American Revolution
I | INTRODUCTION |
American
Revolution (1775-1783), conflict between 13 British colonies in North
America and their parent country, Great Britain. It was made up of two related
events: the American War of Independence (1775-1783) and the formation of the
American government as laid out by the Constitution of the United States in
1787. First, the war achieved independence from Great Britain by the colonies.
Second, the newly created United States of America established a republican form
of government, in which power resided with the people.
The revolution had many causes. Long-term
social, economic, and political changes in the colonies before 1750 provided the
basis for an independent nation with representative political institutions. More
immediately, the French and Indian War (1754-1763) changed the relationship
between the colonies and their mother country. Finally, a decade of conflicts
between the British government and the colonists, beginning with the Stamp Act
crisis in 1765, led to the outbreak of war in 1775 and the Declaration of
Independence in 1776.
Once independent, the new state governments
implemented republican constitutions, and a Continental Congress directed the
American war effort. Then in 1781 the rebellious states created a loose union
under the Articles of Confederation. At the end of the war in 1783, Britain
recognized its former colonies as an independent nation. In 1789 the people of
the several states ratified the Constitution that created a stronger central
government.
II | THE BRITISH COLONIES IN 1750 |
A | The American People |
Britain’s 13 North American colonies
experienced an extraordinary rate of population growth. In 1700 the population
was about 250,000; seven decades later there were about 2,500,000 inhabitants, a
tenfold increase. This phenomenal growth was a prerequisite for a successful
independence movement. In 1700 there were 20 people in Britain for every
American colonist; by 1775 this ratio had fallen to 3 to 1. See also
Colonial America, History of.
The American population also changed in
composition. The proportion of the colonists who were of English culture and
ancestry steadily declined during the 1700s as the result of the arrival, by
forced or voluntary migration, of new racial and ethnic groups. Among the 80
percent of Americans who were of European descent, there were important cultural
divisions. Migrants from Germany, Scotland, and Ireland made up at least 30
percent of the white population. Members of these groups often settled in their
own communities, especially in the mid-Atlantic colonies of Delaware, New York,
New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Others migrated into the backcountry regions of
the Southern colonies (Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and
Georgia), thus adding ethnic diversity to a region already divided along racial
lines. Only the New England colonies of Connecticut, Rhode Island,
Massachusetts, and New Hampshire remained predominantly English in composition
and culture.
In 1775 about one-fifth of the people of
the mainland colonies were of African ancestry. Unlike Latin America and the
West Indies, North American slaves had a high rate of natural increase. About
250,000 Africans were brought to the mainland colonies before 1775, but the
total black population numbered 567,000 on the eve of independence. Most lived
as slaves working on tobacco and rice plantations in the Southern colonies.
Slaves and some free blacks also lived in the Northern colonies, working on
small farms or in cities. See also Slavery in the United States.
Diversity existed not only in the
population but also in religious life. Many of the American colonists were not
members of any church. Of those who had a religious affiliation, the vast
majority were Protestant Christians. There were significant numbers of Roman
Catholics in Maryland and Delaware, and a small number of Jews, mostly in Rhode
Island. Among the Protestants, there were significant regional variations. In
New England, the Congregational Church was legally established; all residents
had to contribute to its support. In the South, the Church of England likewise
received state support. However, Scots-Irish migrants created Presbyterian
churches in the Southern backcountry. In addition, many Baptist congregations
were formed during the Great Awakening, an important religious revival that
swept through all the colonies during the 1740s. In the mid-Atlantic colonies,
there were many different faiths, including Quakers, Dutch Reformed, Mennonites,
Anglicans, Presbyterians, and Lutherans, so that it was difficult to enforce
support for a single established church.
This growth in population and diversity
made the American colonies more difficult for Britain to rule. It was therefore
an important precondition for the rise of an independence movement and the
subsequent emergence of a unique American nationality.
B | The Political System |
In 1750 there was little political basis
for a national consciousness in the colonies of British North America. Each of
the 13 colonies was a separate entity, with its own governor and legislative
assembly. The inhabitants’ first political allegiance was to their own colony.
The lower house of each legislature was elected by the adult white men who were
property owners. However, the upper houses, or councils, and the governors were
chosen in different ways depending on the type of colony.
There were three kinds of colonies:
corporate, proprietary, and royal. Rhode Island and Connecticut were corporate
colonies, so called because they had been founded under charters granted by the
king of England that bestowed corporate rights. In these two colonies, the
corporation of property owners elected the council and governor as well as the
assembly. Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware were proprietary colonies, ruled
by descendants of their founders. Their governors and councils were chosen by
their British proprietors, or owners. Georgia, North and South Carolina,
Virginia, New Jersey, New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire were royal
provinces. Their governors were appointed by the king on the advice of the Board
of Trade, the British administrative agency that supervised colonial affairs.
Their councils, except in Massachusetts, were nominated by the governor and
approved by the Board of Trade.
In 1750 there were no governmental bodies
or political parties that could formulate policy for the colonists as a whole.
Such intercolony ties were created only in response to political events that
affected all the colonies—first the French and Indian War and then the struggle
for independence.
Nevertheless, the colonies shared one
important political institution. Each colony had a representative assembly with
authority to make laws covering most aspects of local life. The assemblies had
the right to tax; to appropriate money for public works and public officials;
and to regulate internal trade, religion, and social behavior. Although the
British government was responsible for external matters, such as foreign affairs
and trade, the American colonists had a great deal of self-government during the
colonial period. The capable leaders of the assemblies took the lead in the
independence struggle. These well-functioning representative institutions would
form the basis for the new state governments.
C | Economy and Society |
In addition to the rapid growth and
diversity of the population and the experience in representative government, the
emergence of a prosperous agricultural and commercial economy in the colonies
during the 18th century helped pave the way for the independence movement. This
economic system was based on the production of wheat, cattle, corn, tobacco, and
rice in America for export to the West Indies, Britain, and Europe.
C1 | The South |
Southern agriculture was founded on the
cultivation of tobacco, wheat, and corn in Virginia, Maryland, and North
Carolina, and of rice and indigo (a blue dye) in South Carolina and Georgia.
There was a large demand for these crops in Europe. These crops were cultivated
with the help of black slaves imported from Africa. The white planter class in
the South was the most powerful, both politically and economically.
C2 | The North |
Wheat was the main cash crop of the
mid-Atlantic colonies of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. These colonies,
along with those in New England, exported wheat—along with corn, cattle, horses,
fish, and wood—primarily to the West Indies. The British and French planters of
the Caribbean, exploiting a mainly African labor force, specialized in the
production of sugar for export to Europe and imported many of their foodstuffs.
The Northern mainland prospered from this vast transatlantic division of labor.
In payment for supplies shipped to the West Indies, their merchants received
bills of exchange (essentially credit slips) from merchant houses in Great
Britain. These credits were then used to purchase British manufactured
goods.
C3 | Trade Patterns and Urban Growth |
The two most important trade routes in
terms of volume and financial return were controlled by British merchants: the
tobacco and the sugar trades. American merchants dominated two small trade
routes: the export of rice to Europe and the export of supplies from the
Northern mainland to the West Indies. However, American control of these
subsidiary trade routes undermined the British policy of mercantilism, which
depended on raw materials from the colonies that were shipped to Great Britain
and then exported as finished products. This policy discouraged any colonial
trade except with Great Britain.
The colonists’ participation in
transatlantic trade accounted for the rise of the American port cities of
Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Newport, and Charleston. These
shipping centers gradually came to provide the commercial services, such as
insurance and wholesale trade, and the small-scale industries, such as rope and
sail manufacture and shipbuilding, that were necessary to sustain a merchant
fleet. The independence movement began in these cities.
C4 | Social Divisions |
The contrast between the rich and the
poor was stark in the colonial cities. In 1774 about 29 percent of the adult men
in Boston possessed no taxable property at all. These men were wage earners,
working for others. They lived in the back of shops, taverns, or rented rooms.
Since they had little or no property, they could not vote, and thus lacked
direct political power.
Next in social rank were the artisans
and small shopkeepers. Constituting almost half of a town’s population, they
owned about one-third of the total wealth. Shopkeepers had once dominated town
life, but their political and social influence had waned with the rise of
wealthy merchants. Artisans feared a similar decline in their position; the
influx of British manufactures might destroy their small businesses, reducing
them to the status of propertyless wage laborers. As threatened social groups,
artisans and shopkeepers were vital to the revolutionary upheaval. They took the
strongest stand against the new British measures of taxation and control. They
also challenged the political domination of the merchants and lawyers.
Urban merchants also played key
leadership roles in American resistance. By 1770 these men, about 10 percent of
the taxpayers, owned from 50 to 60 percent of the total wealth of these towns.
Their wealth also gave them much prestige and enabled them, and their lawyer
allies who handled complex commercial transactions, to dominate political
life.
The gap between rich and poor was much
narrower in the farming regions of the Northern colonies. However, even in rural
communities, where most Americans lived, social differences were increasing.
Inequality was especially apparent in areas where crops were raised for sale,
rather than just for subsistence. For example, in the Southern colonies, great
disparity existed between plantation farmers who grew rice and tobacco on a
large scale and family farmers who grew food to feed themselves. In both the
North and the South these differences divided farming communities.
In 1775 it was not clear whether the
many divisions within American society—among racial and ethnic groups, religious
denominations, and social classes—and the fragmented character of colonial
political institutions would prevent a unified movement for independence. But it
was increasingly apparent that the battle with Britain for American home rule
would also involve a struggle among Americans over which people would rule in
the new country.
III | THE GREAT WAR FOR EMPIRE |
The warfare between Britain and France that
began in 1754 with skirmishes in North America has several different names. In
America it is known as the French and Indian War (1754-1763). In Europe it is
called the Seven Years’ War because the fighting there lasted from 1756 to 1763.
The war in North America was fought mostly throughout the Northern colonies, and
in the end Great Britain defeated France. During the peace negotiations, Britain
acquired French holdings in Canada and Florida from France’s ally, Spain.
However, Britain also accumulated a large debt over the course of the war. To
help pay off the debt, Britain turned to the colonies to generate revenue.
The war changed the relationship between
Great Britain and the colonies. Prior to the war, Great Britain had practiced a
policy of salutary neglect, not insisting on strict enforcement of laws, such as
the Molasses Act, which in 1733 imposed a tax on molasses, because trade with
the American colonies was making Britain very wealthy and powerful. During this
period, the colonists developed a nearly independent political and economic
system.
After the war, however, British leaders
reevaluated their relationship with the colonies, ending the policy of salutary
neglect and proposing reforms and new taxes. This reevaluation was caused by
conflicts between Great Britain and the colonies during the war, such as the
colonial assemblies’ insistence on controlling the militia units raised to fight
the French, the increased colonial independence, and colonial smuggling of
French goods into the country during the war. In addition, the war had left
Great Britain deeply in debt. British leaders viewed American prosperity as a
resource and taxing the colonies as a means to relieve British debt. Conflicts
arose as Great Britain attempted to reassert its power over the colonies; they
viewed Great Britain’s attempts to tax them as interference into internal
matters. The colonies believed that Great Britain had jurisdiction only over
external issues.
IV | THE COMING OF THE REVOLUTION |
A | The New Imperial System |
After the war the British government
undertook a concerted effort to bring the colonies more firmly under its
control. Prompted by an uprising of Native Americans led by the Ottawa chief
Pontiac, the British king issued the Royal Proclamation of 1763. This edict
restricted European settlement to the area east of the Appalachian Mountains in
order to prevent new wars with the Native American peoples of the interior. It
was followed by the Currency Act of 1764, which prohibited the colonial
assemblies from using paper money as legal tender for payment of debts. Another
revenue measure, the Sugar Act of 1764, lowered the duties imposed by the
much-evaded Molasses Act of 1733, but sought to ensure that the new tariffs
would be diligently collected (see Sugar and Molasses Acts). The law
placed tighter administrative controls on coastal shipping. More important, it
provided that violations of the Sugar Act would be prosecuted in the
vice-admiralty courts, in which cases were heard by British-appointed judges
with no local juries. Another innovation was the Quartering Act of 1765, which
obliged the colonial assemblies to provide housing and supplies for British
troops. In addition, well-publicized discussions were taking place in London
about taxing the colonies for the support of British troops in Canada and in
frontier outposts. Reform of the empire was clearly underway.
Coming after more than 50 years of
salutary neglect, the new regulations alarmed the colonists. Then, in 1765 the
British government headed by George Grenville acted to raise revenue by levying,
for the first time, a direct tax on the colonists. The Stamp Act required them
to buy and place revenue stamps on all official legal documents, deeds,
newspapers, pamphlets, dice, and playing cards. Colonists strongly opposed the
Stamp Act. In part, the colonists were alarmed by the economic costs imposed on
them by the reforms. Ordinary people had always been lightly taxed in America
and did not want their money to be used to support British officials.
B | The Ideological Sources of Resistance |
Educated colonists mounted an ideological
attack on the new British policies. They drew inspiration from three
intellectual traditions. The first tradition was English common law, the
centuries-old body of legal rules and procedures that protected the king’s
subjects against arbitrary acts by other subjects or by the government.
A second major intellectual resource was
the Age of Enlightenment in Europe during the 18th century. Unlike common-law
attorneys, who valued precedent, Enlightenment philosophers questioned the past
and appealed to reason. Many of them followed 17th-century English philosopher
John Locke in believing that all individuals possessed certain “natural
rights”—such as life, liberty, and the pursuit of property—and that it was the
responsibility of government to protect those rights.
The English political tradition provided a
third ideological basis for the American resistance. Early English Whigs had
resisted the arbitrary power exercised by the Stuart kings before 1689 and had
sought to limit the authority of the Crown and to increase the power of
Parliament. Their ideas had appealed to many members of the colonial assemblies,
who faced powerful governors appointed by the king.
Then, in the decades after 1720, many
educated Americans followed arguments in England that attacked the power of
government financiers, condemned the idea of standing armies, and accused the
king and his ministers of manipulating Parliament through patronage and bribes.
To these Americans, the Stamp Act was not simply an economic measure to defray
the cost of the American garrisons. The colonists believed that Britain was
responsible for external matters but the colonial assemblies legislated internal
affairs. Therefore, the Stamp Act represented a cunning attempt by Britain to
seize control of taxation from the representative colonial assemblies and to tax
the colonists without giving them representation in government.
C | The Stamp Act Crisis |
American opposition to the Stamp Act began
shortly after its passage in March 1765. Patrick Henry of Virginia urged the
House of Burgesses to condemn the Stamp Act. The Massachusetts assembly called
for an intercolonial meeting, and a Stamp Act Congress met in New York City in
October 1765. Delegates from nine colonies attended, and petitioned the king for
repeal of the act, denouncing it as taxation without representation. Many
British merchants joined in this appeal. Their exports of manufactures to the
colonies had increased markedly since 1750 and they feared the effects of
American refusal to pay commercial debts amounting to millions of pounds.
However, the broader issues at stake were
temporarily obscured by the drama of immediate events. Some Americans responded
with violence to the new British measures of taxation and control. On October
31, the day before the Stamp Act was to go into effect, 200 merchants in New
York City vowed to stop importing British goods, beginning the First
Nonimportation Movement. Then they joined storekeepers, artisans, sailors, and
laborers in a mass protest meeting. On the next night, 2,000 residents
surrounded the fort where the stamps were being guarded and then plundered the
house of a British officer. These mob actions prompted the lieutenant governor
to ask General Thomas Gage, the British military commander in North America, to
rout the protesters by force.
Similar situations occurred in
Philadelphia, Albany, and Charleston. Local merchants joined in nonimportation
agreements. Groups of artisans, calling themselves Sons of Liberty, forcibly
prevented the distribution of stamps and forced the resignation of the stamp
collectors. In Boston, a mob destroyed the house of Lieutenant Governor Thomas
Hutchinson. The colonial elite—merchants, planters, assembly leaders—did not
condemn this resort to violence; some even encouraged it. Nearly everywhere,
British authority was challenged, and the imperial forces lacked the power or
the determination to prevail.
Pressure from the British merchants, who
feared the nonimportation movement, persuaded a new British ministry, led by
Prime Minister Charles Wentworth, Marquess of Rockingham, to repeal the Stamp
Act in 1766. However, Parliament enacted a Declaratory Act that restated its
traditional claim to legislate for and to tax the colonists. As Chief Justice
William Murray, later 1st earl of Mansfield, stated: “The British legislature
... has the authority to bind every part and every subject without the least
distinction, whether such subjects have the right to vote or not.”
D | The Townshend Acts |
Mansfield’s argument was directed against
the colonial position of no taxation without representation. Colonists who
protested the taxes distinguished between taxes designed to raise money, which
they opposed, and duties intended primarily to regulate trade, which the
colonists had accepted, at least in principle, since the Molasses Act of
1733.
This distinction between revenue and
regulation was subtle and somewhat artificial. And it was misinterpreted by
Charles Townshend, longtime critic of the American assemblies and now chancellor
of the Exchequer in the government headed by William Pitt. Townshend believed
that the colonists were objecting to internal taxes, such as the Stamp Act, but
not to external taxes on trade. Consequently, he assumed that the colonists
would accept external taxes. The Townshend Acts, which were passed in 1767,
placed duties on colonial imports of lead, glass, paint, paper, and tea. This
act also specified that the revenue was to be used not only to support British
troops in America but also to provide salaries for royal officials who would
collect taxes. Such funding would make these officials financially independent
of the colonial assemblies.
This attempt to raise revenue through
trade duties and to circumvent American control of imperial officials angered
many colonial leaders. John Dickinson argued in his influential Letters from
a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1767) that the Townshend duties were “not for the
regulation of trade ... but for the single purpose of levying money upon us.”
Bolstered by such arguments, the colonists opposed the taxes, not with the
violence of 1765, which ended with the repeal of the Stamp Act, but with a new
boycott of British goods, the Second Nonimportation Movement.
E | Economic and Moral Upheaval |
The Americans’ determined resistance to
the Townshend Acts resulted, in part, from a profound transition in the colonial
economy. Before 1754 the colonists had earned enough from their exports to pay
for their imports from Great Britain. Then, British military expenditures in
America during the French and Indian War bolstered the incomes of many colonists
and unleashed a wave of spending for consumer items: equipment for their farms
and all kinds of household goods—including cloth, blankets, china, and cooking
utensils. British merchant houses aided this spree of consumption by extending
to American traders a full year’s credit, instead of the traditional six months.
The mainland colonists soon accounted for 20 percent of all British exports and
had gone deeply into debt.
At the end of the war in 1763, the boom
came to an abrupt end. The postwar recession brought bankruptcy and disgrace to
those Americans who had overextended their commitments and brought hard economic
times to nearly everyone else. This financial hardship generated opposition to
the Stamp Act in 1765, especially among urban artisans. They had suffered from
the competition of low-priced British manufactures and now feared higher taxes.
Similar economic pressures fueled resistance to the Townshend Acts in 1767.
Americans also had moralistic reasons for
calling a halt to the mass importation of European goods. Extravagant
expenditures on luxury items—fancy carpets and carriages, elegant clothes and
furniture—produced calls for a return to more frugal living standards. In New
England, where Puritan influence was strongest, excessive consumption and debt
was seen as a moral failing that inevitably led to a weakening of
character.
American women, especially religious
women, added their support to the nonimportation movement. Ordinarily women were
excluded from prominent roles in political affairs, but the boycotts prompted a
more sustained involvement by women in the public world. In Providence, Rhode
Island, during the Stamp Act crisis, 18 “Daughters of Liberty” met to spin yarn
for cloth, to avoid purchasing any cloth from British manufacturers. To protest
the Townshend Acts, a much larger group of religious women in New England
organized dozens of spinning matches, bees, and demonstrations at the homes of
their ministers. Some gatherings were openly patriotic, such as that at Berwick,
Maine, where the spinners “as true Daughters of Liberty” celebrated American
goods, “drinking rye coffee and dining on bear venison.” But many more women
combined support for nonimportation with charitable work by coming together to
spin flax and wool, which they donated to their ministers and needy members of
the community.
F | Constitutional Conflict |
While confrontations over taxes and
reforms were serious, the bonds uniting the colonies and Britain were still
strong. Peace and unity were still possible. American diplomat Benjamin Franklin
declared in 1769 that the British ministry should “Repeal the laws, Renounce the
Right, Recall the troops, Refund the money, and Return to the old method of
requisition.” Late in that year the British government, now directed by Lord
Frederick North, the new prime minister and ally of King George III, went part
way toward meeting these demands. Under the pressure of the American economic
boycott, and a sharp drop in British exports, Parliament agreed to the repeal of
most of the Townshend Acts. However, the ministry did not recall the British
troops from any of the colonies and showed no disposition to return to the
pre-1763 imperial system. Indeed, Parliament reasserted its authority to
legislate for and to tax the colonies, retaining the tax on tea as a symbol of
its supremacy.
The long debate over taxes clarified the
fundamental constitutional questions at stake and posed the political issue in
stark terms. “I know of no line that can be drawn between the supreme authority
of Parliament and the total independence of the colonies,” declared Thomas
Hutchinson, the American-born governor of Massachusetts, early in the 1770s. A
committee of the Massachusetts assembly accepted Hutchinson’s challenge and drew
the obvious, if nearly unthinkable, conclusion: “If there be no such line,” then
the colonies would have to be “independent.” But the committee proposed a
solution: If Britain and its American colonies were united by the king as their
“one head and common sovereign,” then they could “live happily in that
connection,” retaining their own semiautonomous assemblies.
This solution would have required
Parliament to renounce its claims to sovereign power in America and was almost
unthinkable given its quest for authority. Moreover, two violent incidents
showed how difficult it would be to achieve any peaceful constitutional
compromise. In Boston in 1770 British troops fired on an unruly mob, killing
five people, an event known as the Boston Massacre. Two years later, a Rhode
Island mob destroyed a British customs ship, the Gaspée, wounding its
captain in the process. In both cases, the British ministry declined to take a
strong stand, hoping that time and patience would resolve the imperial crisis.
Many members of Parliament demanded a more aggressive stance: American violence,
they said, should be met with British force.
These incidents also played into the hands
of those Americans who favored independence. Following the Stamp Act crisis, the
Sons of Liberty in the various colonial towns were in contact with each other.
More assertive leaders of the colonial assemblies also corresponded, and
gradually an organized Patriot movement developed. Following the Gaspée
incident, Boston patriot Samuel Adams persuaded the Massachusetts assembly to
establish a formal Committee of Correspondence, and Patriot leaders in the
assemblies of Virginia and the other colonies soon followed suit. These
committees exchanged information and fostered a new sense of American
interdependence and identity. In any new imperial crisis, American Patriots
would for the first time be able to formulate a coherent and unified policy of
resistance.
G | The Tea Act and the Outbreak of Fighting |
As Patriots warned fellow colonists of the
dangers of imperial domination, Lord North lent substance to their predictions.
He wanted to assist the East India Company, which had incurred great military
expenses in expanding British trade in India. To do so, he secured the Tea Act
in 1773, which eliminated the customs duty on the company’s tea and permitted
its direct export to America. The company’s tea, although still subject to the
Townshend duty, would be cheaper than the smuggled Dutch tea most Americans
drank. If the colonists bought it, however, they would be accepting the duty.
Beyond that, American merchants would lose a valuable trade, because the company
planned to sell its tea through its own agents.
Lord North knew that the Tea Act would be
unpopular in America, but he was determined to uphold parliamentary supremacy.
When a shipment of tea arrived in Boston, radical Patriots led by Samuel Adams
prevented its unloading. When Governor Hutchinson refused to permit the tea to
be reexported, the Patriots, many disguised as Native Americans, threw the cargo
overboard in the so-called Boston Tea Party in December 1773.
G1 | Britain Stands Firm |
Events now swiftly moved toward the
outbreak of war. An outraged Parliament demanded compensation for the tea. The
Boston town meeting, now under the influence of the radical Caucus Club led by
Adams and Joseph Warren, rejected this demand. The North ministry replied with a
series of stern edicts in March 1774. These edicts, along with the Québec Act, a
measure passed by the British Parliament at the same time, were known among the
colonists as the Intolerable Acts. The port of Boston was declared closed; the
powers of the Massachusetts assembly and local town meetings were curtailed; and
two acts provided for the quartering of troops in private houses and the
exemption of imperial officials from trial in Massachusetts. The ministry’s
strategy was to use the destruction of tea to isolate what the British saw as
the radical Massachusetts Patriots from more moderate Americans in Virginia and
the mid-Atlantic colonies.
The British strategy of dividing the
Americans nearly succeeded. Colonial leaders met in the First Continental
Congress, held in Philadelphia in September and October 1774. In a pamphlet
titled A Summary View of the Rights of British America, intended to
influence the Virginia delegates to the Congress, Thomas Jefferson denounced all
parliamentary legislation as acts “of arbitrary power ... over these states.” A
much more conciliatory attitude was reflected in a plan presented by Joseph
Galloway of Pennsylvania. Galloway proposed the creation of an American
parliament that would have significant powers of taxation and legislation, but
whose acts would need the approval of a governor-general appointed by the Crown.
Galloway’s plan was rejected by a narrow vote. The delegates then adopted
policies favored by more radical Patriots, including a petition to the king
called the Declaration of Rights and Grievances. The Congress declared the
British reform program “unconstitutional, dangerous, and destructive to the
freedom” of America. More important, it voted to establish a Third
Nonimportation Movement. To implement this boycott, which included pledges
against exportation and consumption as well as importation, the Congress created
a Continental Association—a system of local committees to mobilize patriotic
fervor. Among these local committees were the Committees of Correspondence and
the Committees of Safety. These measures were to remain in effect until all
colonial grievances had been addressed.
G2 | Lexington and Concord |
The British government remained firm in
the face of American resistance. Early in 1775 orders were sent to General Gage,
who at the time was governor and military commander of Massachusetts. He was
ordered to close the Massachusetts assembly, which was then meeting illegally
outside Boston; to arrest its leading members; and to capture the arms being
stockpiled by the colonial militia. On April 19 Gage ordered his troops to
Concord. They were opposed first at Lexington and then at Concord by colonial
militia, who had been warned by Patriots, including Paul Revere. At Lexington,
shots were fired, but the British continued on to Concord. There they were
harassed by American militia shooting from behind trees, hedges, and buildings.
The British were forced to retreat, and they headed back to Boston in
disorganized flight. The battle was a strong American victory. As the British
retreated to Boston, they suffered more than 270 casualties. The colonists lost
fewer than 100 people.
Too much blood had been spilled to allow
a peaceful compromise. A final “Olive Branch Petition” approved by the Second
Continental Congress in July 1775 was rejected by the king. In December,
Parliament passed the Prohibitory Act, which outlawed trade with the rebellious
colonies and set up a naval blockade. Consequently, when Anglo-American
philosopher Thomas Paine asked in the pamphlet Common Sense (published in
January 1776) whether “a continent should continue to be ruled by an Island,”
only a minority of Loyalist Americans were willing to defend the connection with
Great Britain. As a series of military skirmishes fostered the growth of
American patriotism, the Continental Congress took the final steps. In June 1775
it had commissioned George Washington to organize and lead a Continental Army.
In addition, the Congress ordered publication on July 4, 1776, of a Declaration
of Independence, which recounted the grievances against Britain and declared the
colonies free and independent as the United States of America.
V | THE AMERICAN WAR OF INDEPENDENCE |
A | War Aims and Military Forces |
In the fall of 1775 the British government
decided to use overwhelming military force to crush the American revolt. The
task looked easy. England, Wales, and Scotland had a combined population of
about 9 million, compared with 2.5 million in the 13 rebel colonies, nearly 20
percent of whom were black slaves. Militarily, Britain was clearly superior,
with a large standing army and the financial resources to hire additional
troops, and the most powerful navy in the world. The British government also
counted on mobilizing thousands of Loyalists in America and Native Americans who
were hostile to white expansion.
Nonetheless, the Americans had a number of
important advantages. They were fighting on their own territory, close to the
sources of supply and amid a mostly friendly population. In addition, the
Patriots had some resourceful military leaders, who had been tested in the
French and Indian War. Finally, later in the war, the rebellious colonies
received crucial aid from France and Spain. This assistance offset British
superiority in wealth and military power, and made possible a clear-cut American
victory. However, few of these American advantages were obvious when the war
began.
Throughout the war, one of the main
challenges facing the Americans was maintaining a credible army. Washington’s
main Continental Army never had more than 24,000 active-duty troops, although
Congress promised to raise a force at least three times that size. In addition,
the army was poorly supplied and short on weapons and food. Early in the war
General Philip Schuyler of New York complained that his men were “weak in
numbers, dispirited, naked, destitute of provisions, without camp equipage, with
little ammunition, and not a single piece of cannon.” The situation did not
improve during the course of the war. Because of the meager financial support
provided by Congress and the American people, the Continental Army almost
perished from hunger and cold during the winters of 1777 and 1778. Inadequate
pay prompted mutinies in the ranks and in the officer corps as late as 1783. The
Continental Army had to struggle to survive during the entire war.
If inadequate support was one weakness of
the Continental Army, its composition was another. The army was a new creation,
without tradition or even military experience. Trained militiamen wanted to
serve in local units near their farms and families, so raw recruits formed the
basis of the Continental forces. Muster rolls for troops commanded by General
William Smallwood of Maryland show that they were either poor American-born
youths or older foreign-born men, often former indentured servants. Some of
these men enlisted out of patriotic fervor; many more signed up to receive a
cash bonus and the promise of a future land grant.
It took time to turn such men into loyal
soldiers. Many panicked in the heat of battle. Others deserted, unwilling to
accept the discipline of military life. Given this weak army, Washington worried
constantly that he would suffer an overwhelming defeat.
In total, the war lasted for eight years
and had four phases, each with a distinct strategy and character. During the
first phase, from April 1775 to July 1776, the Patriots’ goal was to turn the
revolt into an organized rebellion, while British governors and armed Loyalists
tried to suppress the uprising. The second phase of the war began with a major
British invasion of New York in July 1776 and ended with the American victory at
Saratoga in October 1777. The British strategy was to confront and defeat the
Continental Army and to isolate the radical Patriots of New England.
Washington’s goal was to protect his weak forces by retreat and, when he held
the advantage, to counterattack. During the third phase of the war Britain tried
to subdue the South. Beginning in early 1778 it used regular troops to take
territory and local Loyalists to hold it. Patriots used guerrilla warfare to
weaken British forces, and then used French assistance to win a major victory at
Yorktown, Virginia, in October 1781. Then came the final phase of the war when
astute Patriot diplomacy won a treaty recognizing the independence of the United
States in September 1783.
B | Phase One: The Opening Campaigns |
Following the outbreak of fighting at
Lexington and Concord in April 1775, the Americans held the strategic advantage.
They had numerical superiority and quickly brought it to bear against the main
British force in Boston. Nearly 20,000 New England militiamen surrounded the
town and placed it under siege. On June 17 General Gage responded by attacking
American positions on Breed’s and Bunker hills (see Battle of Bunker
Hill). The British dislodged the Patriot forces, but they suffered more than
1,000 casualties. American losses were much lower, with about 140 men killed and
about 270 wounded.
The stalemate at Boston continued until
March 1776, when the Americans, now under the command of Washington, erected a
battery of cannon on Dorchester Heights, overlooking the city. Rather than
engage the entrenched Americans, General William Howe, who had succeeded Gage as
the British commander because Gage was criticized for heavy British casualties
at Bunker Hill, evacuated his troops from Boston. The British departed for Nova
Scotia accompanied by more than 1,000 Loyalist refugees.
B1 | Civil War in the South |
In the meantime, the fighting in
Massachusetts had sparked skirmishes between Patriots and Loyalists in Virginia
and the Carolinas. In June 1775 the Virginia House of Burgesses forced the royal
governor, Lord John Dunmore, to take refuge on a British warship in Chesapeake
Bay. From there, Dunmore organized two military forces: one of whites, the
Queen’s Own Loyal Virginians, and one of blacks, the Ethiopian Regiment. In
November he issued a controversial proclamation offering freedom to slaves and
indentured servants who joined the Loyalist cause.
In North Carolina, Governor Josiah Martin
tried to maintain his authority by raising a force of about 1,500 Loyalist
migrants from the highlands of Scotland. However, in February 1776 the Patriot
militia defeated Martin’s army in the Battle of Moore’s Creek Bridge, capturing
more than 800 of his troops. In Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1776 General
Charles Lee and Patriot John Rutledge, who later became governor of South
Carolina, mobilized armed artisans and three Continental regiments and repelled
a British assault by about 3,000 troops commanded by General Henry Clinton.
B2 | The Americans Invade Canada |
Yet another series of battles took place
in Canada, which had not joined the American colonies in their independence
movement. In May 1775 Fort Ticonderoga, an undermanned fortress on the inland
route to Montréal, fell to colonial forces led by Ethan Allen and Benedict
Arnold, who later became a British spy. The British garrison at Crown Point on
Lake Champlain surrendered almost immediately afterward. In September an
American army under General Richard Montgomery moved farther north, laying siege
to Saint Johns, a British fort. Following the capture of this post in November,
Montgomery’s troops quickly advanced on Montréal, capturing the city without
serious resistance.
While Montgomery’s army was pushing
toward Montréal along the Lake Champlain route, another American force of about
1,000 men, commanded by Arnold, was slowly proceeding up the Kennebec River in
Maine to attack the British at Québec. Despite harsh weather, inadequate
supplies, and the desertion of one-third of his force, Arnold reached Québec
late in November. He joined forces with Montgomery, who had brought a small
detachment down the St. Lawrence River from Montréal. In late December the
combined American forces attacked the well-fortified city. British fire
inflicted heavy casualties on the Americans, wounding Arnold and killing
Montgomery. Unable to take Québec by storm, the remaining Americans besieged the
city until the spring of 1776. Then, a British relief convoy raised the siege
and recaptured Montréal from the disease-ridden and poorly supplied American
force.
The Americans’ failure to capture Québec
revealed their weak offensive capabilities. The local militiamen who comprised
the bulk of the Patriot forces during the first phase of the war were prepared
to fight only for short periods and within a few hundred miles of their homes.
They could oust the British army from Boston and British governors from the
South, but they could not carry the war into enemy territory. Still, the
American Patriots had achieved a great deal in 15 months. They had asserted
control over most of the mainland and upheld the authority of their rebel
governments. Indeed, it was these victories that emboldened the new American
state governments and the Continental Congress to move toward independence
during the spring of 1776.
C | Phase Two: The British Northern Offensive |
Just as the Congress was issuing the
official Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia in July 1776, a British
army of more than 30,000 men was landing on Staten Island near New York City.
Lord North, who was still the prime minister, had ordered General Howe to
capture New York City and seize control of the Hudson River valley, thus
isolating the radical Patriots in New England from the rest of the colonies.
Expecting this show of force to dissolve Patriots’ resolve, North gave Howe the
authority to negotiate an end to the rebellion.
When initial negotiations failed, Howe
launched an attack on August 27 against the 10,000 American troops entrenched on
Brooklyn Heights. His experienced men outflanked the American positions and
captured two generals and about 1,000 soldiers. The British general then
directed a deliberate, tactically correct pursuit of the retreating American
forces, defeating them in pitched battles in October on Harlem Heights and at
White Plains.
As Howe aimed for a decisive victory,
Washington’s goal was simple survival. Outnumbered, outgunned, and
outmaneuvered, the American general retreated into New Jersey in a desperate
effort to keep his battered army intact. In a major mistake, he failed to order
the evacuation of Fort Washington on the northern end of Manhattan Island. This
fortress fell easily to the British in November, with the loss of 3,000 troops
and scores of cannon. Abandoning Fort Lee, across the Hudson from Manhattan,
Washington withdrew to the south.
The American position was bad in 1776, but
it would have been even worse had it not been for the determined resistance
offered by American forces commanded by Benedict Arnold. His skillful defense on
Lake Champlain forced the withdrawal to Canada of a strong British force under
General Guy Carleton. Carleton’s army had been moving south toward Albany and
New York City, as part of North’s plan of isolating New England from the rest of
the colonies and falling on Washington’s army from the rear.
Even without Carleton’s assistance, General
Howe’s forces might have decisively defeated the main Continental Army. However,
Howe was a naturally cautious man, and he employed the relatively static tactics
standard in 18th-century Europe. Moreover, he did not want to take military
risks that might result in heavy casualties because it would take at least six
months to get reinforcements from Britain. Finally, Howe was personally
sympathetic to many American demands and hoped to negotiate a settlement of the
conflict. Consequently, the British commander did not undertake a pursuit of
Washington’s disorganized forces, giving the Americans much-needed time to
regroup.
C1 | The American Counterattack |
Howe’s caution prevented the British from
crushing the rebellion in 1776. Washington withdrew his shattered army across
New Jersey and over the Delaware River into Pennsylvania, advising the
Continental Congress that “on our Side the war should be defensive.” The
American general’s strategy was to draw the British away from the seacoast to
extend their lines of supply and spread out their forces. As the British went
into their winter quarters, Washington led a surprise attack across the Delaware
River into New Jersey on Christmas night, December 25, 1776. His forces won
victories against German troops, called Hessians, at the Battle of Trenton, and
then against British regulars at the Battle of Princeton. These were minor
triumphs but they had a startling effect on American morale, which improved
dramatically.
Despite the setbacks the British had
suffered in New Jersey, they still held the military advantage. General Howe’s
troops continued to occupy New York City and to control most of northern New
Jersey. Another British army, under General Clinton, captured the important port
of Newport, Rhode Island, on December 1, 1776. And General John Burgoyne, who
had replaced Carleton, was massing a third force in Canada. The events of the
last half of 1776 had shown that the American forces were no match for British
regulars in a fixed battle. Each time the opposing armies had faced each other,
the Americans had been forced to retreat, sometimes in orderly fashion, more
often in disarray.
C2 | Britain’s Strategic Mistakes |
The year 1777 was crucial to the contest.
It tested the ability of the British to overpower the Continental Army and the
will of the Americans to endure a series of military defeats. Lord North’s
strategy remained the isolation of New England. To achieve this goal a strong
army under General Burgoyne was to move down the Lake Champlain route to Albany,
where it would join up with Howe’s force from New York City. But Howe had
decided upon a different plan. He left 3,000 troops under General Clinton in New
York City and personally led the main British force in an attack on
Philadelphia, the home of the Continental Congress.
There were two flaws in Howe’s plan, one
strategic and the other tactical. The strategic flaw was the division of his
force and the failure to dispatch any troops to the north. If Burgoyne’s army
encountered heavy American resistance, it would have no help. This basic mistake
was then compounded by a tactical error. Instead of quickly marching overland
through New Jersey to Philadelphia, Howe decided to move his force by water, a
much longer and slower route. Embarking about 20,000 men on some 250 ships, the
British general sailed down the coast and then up the Chesapeake Bay toward
Philadelphia. Although Congress had fled the city, General Washington had no
choice but to meet Howe’s forces in fixed battle, whatever the danger to his
outnumbered army. First at the Battle of the Brandywine on September 11 and
again at the Battle of Germantown on October 4, the British outflanked the
entrenched Continental Army, forcing it to retreat. Having easily occupied
Philadelphia, Howe set up headquarters in the city.
Washington withdrew his battered forces
to nearby Valley Forge, where 11,000 soldiers spent a harsh and trying winter.
Perhaps more than 2,500 soldiers died from exposure or disease in the winter
encampment, while desertions and an extreme lack of provisions further reduced
the army to about half its former size. Only the efforts of Baron Friedrich
Wilhelm von Steuben, a Prussian officer who volunteered his services to the
American cause, restored discipline and morale to the rebel forces by training
and teaching many military tactics.
C3 | Saratoga: The Turning Point of the War |
The British victories in Pennsylvania
were won at a high price: the loss of an entire army at Saratoga, New York.
Because of Howe’s water route and Washington’s determined, if futile,
resistance, the British captured Philadelphia late in the campaigning season—too
late for them to send aid to General Burgoyne’s forces in the north. Early in
July 1777, Burgoyne’s army of almost 9,000 troops took Fort Ticonderoga, and
began to move south toward Albany. Simultaneously, a mixed force of about 2,000
British regulars and Native Americans under Colonel Barry St. Leger marched to
launch a coordinated attack on Albany. St. Leger proceeded along the St.
Lawrence to Fort Oswego on Lake Ontario and began to descend the Mohawk River
valley. His mission was to reduce the American stronghold of Fort Stanwix and
then to continue east and link up with Burgoyne at Albany.
The first British setback came on the
Mohawk. St. Leger’s forces placed Fort Stanwix under siege early in August and
ambushed a relief column led by General Nicholas Herkimer near Oriskany.
However, they failed to capture the American fortress. In late August, following
the departure of some of his Native American allies and threatened by the
approach of an American force under Benedict Arnold, St. Leger was compelled to
lift the siege and retreat to Montréal. The Americans could now concentrate
their forces against Burgoyne’s army.
At first, the progress of Burgoyne’s
invasion force was impeded by troops commanded by General Philip Schuyler. Then,
New England militias dealt a staggering blow to a contingent sent out to secure
supplies for the underprovisioned British army, killing or capturing most of the
800-man force in the Battle of Bennington, in present-day Vermont, on August 16.
Nevertheless, Burgoyne decided to push south toward Albany. He hoped for help
from St. Leger and from General Clinton, who was now leading a relief expedition
north from New York City.
By mid-September Burgoyne’s army had
advanced south of Saratoga and was within striking distance of Albany. But
American forces, commanded by General Horatio Gates, were well entrenched at
Bemis Heights and repelled a British assault. Because of the slow movement of
British regulars and their supply wagons over the rough terrain, the Americans
had been able to bring up substantial reinforcements, primarily militia from
western New England. On October 7, these forces resisted a second British
attack. Burgoyne’s reduced army withdrew to Saratoga, where it was surrounded by
the ever increasing American force, now numbering up to 17,000. On October 17,
1777, they forced Burgoyne to surrender his remaining 5,800 troops. This
capitulation gave the Patriots their first major military victory and brought to
an end the second, and pivotal, phase of the war of independence.
D | Phase Three: The War in the South |
A new phase of the war began in 1778. The
American triumph at Saratoga completely disrupted Britain’s military strategy,
and General Howe was forced to resign in disgrace. The Americans had
demonstrated their capacity to resist, even following the loss of their chief
cities.
D1 | European Diplomacy |
These events were observed closely in the
capitals of Europe, especially in Paris. France, still seeking revenge for the
loss of Canada in 1763, had watched the development of the American resistance
movement with great interest. The French government had sent observers to
America at the time of the Stamp Act Congress in 1765 and was ready to offer
positive assistance when fighting broke out a decade later.
The policy of Charles Gravier, Comte de
Vergennes, the French foreign minister, was to offer covert aid to the rebels,
but to keep France out of the war until an opportune moment. An American
emissary, Silas Deane, was welcomed in Paris as a “commercial agent” in 1776. In
May of that year a fictitious company was set up under the direction of the
author Pierre Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais to funnel military supplies to the
rebellious colonists. These much-needed munitions were paid for by a secret loan
from the French and Spanish governments. However, in December, when the American
representatives, who now included Benjamin Franklin and Arthur Lee as well as
Deane, attempted to secure additional military aid, they were firmly rebuffed by
Vergennes. Knowing of Howe’s initial military victories in New York and fearing
the imminent collapse of the American rebellion, the French leader had no desire
to commit his nation to a losing cause.
The American victory at Saratoga
profoundly altered French thinking. When news of Burgoyne’s capture reached
Paris in December 1777, Vergennes immediately offered the Americans a commercial
and military alliance. His haste was justified. In Britain, Lord North was
deeply troubled by the inability of his generals to defeat the Patriot armies
and had decided to seek a negotiated settlement of the rebellion. He secured
repeal of the Tea Act and the Intolerable Acts and sent a commission headed by
Frederick Howard, 5th earl of Carlisle to negotiate directly with the
Continental Congress, offering a return to the pre-1763 imperial
relationship.
North’s offer of peace came too late and
promised too little. The Patriot leaders now wanted complete independence and
they had another diplomatic option. In February 1778 the Continental Congress
entered into a formal alliance with France. The French agreed to give up their
claim to Canada and regions east of the Mississippi River and promised to fight
until American independence had been achieved. In return, the United States
opened up their trade to French merchants and agreed to support French
territorial gains in the West Indies. Because of this treaty, war soon broke out
between France and Britain. For the first time during the war of independence,
American success seemed possible.
D2 | The New British Strategy |
Defeated at Saratoga and now vulnerable
to French attack in the West Indies and on the high seas, the British devised a
new military strategy. The new British plan had two objectives. The first was to
concentrate their forces in the North in two seaports, New York City and
Newport, Rhode Island. General Clinton, who had replaced Howe as commander in
chief of British forces, evacuated Philadelphia and moved the main British army
overland to New York. On the way he fought an indecisive engagement with General
Washington’s army near Monmouth Courthouse (now Freehold), New Jersey, on June
28, 1778. In 1778 British forces also repelled a joint French-American attack
against Newport. During the following year the Americans were only able to
capture a few outlying fortresses, at Stony Point, New York, and Paulus Hook,
New Jersey.
Secure in their Northern bases, the
British focused their efforts on a second objective: the conquest of the South.
The South, with its export crops of tobacco, rice, and indigo, was the most
valuable region of the mainland. Moreover, the British believed that more
Loyalists lived in the South. They hoped that these Southern Loyalists could be
mobilized both to provide support and supplies to the advancing British armies
and to hold captured territory after the armies had moved on.
At first, this new strategy met with
considerable success. An army of 3,500 British troops captured Savannah,
Georgia, at the end of December 1778, and seized Augusta one month later. An
American attempt to dislodge the British from Savannah in October 1779 failed,
despite the assistance of French naval forces. At the end of 1779 most of
Georgia was firmly under Loyalist control, and the British army shifted its
attention to South Carolina. In May 1780 an expedition commanded by General
Clinton took Charleston, capturing more than 5,000 American troops. Aided by
local Loyalists, the invaders gradually occupied most of South Carolina. At the
Battle of Camden in August, the British, now commanded in the South by Lord
Charles Cornwallis, routed an American army under General Horatio Gates.
D3 | The War at Sea |
As British and American troops battled in
the Southern backcountry, the small Patriot navy won a few spectacular victories
at sea. On two occasions a small American squadron captured the port of Nassau
in the Bahamas. Captain John Paul Jones twice carried the naval war into British
waters. In 1778 Jones raided the port of Whitehaven, in England, and then
captured the British sloop Drake. In the North Sea on September 23, 1779,
Jones’s Bonhomme Richard forced the surrender of the British warship
Serapis.
More important than these isolated
triumphs was the steady war of attrition waged by American privateers against
the British commercial fleet. By 1781 more than 450 privately owned vessels had
received commissions from the states or the Congress to attack British shipping.
During the war, these vessels captured or destroyed nearly 2,000 British
merchant ships. The privateers did not seriously impede the movement of British
armies and military supplies, which were usually transported in well-protected
convoys. But they raised the cost of the war to Britain and, in combination with
the French fleet, formed a serious threat to Britain’s commercial
supremacy.
D4 | The Road to Yorktown |
Ultimately, the outcome of the American
War of Independence was determined on land, not at sea. Following Cornwallis’s
victory at Camden, South Carolina, in the summer of 1780, the British controlled
most of Georgia and South Carolina. Then Britain’s Southern strategy began to
collapse. Clinton never had enough troops and supplies to crush the Patriot
armies. Some much-needed British forces were tied down by French threats to the
West Indies and to the British garrisons in Newport and New York City. Moreover,
Parliament was unwilling to make an unlimited commitment of men and supplies to
the reconquest of its mainland colonies. Equally important, the British and
Loyalist troops in the South were unable to hold captured territory in the face
of rebel guerrilla attacks.
Patriot bands led by Francis Marion,
Thomas Sumter, and Andrew Pickens engaged in guerrilla warfare against the
British. They gradually cut the British lines of supply, forcing the garrisons
to withdraw toward Charleston and Savannah. At the same time, American troops
and militia under the command of Nathanael Greene, “Light Horse Harry” Lee, and
Daniel Morgan inflicted heavy casualties on the main British army under
Cornwallis. Following significant American victories at Kings Mountain on
October 7, 1780, and Cowpens on January 17, 1781, in South Carolina and a costly
battle at Guilford Courthouse, North Carolina, on March 15, 1781, Cornwallis
moved his army northward to Virginia.
After Cornwallis’s departure, General
Greene’s army engaged the remaining British forces in South Carolina in battles
at Hobkirk’s Hill in April, at Ninety Six in May and June, and at Eutaw Springs
in September. Each time the combined force of British regulars and Loyalists
emerged victorious on the battlefield, but each time they were then forced to
retreat because of American strength in the surrounding countryside. By the fall
of 1781, the British had been forced back to their coastal enclaves at
Charleston and Savannah.
By 1781 the British attempt to conquer
the Southern states, which had begun so successfully in 1778, was failing. The
British strategy finally collapsed in Virginia. After leaving the Carolinas,
Lord Cornwallis moved his forces through Virginia without serious resistance. At
Yorktown, near the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay, they began building a fortified
base from which to launch a new campaign against American forces in Virginia. At
this point, the American alliance with France allowed the Patriots to administer
a crushing defeat to Cornwallis’s army.
Before 1780, the French had focused
their attention on the rich British sugar islands and had provided the Americans
with little assistance. Then, in July 1780, a French army of about 5,000 men,
commanded by General Jean Baptiste de Vimeur, Comte de Rochambeau, dislodged the
British from Newport and threatened their garrison in New York City. The
presence of this French army gave Washington enough military force to launch a
surprise attack on Cornwallis. In the summer of 1781, a large French fleet under
Admiral François Joseph Paul, Comte de Grasse sailed from the West Indies to
Chesapeake Bay, where it was joined by a French squadron from Newport. This
strong naval force prevented the resupply or evacuation of Cornwallis’s army.
Meanwhile, Washington secretly moved Rochambeau’s troops to Virginia, where they
joined an American army commanded by the Marquis de Lafayette, a French
volunteer, and 3,000 French troops carried by de Grasse’s ships. By September
1781 the 7,000 men under Cornwallis faced a combined French and American force
of more than 16,000. As at Saratoga, British immobility had permitted the
Americans to gather reinforcements for the Siege of Yorktown. Once more the
British were greatly outnumbered, and they were again forced to surrender an
entire army. Cornwallis capitulated on October 19, 1781.
E | Phase Four: Peace Negotiations |
The French and American victory at
Yorktown was even more devastating to the British cause than the earlier
American triumph at Saratoga. After six futile years of warfare, the British
Parliament was not willing to support a new military campaign. The British
public would not accept new taxes, and many people were demanding reform of the
political system. The British ministry gave up hope of suppressing the
rebellion. Sporadic fighting continued for two years, especially at sea, but the
major events of the fourth and last phase of the war took place at the
negotiations in Europe.
The stakes were not limited to the issue
of American independence. When France joined the war in 1778, the American
conflict became a key element in European diplomacy. In 1779 Spain offered to
remain neutral if the British would return Gibraltar. When this demand was
refused, Spain allied with France and declared war on Britain. In the short run,
Spain’s entry into the war assisted the American cause by adding to French naval
strength. However, its ultimate implications were less favorable. Spain wanted
the war to continue until the British could be ousted from Gibraltar. Similarly,
France wanted to delay a peace treaty until it had captured some British sugar
islands in the West Indies.
These diplomatic and military questions
came to the fore after the British surrender at Yorktown. In March 1782 Charles
Watson-Wentworth, 2nd Marquess of Rockingham, once again took power as the chief
British minister. As in 1766, when he resolved the Stamp Act crisis, Rockingham
sought compromise. He secured from Parliament a resolution declaring that
Britain would no longer prosecute “an offensive war in America.” His ministry
then opened negotiations with French and American diplomats in Paris.
Britain’s negotiating strategy was to play
its enemies against one another. Thus, the ministry offered independence to the
Americans, but refused to return Gibraltar to Spain or to meet any French
demands for territory. When the French negotiators continued to press their
demands and those of their Spanish ally, the four American diplomats in
Paris—John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, John Jay, and Henry Laurens—acted to
protect American interests. Although instructed by Congress to act in concert
with their French allies, the Americans entered into secret and separate talks
with the British.
The American initiative succeeded. After
hard bargaining, the British and American negotiators signed preliminary
articles of peace on November 30, 1782. Following an unsuccessful Spanish
assault on Gibraltar, the Spanish government finally joined the peace
negotiation. Under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris, signed by all parties
on September 3, 1783, Britain retained Canada, won legal protection for its
merchants who held debts in America, and secured promises concerning the
property and rights of Loyalists. In return, Britain acknowledged the
independence of the United States of America and accepted the claim of Congress
to the lands inhabited by Native Americans peoples between the Appalachian
Mountains and the Mississippi River. In part, this concession was made because
of the capture of Kaskaskia and Vincennes in the Illinois country by Virginian
George Rogers Clark in 1778 and 1779. Britain also granted the Americans fishing
rights off Newfoundland. Finally, to reconcile the Spanish to the loss of
Gibraltar, Britain returned Florida to Spain, which also gained control of
Louisiana from France. The peace agreements were an American triumph, extending
at the negotiating table the victories gained on the battlefield.
F | The Social Impact of the War |
The struggle for independence exposed
civilians as well as soldiers to deprivation and death. The residents of New
Jersey and the Carolinas were particularly hard hit by the fighting, as British
and American armies marched back and forth across their lands. Patriot militias
and Loyalist partisans looted farms, seeking political revenge or mere booty.
Troops harassed or raped women and girls. Wherever the armies went, families
lived in fear. Neighbors came to fear one another as well. Patriot mobs in New
England tarred-and-feathered suspected Loyalists and seized their property.
Local Committees of Safety often imposed fines or jail sentences on those who
failed to support the Patriot cause.
F1 | The Plight of Soldiers |
Initially Patriots hoped that a local
institution, the militia, would form the core of the American military effort.
They feared that a permanent, or “standing,” army constituted a danger to
political liberty, and therefore were not eager to supply the Continental Army
with money and supplies. As a result, the Continental Army suffered through
hardships, such as hunger and deprivation, during the war.
Soldiers had many grievances, for they
were subject to harsh discipline and received inadequate rations and pay. During
the winters of 1779 and 1780, Continental troops stationed at Morristown, New
Jersey, rose up in mutiny to protest the harsh conditions. To restore authority,
Washington ordered the execution of several leaders of the mutiny, and persuaded
the Continental Congress to find monetary incentives—in the form of back pay and
new clothing—to pacify the rest of the recruits. Unrest among higher-ranking
military men continued; in 1783 Washington had to use his personal authority to
prevent a group of disgruntled officers from leading an armed revolt against
Congress. In the end, the officers won a half-pension for seven years, and
soldiers received small grants of western lands. These were meager rewards,
given the hardships of military life.
F2 | Civilian Hardships |
The war also demanded personal
sacrifices and hard work from the civilian population. Faced with a scarcity of
imported goods and skyrocketing prices, Patriot governments requisitioned needed
goods directly from the people. Thus in 1776 Connecticut officials asked for
shirts and shoes for state troops. Patriot women met this need by increasing
their production of homespun cloth. Women also assumed new responsibilities,
challenging traditional gender roles. With their husbands and sons away in the
army, women assumed the burden of farm production. Some worked the family farm
themselves, plowing fields or cutting and loading grain. Others supervised hired
laborers or slaves.
It was not physical danger or hard work
that dealt the most devastating blow to ordinary Americans, but rather the
financial costs of the war of independence. Most families suffered because of a
dramatic rise in prices. Their money bought less and less as the war went on.
The hyperinflation of the Continental dollar was the result of the financial
policies of the Patriot governments. Because of their fragile authority,
American political leaders were afraid to levy heavy taxes to pay for the cost
of the war. Instead they printed money, and used it to pay the troops and to buy
food, equipment, and munitions for them. By 1779 the Continental Congress had
issued $242 million worth of Continental currency, and the state governments had
printed another $210 million. The currency constantly declined in purchasing
power because people feared that it could not be redeemed in gold or silver; if
a $10 bill was worth $3 when it came into their hands, it would be worth only
$2.90 or less when they spent it. Although individual losses were small,
collectively these “currency taxes” paid the huge cost of the war.
This soaring inflation (rise in the cost
of living) forced nearly every family to become more calculating and to look out
for its own interests. Unwilling to accept worthless currency, hard-pressed
farmers refused to sell their crops to the Continental Army. In towns, women led
mobs that seized overpriced sugar, tea, and bread from storekeepers. Among the
civilian population, the war lowered the standard of living and increased
conflict among social groups.
F3 | The Loyalists Depart |
The group that lost the most during the
war were the Loyalists. The number of Loyalists who fled the United States is
unknown but estimates range from 80,000 to 100,000 people. They emigrated mostly
to Canada but also to the West Indies and Britain. Their departure affected the
character of American society, for a significant minority of Loyalists were
wealthy and politically powerful merchants, lawyers, and landowners. In many
cities, upwardly mobile Patriot merchants replaced Loyalists at the top of the
economic ladder.
The houses and lands left behind by the
Loyalists raised the issue of their property rights. Some Patriots demanded
confiscation of the property of the so-called traitors, but most public
officials thought this would be contrary to republican principles. The new state
constitutions declared that every citizen should be secure “in the enjoyment of
his life, liberty, and property,” and this protection was usually extended to
Loyalists.
Consequently, the state governments did
not foster a social revolution by transferring Loyalist property to their
Patriot supporters. In some cases yeoman farmers and former tenants purchased
small sections of large Loyalist estates. But the general structure of rural
society did not change as a result of the American Revolution, making it
different from the French Revolution of 1789 and the Communist revolutions in
Russia in 1917 and China in 1949.
F4 | Black Americans Seek Freedom |
The War of Independence did make a
significant change in the lives of thousands of enslaved black Americans.
Thousands of slaves in the South sought freedom by taking refuge behind British
lines. When the British army evacuated Charleston and Savannah, more than 10,000
former slaves went with them. Some blacks settled in Nova Scotia; others moved
to Sierra Leone in West Africa. Just as many blacks sought to improve their
situation by enrolling in the Patriot cause. Free New England blacks served in
the First Rhode Island Company, while slaves in Maryland won their freedom by
serving in the army. Elsewhere in the South, slaves bargained with their owners,
trading wartime loyalty for eventual liberty. Between 1782 and 1790, Virginia
planters freed almost 10,000 slaves. See also African American
History.
In the North, where there were
relatively few slaves, the war brought an end to the institution in
Massachusetts and the enactment of gradual emancipation laws in Pennsylvania,
Connecticut, and Rhode Island. By 1800 every state north of Delaware had enacted
similar laws, and blacks were taking advantage of their freedom to create their
own social organizations such as black churches.
In the South, slavery continued.
Enslaved people represented a huge financial investment. Most political leaders
were slaveholders, and they resisted the pleas of various religious
groups—primarily Quakers, Baptists, and Methodists—to move toward emancipation.
Planters maintained that slavery was a “necessary evil” required to ensure the
supremacy of whites and the elaborate lifestyles of the planter elite.
Nonetheless, the War of Independence
formed a major turning point in black history. It changed slavery from a
national to a regional institution and created new opportunities for thousands
of freed blacks in the Northern states.
G | The War in Retrospect |
The War of Independence was the central
event in the lives of a generation of Americans. For nearly a decade it
entangled them in experiences of a remarkable intensity, shaping their thoughts
about themselves, their society, and their government. Of the approximately
400,000 adult white men who lived in the colonies in 1775, probably about
175,000 fought in the war—120,000 as Patriot soldiers or militia, 55,000 as
Loyalists. Thus, husbands or sons from nearly half of all white families were
part of the “shooting” war. Many others—black as well as white, women and
children as well as men—were shot at or suffered personal harm. Thousands of
homes were looted or burned, and tens of thousands of people were detained,
molested, or forced to flee from the cities occupied by British or Patriot
troops and the intensely contested battle zones around New York City, throughout
central New Jersey, and nearly everywhere in Georgia and the Carolinas.
For all these families the war was a
political education. They learned, first, that one had to choose sides; it was
more dangerous to remain neutral, without friends, than to join the Patriot
militia or declare for the British cause. In the end, this process of wartime
politicization led to mass emigration among Loyalists and intense patriotism
among rebels. The war itself created loyalty to the new state governments and to
the United States.
Second, they learned to question social
and political authority. Once ordinary people had sensed the power of their
united strength—whether in mobs, or militia, or armies, or popular
conventions—they were less willing to defer to men of wealth and high status. In
this sense, the war was a democratizing experience that solidified support for
republicanism and began to overturn the deeply ingrained deferential habits of
the colonial era.
Finally, some of the American people
learned that success in war, and presumably in peace, required not only a loyal
and purposeful population but also direction by a strong central government. The
economic trials of the war, especially the difficulty of raising money without
the power of taxation, encouraged them to enhance the powers of Congress at the
expense of those of the states. Thus, the war developed sentiment for national
political institutions.
The legacy of the war was a volatile mix
of forces: patriotic fervor, democratic energy, republican values, and
nationalist sentiment. Their interaction would determine the fate of the new
nation.
VI | THE NEW NATION: 1775-1789 |
While Americans struggled to win the
independence of the United States, they were also creating new republican
institutions of government to replace royal authority. In the process they had
to work out the full implications—political, social, and intellectual—of life in
a republican nation.
A | New Political Institutions |
The collapse of royal authority in
America in 1775 did not lead to a breakdown of public order. Instead, the
provincial assemblies, local county courts, and town meetings simply added the
tasks previously performed by the imperial government to their traditional
functions. The transfer of power was given legitimacy by state constitutions,
which were written and ratified by the assemblies between 1776 and 1780.
The new constitutions were republican
because they derived their legitimacy from the consent of the people—also known
as the doctrine of popular sovereignty—and created representative political
institutions. However, in structure, the new governments closely resembled those
of the colonial period. Most states had an elected governor, a legislature of
two houses, and property qualifications for voting.
There were, however, several significant
variations. The most democratic of the new constitutions was that of
Pennsylvania, ratified in 1776. It bestowed the vote on all adult white
taxpayers and, to encourage majority rule, provided for only one house in the
legislature and curtailed the powers of the governor. In sharp contrast, the
aristocratic constitution of South Carolina imposed high property qualifications
for voting and even higher restrictions for officeholding. These political
differences reflected the contrasting societies of the two states.
Pennsylvania’s democratic institutions resulted from the coming to power, during
the revolution, of a coalition of social groups from the middling ranks:
independent farmers, established artisans, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians. South
Carolina’s elitist government was designed to protect the interests of a
relatively small group of rich, slave-owning white planters.
Other constitutional provisions had
historical or ideological origins. Some state charters included a bill of
individual rights while most of the others had specific clauses that guaranteed
traditional English legal rights, such as freedom from arbitrary searches, trial
by jury, and protection of property. The documents also reflected Enlightenment
values, such as guaranteeing religious toleration.
In some states, such as Pennsylvania and
Massachusetts, the new constitutions were approved only after fierce political
battles. In other states, primarily those in the South, the governmental
institutions given legitimacy in the new documents excluded the majority of the
people—white as well as black—from a role in the political process. But
everywhere the new charters were generally accepted, allowing a stable
transition to republican government.
B | Toward a New Religious Order |
Before 1776 most Americans lived in
colonies with established churches. All members of the community were assumed to
be members of that church (the Church of England in the South, the
Congregational Church in New England) and they were required by law to
contribute to the support of the minister. Only Pennsylvania and Rhode Island,
founded by Quakers and Baptists respectively, had no established church and
allowed religious freedom.
Independence brought significant changes
in American religious institutions, particularly in the South. Patriots who were
members of the Church of England repudiated their allegiance to the king, the
head of that church, and formed the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. Most
of the leading planters in Virginia were Episcopalians and, to win support for
the war effort from Presbyterians and Baptists, they had the Virginia Convention
of 1776 issue a Declaration of Rights that guaranteed religious toleration. Then
in 1786 the Virginia legislature passed Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing
Religious Freedom. It declared that all churches had the same legal rights and
that no church should receive direct financial support from the state. New York
and New Jersey adopted similar legislation.
Even as the Southern and mid-Atlantic
states were moving toward a separation of church and state, some citizens wanted
to maintain the traditional European system of established churches. They felt
that state support for religion would promote morality and respect for
authority. These sentiments were particularly strong in New England, where there
were close links between state government and the established Congregational
Church. There were relatively few members of other religious faiths, and most
New England ministers had enthusiastically supported the Patriot cause. For
these reasons, Massachusetts and Connecticut maintained an established church
until the 1830s. However they allowed Baptists and Methodists to support their
own ministers. Thus, following the American Revolution, there was a general
movement toward religious freedom.
C | Economic Problems |
In many respects the creation of a new
political order was much easier than forging a new financial and economic
system. During the War of Independence, British warships temporarily destroyed
the New England fishing industry and seized many American merchant ships. Both
the tobacco and the rice exporting states of the South and the grain-marketing
regions of the North suffered from the disruption of Atlantic trade. The port
cities had the greatest difficulty. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston,
and Newport were occupied for a time by British troops and suffered drastic
declines in population as trade virtually ceased.
Peace did not bring a return to prewar
prosperity. The United States was now outside the British Empire and could no
longer count on special preferences and subsidies. Angry over unpaid debts, some
British merchants refused to handle Chesapeake tobacco exports, cutting American
sales. Without a financial subsidy from the British government, South Carolina’s
once-lucrative indigo industry nearly vanished. Because of the British
Navigation Acts, American-owned ships could no longer trade with the sugar
islands in the British West Indies.
The result was a commercial recession
that lasted for nearly two decades. In 1790 the value of American exports per
capita was only two-thirds of what it had been in 1774. Nevertheless, low-priced
British goods flooded into the United States, driving many artisans out of
business. Responding to artisan protests, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania,
and Massachusetts imposed tariffs on imported manufactures. The American
standard of living declined, increasing the potential for conflict among
competing economic groups.
D | Political and Social Conflicts |
The process of creating a democratic
government during the American Revolution increased the prospect of social
conflict. During the colonial era, most political offices had been occupied by
wealthy men, and less wealthy Americans deferred to them. However, as early as
1770 Philadelphia workers protested against high-powered men who sought to
control the political process with little regard for their involvement. By 1776
the backcountry farmers of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, were instructing
their representatives to the state’s constitutional convention to “oppose
everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich and chief
men exercised to the oppression of the poor.”
At first, influential Patriots refused to
cede power to the lower orders. They insisted that voting and officeholding be
restricted to propertied white men. Conservative Patriots wanted to deny
political rights to men who owned only a little property.
Nevertheless, the American Revolution did
undermine the control of the state legislatures by an oligarchy of wealthy
planters and merchants. In 1774 fewer than one in five members of the assemblies
had been artisans or yeoman farmers. After the war, men from these social groups
formed a majority in some Northern legislatures and a powerful minority in the
Southern assemblies. Claiming a “right to speak and think for themselves,”
artisans formed Mechanics Associations and elected representatives from their
own ranks. Yeoman farmers benefited from the increased representation of
backcountry regions under the new state constitutions. Overall, the increased
political activity of farmers and artisans was significant.
E | Gender Inequalities |
The democratic reforms generated by the
revolution were not fully extended to women. Women had not taken an active role
in politics during the colonial era. However, during the revolution, educated
upper-class women entered into political debate in private conversations and,
less frequently, in public letters to newspapers. These women did not seek
voting rights but some of them asked for a republican legal order that would
give women greater individual rights. Under English and American common law, a
woman was subject to the legal control of her father until age 21 and to the
legal control of her husband upon her marriage. This meant that a married woman
could not own property or make legal contracts for herself and was virtually
subject to her husband’s will. Despite the pleas of Patriot women, including
Abigail Adams, neither Congress nor the state governments took significant steps
to enhance the legal rights of their female citizens.
Women continued to be excluded from
politics, as well. The state constitutions either restricted suffrage (voting
rights) to men or imposed property qualifications for voting that effectively
excluded married women. The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 did allow the vote
to all free adult inhabitants worth £50, but when widows and unmarried women
began to exercise this right after 1800, new legislation in 1807 excluded women
from the polls. See also Women’s Rights.
F | The Nature of the Revolution |
The republican freedoms won in the war
against Great Britain and incorporated into the new state constitutions made the
United States a more democratic and a more equal polity. However, the Patriot
leaders who led the independence movement did not want a political or a social
revolution. The governments they founded did not attempt to alter the existing
unequal distribution of wealth or eliminate the barriers of class, race, or
gender status. Most of the benefits of political independence went to men who
were white and property owners.
Thus, the American uprising against
Britain was less a total revolution than a movement for home rule that was led
and ultimately controlled by a privileged minority. And yet the American War of
Independence shook up the existing society in profound ways. The long war
created a huge price inflation that made many people more calculating, forcing
some of them to embrace the market economy and others to retreat into
subsistence farming. It also caused the departure of thousands of wealthy
Loyalists, an event that altered the social structure. Moreover, the Patriot
doctrines of republican liberty led to the end of slavery in the North and
challenged its legitimacy in the South; prompted the political mobilization of
ordinary farmers and artisans; and raised fundamental questions about gender
roles.
Beyond these immediate social changes,
the upheaval brought a revolution in American political thought. The people of
the United States repudiated social hierarchy and hereditary monarchy in favor
of individual liberty and representative republican government. Jefferson used
Enlightenment natural law principles, such as the right to life and liberty, as
the foundation of the Patriots’ doctrine of popular sovereignty. Thus, he argued
in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that “to secure these rights,
governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the
consent of the governed.” These principles—of individual rights and popular
sovereignty—were truly revolutionary and were among the Patriots’ most important
legacies to future generations.
VII | THE CREATION OF A NATIONAL GOVERNMENT |
The revolutionary generation of Americans
also bequeathed to posterity a workable system of national government. No
national political institutions existed in America before the war. To fight the
war against Britain, the states in 1781 agreed to Articles of Confederation,
which created a weak but workable national government. Then in 1787
nationalist-minded Patriots devised a constitution, creating a “national
republic” whose powers were drawn from the people at large and which established
a much stronger central government.
A | The First Congresses |
The movement toward centralized
government began slowly and sporadically. The Albany Congress of 1754 and the
Stamp Act Congress of 1765 addressed specific issues and were attended by
representatives from only some of the colonies. However, beginning in 1772 the
Patriot Committees of Correspondence expanded these contacts among colonial
leaders. Consequently, the First and Second Continental Congresses, held at
Philadelphia in 1774 and 1775, were attended by delegates from most colonies and
claimed to speak for the entire American population.
Following the Declaration of
Independence in 1776, the states voluntarily joined together in a legislative
assembly, the Continental Congress, in which each state had one vote. The
Congress mediated disputes among the states, raised and maintained the
Continental Army, secured loans from European bankers, and made military and
commercial alliances with France. Its success laid the basis for more permanent
national political institutions.
B | The Articles of Confederation |
The Continental Congress was a temporary
government without clearly defined powers. To establish its authority, the
Congress in November 1777 enacted the Articles of Confederation, drafted by John
Dickinson of Pennsylvania, and declared they would go into effect when ratified
by all of the states. The Articles proposed a loose confederation in which each
state kept its sovereign independence and control over all of its internal
affairs. However, certain powers, primarily relating to diplomacy and defense,
were delegated to the Confederation Congress. It was given the power to declare
war, make treaties, borrow and print money, and requisition funds from the
states.
At first, a number of states refused to
ratify the Articles. Some state governments hesitated to create a central
political authority that might restrict their autonomy like the British
Parliament had done. Other states demanded recognition of their colonial-era
land claims that, in some cases, stretched to the Pacific Ocean. Gradually, the
pressures of war overcame this reluctance. “Unless Congress are vested with
powers, by the separate states, competent to the great purposes of war ...,”
General George Washington warned the country in 1780, “our cause is lost.”
Congress did its part, persuading the states to give up their western land
claims and to allow creation of a national domain. Finally, in 1781, under the
threat of British invasion, Maryland became the final state to ratify the
Articles.
The central government created by the
Articles was simple in structure and limited in authority. There was no governor
or chief executive and no system of courts. The legislature was a one-house
Congress in which each state had one vote, regardless of population or wealth.
The Congress had military and diplomatic powers, but no authority to regulate
commerce or to levy taxes. It could ask the states for needed funds, but it
could not force them to comply. Furthermore, the powers of the Confederation
could be changed only by the unanimous consent of the states.
Although the Confederation was created
primarily to fight the war against Britain, its structure and powers had deeper
roots in American history. Indeed, they represented a fragile compromise between
two contradictory aspects of the colonial experience. On the one hand, there was
the tradition of local political control. For decades the colonial assemblies
had sought to expand their powers and to diminish those of the central
government in London. Now that they were independent states, they had no wish to
subject themselves to external control. On the other hand, the individual
colonies had prospered because they were part of a larger political and economic
entity. Under the British imperial system, goods had moved freely between one
colony and another without being subject to local tariffs, and people were free
to migrate as well. Now that the Americans were independent, some sort of
national authority was necessary to ensure unrestricted travel and trade among
the independent republican states and to resolve other common peacetime
problems.
C | Nationalists |
Even as the Articles of Confederation
were ratified, some Patriots were campaigning for a stronger central government.
One group that wanted a more powerful Confederation was composed of
nationalists. These men—military officers, diplomats, delegates to Congress, and
federal financiers and bureaucrats—had served the Confederation during the war
and had acquired a national perspective and outlook. In their thinking, there
was a self-evident need for central control over the disposition of western
lands, tariff and commercial policies, and dealings with foreign states.
The first success of the nationalists
came with respect to western lands. By 1781 the Congress had acquired title to
most of the lands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River
and began to develop policies for the coherent settlement of this vast national
domain. Congress decided that the revenues from the sale of this national domain
would go to the national government, not the states.
C1 | Tariffs and the Annapolis Convention |
Even as the Confederation government
was devising this program for the settlement of the West, nationalists won
Congress’s approval for a 5 percent tariff on foreign imports. Until the western
lands could be sold, Congress needed this revenue to pay its war-related debts.
Moreover, three states had enacted tariffs to protect their artisans. So a
uniform levy seemed imperative to prevent smuggling of foreign manufactures
between states and to ensure the free flow of American farm goods and
manufactures.
However, before this tariff could go
into effect, it had to be approved by all the states because it increased the
powers of the Confederation. The refusal of Rhode Island and New York to approve
the tariff prompted the nationalists to call a commercial convention at
Annapolis, Maryland, in 1786. When only five states sent delegates to the
Annapolis meeting, the nationalists planned a new, and broader, meeting. They
asked Congress and the states to approve a convention at Philadelphia in 1787.
Its task would be to devise a stronger national government.
C2 | Creditors and Shays’ Rebellion |
Nationalists were not the only group
seeking the creation of a stronger central government. In most states there were
creditors—men who had lent money to governments or private individuals—who had a
similar goal. They wanted high taxes so that they could redeem their loans
quickly and at face value. In order to do this, they wanted to diminish the
power of state legislatures, which were often influenced by hard-pressed farmers
and other debtors. Farmers, and many wealthier planters, wanted low taxes. The
recession of the 1780s had cut their income, and many farmers and planters owed
private debts to merchants or landlords.
To protect their economic interests,
debtors elected men to the state legislature who favored low taxes and
debt-relief measures. The South Carolina legislature enacted a law that
prevented creditors from legally seizing the land of debtors and selling it.
Instead, creditors were required to accept installment payments over a
three-year period. Pro-debtor state legislatures also printed large amounts of
paper money and, when it depreciated in value, enacted “legal tender” laws
requiring creditors to accept it in payment for private debts. Such laws angered
creditors, but they eased the financial pressures on debtors and prevented major
social upheavals.
In Massachusetts, the refusal of the
legislature to enact pro-debtor measures sparked Shays’ Rebellion, the first
armed uprising in the new nation. During the 1780s wealthy creditors used their
influence to defeat legislation regulating legal fees and lowering taxes.
Hard-pressed by economic recession, high taxes, and private debts, many farmers
were unable to pay their debts. Creditors sued them in court and won legal
judgments against their land and homes. To protect their property, mobs of
farmers closed the courts in 1786 and organized extralegal conventions to
discuss their grievances. Led by Daniel Shays, a former captain in the
Continental Army, they set up a military force and prepared to seize the arsenal
at Springfield. The Massachusetts legislature quickly passed a Riot Act and,
with financial support from eastern merchants, Governor James Bowdoin mobilized
an army, which put down the rebellion in early 1787.
Shays’ Rebellion stemmed from economic
grievances but derived much of its force from the doctrine of popular
sovereignty enshrined by the American Revolution. Coming on the eve of the
Constitutional Convention, Shays’ Rebellion reinforced the determination of
nationalists—and their creditor allies—to create a stronger central government.
They wanted a government that could raise a powerful army both to put down
domestic insurrections and to confront foreign threats. Britain continued to
hold military forts in western lands belonging to the United States, and Spain
was fomenting secessionist movements among western settlers and threatening to
close the Mississippi River to American commerce.
D | The Constitutional Convention of 1787 |
The 55 delegates who gathered in
Philadelphia in May 1787 were mostly merchants, slave-owning planters, and
landlords. There were no artisans and only a few farmers. The delegates included
some of the most prestigious men in the United States—among them George
Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison. Other
leading Patriots were absent: Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were in Europe on
diplomatic missions; Patrick Henry refused to attend because he favored the
limited central government of the Confederation.
The strong nationalist bias of most
delegates quickly emerged. William Paterson of New Jersey proposed a limited
reform of the existing Articles of Confederation. Paterson’s New Jersey Plan
would have given the Confederation government authority to regulate trade and
commerce and to levy taxes. It would also have ensured that acts of Congress
would be the “supreme law of the respective states.” However, the convention
rejected the New Jersey Plan. Some members objected that it discriminated
against states with large populations by leaving all states with a single vote
in the one-house Confederation legislature. Many other delegates were convinced
that it left too many powers to the states.
The convention turned its attention to
the plan for a national republic presented by James Madison of Virginia. Madison
was determined to create a powerful central government. His Virginia Plan would
limit the sovereignty of the individual states and ensure “the supremacy of
national authority.” The new government would draw its authority not from the
states but from the people as a whole; it would be a national republic with the
power to act directly on individuals within the various states. Finally, the
Virginia Plan proposed a three-part national government, with a lower house
elected by the voters, an upper house selected by the lower body, and an
executive and judiciary chosen by the entire legislature.
D1 | Compromises over Representation and Slavery |
The delegates endorsed the basic
principles of Madison’s plan in June. During the following month, they addressed
the complex and controversial issue of representation and fashioned two
compromises. The first compromise, suggested by the delegation from Connecticut,
sought to balance the political power of states with large and small
populations. Under the terms of the compromise, the states would be represented
in the lower house on the basis of population. In the upper house, each state
would have an equal number of votes.
Although the main conflict over
representation was between the large and the small states, a second compromise
was necessary to address an important regional issue. The Southern states
contained a large number of black slaves. Since these slaves were not allowed to
vote, Northern delegates argued that they should not be counted for purposes of
representation. They maintained that the number of seats held by Southern states
in the lower house of the national legislature should be based on their white
population. Southerners replied that this method of apportioning seats did not
recognize the wealth and importance of their states; they wanted slaves to be
counted equally with free people. The delegates compromised. Three-fifths of a
state’s enslaved population would be counted for purposes of representation and
taxation.
There were other regional arguments
over slavery. Although moral arguments against slavery shaped the debates in the
convention, most delegates treated slavery primarily as a political issue. That
is, they sought compromises between the North and the South that would preserve
national unity. Thus, the Constitution permitted the importation of slaves until
1808 but then gave Congress the power to ban the trade. And Northern delegates
reluctantly accepted a fugitive clause that allowed owners to reclaim slaves who
fled to other states.
D2 | Limiting Popular and State Power |
After reaching these compromises over
representation and slavery, the delegates spent two months working out the
details of the new plan of government. They defined the judicial power of the
central government in broad terms and created a Supreme Court. However, because
they did not want to raise opposition to the new Constitution, the delegates
left it to the first Congress to work out a politically acceptable way of
establishing national courts within the states. For the same reason, they
decided not to impose a property qualification for voting in national elections,
although many of the delegates wished to diminish the power of the people. To
limit popular power, the convention used other means: for example, both the
Senate and the president of the United States would be chosen by indirect means.
Voters would not have the power to elect senators; rather, they would be
selected by the state legislatures (a provision that was changed only by the
17th Amendment, ratified in 1913). Likewise, voters would not choose the
president; instead, they would select members of a small Electoral College who
would choose a president (a system that still prevails today in theory though
not in practice).
During these months, the delegates
also agreed to create a strong, pro-creditor national state. The Constitution
declared that the new government would honor the existing national debt and
would have broad powers of taxation as well as control over commerce. Moreover,
the new document restricted the power of pro-debtor state legislatures. Like the
British government before it, it took away from the states the power to issue
money, thus protecting creditors from inflation caused by paper currency. And it
prohibited the states from enacting any law that impaired “the obligation of
contracts,” thereby preventing debt-relief legislation.
In the middle of September, 38 of the
delegates still in Philadelphia signed the Constitution of the United States (3
refused to sign) and submitted it to the Confederation Congress. The document
stipulated that it would go into effect upon ratification by special conventions
in 9 of the 13 states.
E | The Ratification Struggle |
The new constitution produced exciting
debates and bitter political battles both in the state conventions and among the
public at large. Supporters of the new document called themselves Federalists.
Merchants, commercial-minded farmers, and creditors were the most vocal
advocates of the Constitution, hoping it would spur business activity. The
Federalists’ ranks also included many urban artisans, who wanted protective
tariffs and praised the constitutional provisions regarding commerce.
The Antifederalists, who opposed
ratification of the Constitution, were drawn from all sections and classes and
included political leaders in many states. However, their arguments appealed
primarily to small-scale farmers, who would have little voice in the new
government and feared its power. Antifederalist leaders argued that republican
institutions—governments truly “of” and “for” the people—were possible only in
cities or small states. They contended that the new central government would be
far removed from the people; that the relatively small number of representatives
would lead to the election primarily of the wealthy and well-known; and that the
lack of a bill of rights would expose citizens to arbitrary national power.
Some Federalists saw merit in this last
criticism and, in order to win ratification in the crucial states of Virginia,
Massachusetts, and New York, promised that a bill of rights would be added by
the first Congress. The other Antifederalist contentions were answered by
Madison, Hamilton, and John Jay in a series of newspaper articles known as
The Federalist (1788). They stressed that the state governments, which
were closer to the people, would retain substantial powers. The authors also
asserted that the three branches of the new government would “check and balance”
one another, thus preventing an arbitrary exercise of power. Madison went even
further, arguing that republican liberty would be better preserved in a large
rather than in a small state. He pointed out that in a large state there would
be a great number of economic interests and social groups, thus making it
impossible for any one of them to dominate the rest.
These arguments of The
Federalist, the promise of a bill of rights, and superb political tactics
secured the ratification of the Constitution. The conventions in most small and
less populous states quickly voted in favor, for the delegates hoped that a
strong national government would offset the power of their larger neighbors.
Elsewhere the debates were vigorous, and the outcome was close. The Federalists’
margin of victory was only 89 to 79 in Virginia and 30 to 27 in New York. By
1789 the Constitution had been ratified in 11 states and was put into effect
with the election of the first Congress of the United States and a first
president, George Washington.
F | The Nature of the Constitution |
To some Americans at the time, the
Constitution of 1789 appeared to be a reactionary document, almost a throwback
to British imperial rule. The strong central government removed power from the
responsive state governments created by the revolution and seemed to protect the
interests of men of wealth. But other Americans observed that the new government
could protect the nation from external threats and that the Constitution
provided a flexible and potentially democratic political framework.
There was considerable truth in both
views. The new Constitution did solidify the control of national affairs by a
diverse yet definable group of wealthy white men. Many of them had helped to
lead the Patriot independence movement and then found their new-found power
threatened from below. The American Revolution—the triumph of
republicanism—unleashed democratic political forces that challenged traditional
elite power. The Constitution incorporated this new republicanism in its
representative institutions, thereby providing the means by which later
generations of Americans would attempt legally to fashion a more democratic and
equal society.
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