fight the separatist planter aristocracy. But it was also
true in Vermont, where the Allen brothers and local settlers used the war
as a way of breaking free of New York and setting up their own republic.
And it was true in a hundred other locations as well.

Washington's record proves the point that this was basically a guerrilla
war (or, as Johnson puts it, a war of "attrition and exhaustion"): In the
five years between 1776 and 1781, he fought only nine battles (less than
two per year) with the British, losing six of them. But he never suffered a
decisive defeat. And of his three victories, the final one was decisive:
The Battle of Yorktown, which led in 1781 to the surrender of the entire
main British land force. Before that time, his greatest military skill had
been his mastery of the orderly retreat. Sometimes this record of
undramatic success led to trouble. In 1777, following defeats at the
Brandywine River and at Germantown, a plot (known as the "Conway Cabal") to
remove him and to replace him with the hero of Saratoga, General Horatio
Gates, flourished briefly.

The greatest pieces of art inspired by the war recognize that it was a
guerrilla conflict and that orderly retreat can be a practical and noble
strategy. The great painting of Washington crossing the Delaware River
(shown on the cover of Johnson's book) shows him defiant and proud in
retreat. And Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 poem, "Concord Hymn," shows that he
understands that this was a war won by guerrillas and a citizen army rather
than by a professional military.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world.
The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set to-day this votive stone;
That memory may their deeds redeem,
When like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made these heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

With adequate financing from the States, Washington might have been able to
launch a decisive blow against the British much earlier, but he was always
begging for more money, and then scrimping and saving and trying to
convince his soldiers not to desert when they were not paid.

Here's what Washington himself said about his situation, in a letter
written in 1778:
Money [issued by Congress] is now sinking 5 pr. Ct. a day in this City; and
I shall not be surprized if in the course of a few months a total stop it
put to the currency of it. And yet an assembly, a concert, a Dinner, or
Supper (that will cost three or four hundred pounds) will not only take Men
off from acting in but even from thinking of this business [ie. the conduct
of the war] while a great part of the Officers of your Army from absolute
necessity are quitting the Service and the more virtuous few rather than do
this are sinking by sure degrees into beggary and want. I again repeat to
you that this is not an exaggerated account. . . .5

The Continental Army never rose above 14,000 - 16,000 men at its peak, and
at its nadir was as low as 2,000 men. At the decisive Battle of Yorktown,
the army numbered only around 3,000 (supplemented by local militias), and
it was only the intervention of both the French navy and the French army
that allowed Washington to overwhelm the British general, Lord Cornwallis.

Under such circumstances, one of Washington's greatest services to his
country was in convincing anybody to serve at all (Hofstadter, et. al
suggest that only between 1/8 and 1/16 of the eligible males in America
served in the Continental Army during the war), persuading his unpaid
soldiers not to rebel, and in steadfastly refusing the insistent
suggestions of others that he should install himself as a military
dictator.

The Progress of the Conflict:
The war can be divided into two parts:
Northern Campaigns (mostly 1775-1778), with key battles at:
Lexington and Concord (April 1775)
Fort Ticonderoga (early 1775)
Bunker Hill (June 1775)
Quebec (December 1775)
Brooklyn Heights (August 1776)
Harlem Heights (August 1776)
Trenton (December 1776)
Brandywine Creek (September 1777)
Germantown (October 1777)
Saratoga (October 1777)
Monmouth (1778)
Southern Campaigns (mostly 1778-1781), with key battles at:
Charleston (June 1776)
Savannah (December 1778)
Savannah (October 1778)
Charleston (May 1780)
Camden (August 1780)
King's Mountain (October 1780)
Cowpens (January 1781)
Guildford Courthouse (March 1781)
Yorktown (October 1781)

The first engagements were fought without any master plan on either side.
The first battles at Lexington and Concord, and the subsequent battle at
Bunker Hill in Boston, were the result of local actions of the British
governor in Massachusetts, General Gage, and the reaction of Massachusetts
patriots acting without any inter-colonial cooperation. Similarly, Fort
Ticonderoga fell to Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys, who were so
disconnected from the actions in other colonies that they would soon
declare their lands to be a separate republic altogether, outside the
bounds of the United States.

However, strategies began to emerge. The British began an attempt to
recreate the old French and Indian alliance, exactly as the colonists had
feared. Quebec would serve as the base for a strike down the St. Lawrence
and Hudson rivers, resulting in the seizure of New York and the division of
New England from the rest of the states. This strategy was not fully
formulated until 1777, but the patriots recognized its potential at once,
and in September 1775, a two-prong invasion force under Generals Arnold and
Montgomery marched north into Quebec, seizing Montreal before being
repulsed at Quebec City on New Year's Eve.

The Continental Congress, meanwhile, appointed George Washington to head a
new Continental Army, which it promised to do its best to pay for.
Washington's first action was to take command of the militia forces
surrounding Boston, and to lay siege to the city, which the British now
controlled.

The British began their efforts at seizing New York State by attacking New
York City and the mouth of the Hudson River. By the end of the summer of
1776 they had secured this preliminary objective, and Washington had
retreated south into New Jersey and Pennsylvania, where he harassed the
British for the next two years. Meanwhile, a British army assembled
at Quebec and marched south along the Richelieu River, which flows south
from the St. Lawrence. If they were able to control this valley and the
southward-flowing Hudson River, they would connect with the army in New
York City. However, in October 1777, a patriot army under General Benedict
Arnold defeated the British at Saratoga, and the plan was destroyed.

This ended the key period of the campaign in the north---although
curiously, Arnold himself nearly turned the tide of the war when he
conspired with the British to turn over the key fortress at West Point,
halfway up the Hudson, in 1779. The plot was discovered in time, and
failed. From 1778 onward, the British maintained their control of New York
City, but effectively controlled no hinterland at all.

The stunning success at Saratoga revealed that the Americans were a serious
force. This, plus Benjamin Franklin's brilliant diplomacy in France,
convinced the French to join the war against Britain. France now dispatched
both its army and navy, and encouraged Spain to declare war on Britain as
well. This meant not only that French forces would now fight in America,
but also that the British would have to divert military attention to Europe
and to its colonies in the Caribbean and Asia.

The British now opened negotiations to end the war. These went nowhere when
the Crown representatives refused to consider the possibility of granting
independence. Still, if a military stalemate had developed at this point,
this olive branch might have led to better things.

In the event, however, each side's willingness to carry on the war with its
original war aims intact was boosted by new events. For the Patriots, it
was the intervention of the French. For the British, it was the opening of
a successful military campaign in the south, which led, for a while, to the
mistaken belief that it might be able to reconquer the colonies using a
different strategy than the one that had failed at Saratoga.

A secondary British strategy now came to the fore. In the Carolinas,
back-country farmers had long been poorly treated by their local elites,
and had seized upon the outbreak of hostilities to ally themselves with the
British in order to overthrow this colonial elite, which had used
independence to perpetuate the control that it had enjoyed in colonial
times. This led to a back-country rebellion, a protracted and very nasty
local civil war, and a failed British attempt to help the loyalist farmers
by attacking Charleston from the sea in June 1776.

Following this failure, the British had left the southern states
essentially alone for two years, focusing instead on their New York
strategy. In 1778, however, they successfully captured Georgia's main port
at Savannah, and then proceeded to combine forces with the Carolina
loyalists in a way that had not worked two years earlier. They were
rewarded with spectacular success, gaining control of Georgia and most of
South Carolina over the course of the next two years.

In 1780, they managed to hold but not increase their ground, and began to
suffer increasingly large losses, as the battles shifted from the fleeting
guerrilla skirmishes that had characterized the early part of the war to
set-piece battles against an increasingly professional patriot army and now
against the French. This shift in the type of conflict is typical of the
late stages of any successful guerrilla war, as the rebels gain in
strength, experience and international prestige. These losses began to
erode the will back home in Britain to continue the war. Then a series of
Patriot victories in early 1781, under the brilliant leadership of General
Nathaniel Greene (a much better leader at offensive warfare than
Washington) led the British commander, Lord Cornwallis to decide to
evacuate most of his army and abandon the victories of the past three
years.

The final blow took the form of a dramatic military defeat. The main
British force in the south gathered in Yorktown, on the Virginia coast, to
await evacuation. But two French fleets---one from the French islands in
the Caribbean and the other from the French naval station in Rhode Island,
now set up a blockade and kept away the British fleet, which had to return
to its station in New York. Washington's army was ferried southward to link
up with patriot troops in the south, and the French army also built up
strength at Yorktown. The main British army now found itself surrounded on
land and sea, facing a larger and better-supplied army, and it surrendered
on October 1781.

This effectively ended the war, and negotiations began on a treaty
recognizing American independence. This treaty (the Treaty of Paris) was
not signed until September 1783, but from Yorktown onwards, relations with
Britain move firmly into the realm of foreign policy, and these events will
be discussed further in Lecture Six, in which the early foreign policy of
the United States is discussed.

MAP 2.1: NORTH AMERICA IN 1783 See Map (Opens in new window)

THE FIRST AMERICAN REPUBLIC:
The Declaration of Independence:
Independence was declared, more or less, on July 4, 1776. It was not quite
the dramatic dividing-line that it seems to us to be, when we look at it in
retrospect:

What and why was the Fourth of July? Precisely how and why July 4 happened
to become the date of celebration and to be given its commonly assigned
significance is a mystery that may never be solved.

The resolution that first established American independence was passed by
the Continental Congress on July 2 (not July 4), 1776. For it was on July 2
that the Congress formally adopted by vote the resolution that had been
introduced on June 7 by Richard Henry Lee and seconded by John Adams, "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 connection between them and the State of Great
Britain is and ought to be totally dissolved."

. . . . If the Fourth of July was not the date of the first formal
declaration of American independence, what then was its claim to
distinction? For it was also not the date of the signing of Jefferson's
Declaration of Independence. . . . This document was approved by vote of
the Continental Congress in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, and a printed
copy . . . was made and circulated. The voting was by states and New York
had abstained. Not until July 9 did the Provincial Congress of New York
approve. This news reached the Continental Congress on July 15. On July 19
the Continental Congress finally voted that the Declaration "be fairly
engrossed on parchment with the title and style of "The Unanimous
Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America."6

It was not until August 2 that signatures were finally applied to the
document and that Benjamin Franklin made his famous remark to his fellow
delegates, "Well, Gentlemen, we must now hang together, or we will most
assuredly hang separately." The act of signing the document, of course, had
the effect of self-indicting each signatory in the Capital act of Treason.

The Declaration of Independence is the product of a profound and remarkably
rapid paradigm shift. A paradigm shift is a change in a person's way of
explaining how something works. In 1775, most Americans believed that the
crisis was the result of bad administration by British advisors of the
empire. The empire could function well, if held together by an honest
monarch willing to serve as the guardian of the constitution of the laws.
The monarchy held a central place of goodness and sanctity in this scheme
of things. The key to success was to undeceive the king.

By the summer of 1776, Americans believed that the monarchy was the root of
the disease that was destroying the unwritten constitution of the empire.
The only solution was therefore to reject the monarch himself, and in so
doing to dissolve the only legal bond that held them to Britain. From this
time forward, Americans defined themselves as republicans, compared their
actions to those of the Romans during the Roman republic, and fretted over
the dangers of some new Caesar destroying their experiment in
republicanism.

The paradigm shift came about because of King George III's steadfast
refusal to listen to his American subjects. The trigger for the change,
however, was a remarkable pamphlet, "Common Sense", which was published in
January 1776 by Thomas Paine, who was a young radical just off the boat
from England. Paine vigorously attacked the whole notion of monarchy as
illogical and arbitrary. "Common Sense" sold 100,000 copies in the space of
a few months, becoming the most widely read book in America after the
Bible. It converted such notable Americans as George Washington to the
republican cause.

The radical nature of this paradigm shift can be seen by comparing two
documents, both requested by Congress and written by Thomas Jefferson. The
first, "A Summary View of the Rights of British America", was written in
1774 and takes the form of a proud declaration and petition to the king.
The second, "The Declaration of Independence", not only rejects the king,
but makes him, rather than Parliament, its central object of condemnation.

Those people who could not bring themselves to do a complete about-face and
reject the monarchy were forced either to become loyalists and take up arms
against their neighbours, or else to accept a radical new political change
with which they disagreed. A very small number of monarchists, like
Alexander Hamilton, could see the merit of severing the bond with the
British monarchy and then setting up an American constitutional monarch to
rule over the United States. But his ideas were not taken seriously when
they were presented to the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The Articles of Confederation:
In one sense, America had already been a functioning, if disjointed,
federation since before the Declaration of Independence. Evidence for this
proposition:
1. It had possessed a national legislature in the form of the Continental
Congress.
2. It had the ability to wage war, as evidenced by the 1775 invasion of
Canada and the creation of the American Continental Army in early 1776.
This army was pitifully weak compared to what a nation of this wealth and
energy should have been able to produce. But isn't this also true of the
American army that fought the war of 1812?
3. The states had, in a singularly orderly fashion, carried on the business
of maintaining internal law and order throughout the war for Independence,
and all of them had drafted new constitutions for themselves by the end of
the war. Some had this process well under way before independence had been
declared.

Nonetheless, the leadership in most states recognized that a written
constitution of some sort would be essential in order to coordinate the
actions of the various state governments and the Continental Congress. In
1775, Benjamin Franklin had prepared a draft constitution, which he named
the "Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union." In June 1776, a
committee was struck, headed by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania, to formally
draft a constitution for the colonies. Franklin's proposed name was kept,
and the constitution was sent off to the states for ratification in
November 1777.

It was not ratified by all 13 states---and therefore, technically was not
in effect---until March 1781, by which time the end of the war with Britain
was only six months away. But in practice, all states acted from 1776
onwards as if it had already gone into effect.

The reason for the failure of all states to ratify the Articles of
Confederation was that the Maryland legislature, which represented the
"landless" states, were unwilling to give approval to a document that
appeared to give sanction to the territorial claims of the "landed" states,
whose western boundaries, as defined by their original royal charters, were
technically limited only by the Pacific Ocean or the Mississippi. The fear
of the small states was that eventually they would be overwhelmed by their
"landed" neighbours (three of which---Virginia, New York and
Massachusetts---were already among the four most populous states).

The problem was settled by Virginia, NY, Mass and Connecticut agreeing to
give up most of their western claims. North Carolina and Georgia took
longer to agree, but they were less populous states, and therefore less
worrying to the Marylanders.

This seems like a silly issue to us, in the great scheme of things. In
fact, it was deadly serious business. Imagine that the population and
territory of the United States had grown to the level it reached in 1990,
how would this break down in a country of 13 states, in which seven were
landed and six were not?

The seven landed states (Massachusetts, Connecticut, New York, Virginia,
North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) would contain a total of nearly
200 million people. The landless six states would be only 1/7 as large,
containing only 30 million. The territorial differences would be even more
striking---Virginia, for example, would be more than one thousand times as
large as Rhode Island.

This conflict is interesting for two reasons:
1. It is an early example of how conflicts between the states and the
British government now became conflicts involving the new federal
government. As a rule, the federal government proved decidedly better at
settling these disputes than the far-away British had been.
2. It presages the dispute between small states and large states that would
eventually produce the bicameral structure of the United States Congress,
from 1789 onwards.

The Articles of Confederation established a very weak federal government
structured as follows:
1. It would have a unicameral Congress (effectively the Congress already in
existence) consisting of one delegation from each state, each of which
would have a single vote.
2. Delegations would be appointed by state legislatures, and could be of
any size. In the event the delegates from a state delegation disagreed with
each other, their votes were considered to cancel one another.
3. Important decisions could only be made with the consent of nine
delegations (i.e. with a majority of 3/4).
4. The executive would be elected by Congress.
5. Amendments to the Articles could be made only with unanimous approval of
all state legislatures.

The federal government would have the following powers:
1. To declare war and to set quotas for state financial and manpower
support of any war effort;
2. To sign treaties;
3. To resolve interstate disputes;
4. To admit new states;
5. To administer territories not yet part of any state, prior to their
creation as states;
6. To borrow money and create currency;
7. To run the post office (in practice, this was a revenue-raising measure;
the post office monopoly was a major source of revenue throughout the
civilized world in the 1700s).

In all other respects, the states remained sovereign countries. The
residual power clause of the Articles of Confederation reads as follows:

Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every
Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by the confederation expressly
delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled.

It is interesting to note that the new constitution was an almost perfect
recreation, on the North American continent, of the structure that they had
favoured for the empire as a whole, prior to 1776. Benjamin Franklin had
met with the great British thinker and Parliamentarian, Edmund Burke, on
his final pre-revolution visit to Britain in 1775, and the two had agreed
that the British Empire should be "an aggregate of many states under a
common head."7
This was now what the United States of America would be.

The Articles of Confederation are usually treated with contempt by
historians, due to the fact that the new country ran into a series of
difficulties almost as soon as peace had broken out. They were replaced in
1789 by the present Constitution of the United States, which has lasted 200
years and is the second-oldest surviving constitution in the world (next to
that of Massachusetts). But this is unfair. The Articles might well have
developed into a fuller and more rounded constitution over time, by means
of piecemeal amendments rather than outright replacement. Many of the
problems of the 1780s were merely growing pains, and would have been a
problem regardless of the formal constitution in place. Perhaps the absence
of a strong central government would have prevented the use of American
military force as a means of expanding slavery (in the Mexican war of the
1840s), and the absence of a fugitive slave clause or an inferred
proscription against secession might have resulted in the resolution of the
slavery issue without a bloodthirsty civil war in the 1860s.

At any rate, the following events took place during the 1780s, and were
blamed on the Articles of Confederation:
1. The Americans were unable to force the states to meet with America's
obligations under the Treaty of Paris (the peace treaty with Britain,
signed in 1783) to allow loyalists to reclaim property in the United States
and to ensure that prewar debts to British creditors were paid. As Page
Smith observes, "Those who owed pre-war debts to English merchants, debts
whose repayment was stipulated in the Treaty of Paris were quite satisfied
with a federal government too weak to enforce that provision."8
2. As a result of America's failure to comply with the treaty, the British
retaliated by refusing to comply with a major provision of the treaty,
under which British troops were supposed to vacate the Northwest Territory,
which now was United States soil.
3. Spain, which had been allied with the United States during the war, had
captured the town of Natchez on the east bank of the Mississippi from the
British in 1779. She now refused to turn it over to the United States, even
though it lay on US soil. Congress was unable to force Spain to give up
this territory, and there was reason to fear Spain's territorial claims to
most of what is now the states of Mississippi and Alabama, which Spain
backed up by observing that a treaty between Britain and the United States
as to the disposition of territory that had been claimed by Spain all along
could not be valid. This state of affairs seemed all the more threatening,
now that Spain had won back Florida from Britain as a part of the Treaty of
Paris.
On the other side of the coin, perhaps this crisis was not the fault of the
weaknesses resulting from the Articles of Confederation. It is not clear
what, aside from direct military action or cash payments, could have caused
Spain to abandon its claims. Thirty years later, both means were used in
order to prise Florida away from Spain.

4. Congress lacked the funds to pay for an army to protect settlers on the
trans-Allegheny frontier from the Indians. From another point of view,
Congress lacked the funds to provide an army of conquest to drive the
Indians off their traditional lands to make way for settlers, and thus was
unable to engage in efficient ethnic cleansing.
5. America was now frozen out of the trade with Britain's sugar islands in
the Caribbean, which had always been her commercial life-blood. This was
blamed on the decentralization of the system, although it had more to do
with the fact that America was no longer part of the British Empire, and
Britain still adhered to mercantilist principles (absolute
self-sufficiency, minimal trade outside the empire).

Trade retaliation and the imposition of unified sanctions against the
British, which might have softened the British stand, was not a realistic
option under the Articles of Confederation, because it was almost
impossible to coordinate the actions of the states. When, for example,
Massachusetts, Rhode Island and New Hampshire combined to restrain British
trade in the hope of forcing some trade concessions from Parliament,
"Connecticut not only opened her ports to unrestricted trade with England
but went so far as to lay duties on imports from Massachusetts."9

This caused Lord Sheffield to write in his 1783 pamphlet, "Observations on
the Commerce of the American States, "America cannot retaliate. It will not
be an easy matter to bring the American States to act as a nation. They are
not to be feared as such by us."10

Curiously, Congress did not seem to get the credit it deserved for having
taken advantage of the end to the trade restrictions that had formerly
existed due to membership in the empire: Trade treaties were signed with
France, Morocco, the Netherlands, Sweden and Prussia.

6. Congress was having trouble paying back its own debts, accumulated by
wartime borrowing and by the costs involved in paying soldiers from the
now-disbanded Continental Army. It was unable to produce a 9-state majority
in favour of any of the tax measures suggested by the Secretary of Finance,
Robert Morris: A duty on imports, a poll tax, a land tax, or a tax on
distilled liquor (which in practice was a combined consumption tax on urban
dwellers and income tax on the farmers who produced and distilled grain,
but rarely held very much cash). Soldiers from the Continental Army were
eventually paid in the form of land grants in the western territories
surrendered to Congress by the "landed" states.

It deserves to be mentioned that the states were also suffering from an
inability to pay their own debts, which had been driven to great heights by
the war. As a result, taxes soared and debtors (mostly farmers) were driven
into bankruptcy. They demanded that courts stop engaging in foreclosure
hearings, and that the legislatures (which each had their own currency)
debase the monetary system in order to produce inflation and ease their
debt burdens. In the summer of 1786, a large protest march of farmers, led
by a man named Daniel Shays, took place in western Massachusetts. They
intimidated the court at the town of Springfield, forcing it to shut down,
and the governor reacted by sending the militia to disperse the crowd and
arrest Shays for having led a "rebellion." This suggests that the
unwillingness of Congress to raise new taxes may not have been such an
unwise policy---unless you happened to be a creditor.

In the end, even the members of the Congress itself began to conclude that
there was little point in participating in its activities. Perhaps this
situation would have changed, given enough time. But in the winter and
spring of 1786 / 87, a quorum could not be reached:

The letters written by delegates to Congress in the waning months of 1786
and the early ones of 1787 serve to underline its sense of its own
impotence. Some delegates arrived in December and lingered on in New York
until January waiting for a quorum of the states to assemble. Some waited
for weeks and then returned home a few days prior to the arrival of
delegates who would have constituted a quorum. At the end of January, a
Connecticut delegate, Stephen Mitchell, wrote home that it was still not
clear whether "we have a Congress or no." The terms of some of the
delegates present were about to run out, and if they decamped for home all
possibility of "making a congress" for this session would be lost.11
It was in this environment that the movement to replace the Articles of
Confederation with a new constitution began to take shape.

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Related Readings:

Johnson, Paul. A History of the American People. London: Weidenfeld and
Nicolson, 1997, pp. 101-175.

Sources that students may wish to consult:

Aaron, Daniel, Richard Hofstadter, and William Miller, The United States:
History of a Republic. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1957.
(Chapter Five: "The American Revolution," pp. 102-139.)

A solid, factual account of the period, and a good supplement to Johnson's
livelier but more opinionated version.

Brooks, David (ed.), From Magna Carta to the Constitution: Documents in the
Struggle for Liberty. San Francisco: Fox and Wilkes, 1993. (The following
selections only: "Articles of Confederation," pp. 63-74)

Read the first constitution of the United States for yourself!

Jefferson, Thomas. "A Summary View of the Rights of British America"; "The
Declaration of Independence", in Bernard Brown (ed.), Great American
Political Thinkers, volume I. New York: Avon Books, 1983, pp. 293-306.

It's interesting to see how the same person, writing on behalf of the same
body (the Continental Congress) to the same audience (the world of public
opinion) in respect of the same set of grievances, could have produced two
such different accounts. This is probably the best way to see for yourself
how much American opinion had shifted in two years.

Paine, Thomas. Common Sense. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1986.

This was the book that galvanized colonial opinion and prepared the way for
independence. It's still a page-turner after 200 years.

Reid, Scott. "The Orderly Revolution: The Role of the Legislatures in the
Maintaining of a Stable Political Order in Revolutionary America."
Unpublished essay. See my website: <www.scott-reid.com>.

In this paper, I try to determine why the American revolution did not
descend into the sort of chaos that engulfed the revolutions in France,
Russia and elsewhere.

Smith, Page. The Constitution: A Documentary and Narrative History. New
York: Morrow, 1980. (The following section only: Chapter Six, "The Articles
of Confederation," pp. 71-92).

A tidy summary of what was right and what was wrong with the first federal
constitution.

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Lecture References:

1. Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 133.

2. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.
    Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 486.

3. In consequence of which, the colonists took to calling these soldiers "Hessians".

4. Johnson writes, "In Jamaica, Barbados, and Grenada, the local assemblies
    declared their sympathy with the patriots, but British naval supremacy
    prevented them from doing anything more. Bermuda and the Bahamas remained
    formally loyal but would have shifted if the patriots had been able to
    offer military help." A History of the American People, p. 143.

5. George Washington, letter to Benjamin Harrison, December 18, 1778.
    Reproduced in W.B. Allen (ed.), George Washington: A Collection.
    Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1988, p. 119.

6. Daniel Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience.
    New York: Vintage Books, 1965, pp. 377-379.

7. Quoted in Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 124.

8. Page Smith, The Constitution: A Documentary and Narrative History, p. 85.

9 Page Smith, The Constitution: A Documentary and Narrative History, p. 83.

10. Quoted in Aaron, Hofstadter and Miller, The United States: History of a Republic, p. 125.

11. Page Smith, The Constitution: A Documentary and Narrative History, p. 89.

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