The American Revolution: A History (17 page)

A shift in congressional leadership in the early eighties allowed these concerned national groups to exert greater influence. Older popular radicals like Richard Henry Lee and Arthur Lee of Virginia and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts were replaced by such younger men as James Madison of Virginia and Alexander Hamilton of New York, who were more interested in authority and stability than in popular democracy. Disillusioned by the ineffectiveness of the Confederation, these nationalists in the Congress set about reversing the localist and power-weakening emphasis of the Revolution. They strengthened the regular army at the expense of the militia and promised pensions to the Continental Army officers. They reorganized the departments of war, foreign affairs, and finance in the Congress and replaced the committees that had been running them with individuals. The key individual in the nationalists’ program was Robert Morris, a wealthy Philadelphia merchant who was made superintendent of finance and virtual head of the Confederation in 1781. In order to attach financial and commercial groups to the central government, Morris undertook to stabilize the economy and fund the national debt. He persuaded Congress to recommend to the states that paper-money laws be repealed and to require that the states’ contributions to the general expenses be paid in gold or silver. And he sought to establish a national bank and to make federal bonds more secure for investors.

Carrying out this nationalist program depended upon amending the Articles so as to grant the Confederation the power to levy a 5 percent duty on imports. Once the Congress had adequate revenues independent of the states, the Confederation could pay its debts and would become more attractive to prospective buyers of its bonds. Although Morris was able to induce Congress to charter the Bank of North America, the rest of the nationalists’ economic proposals narrowly failed. Not only did the states ultimately refuse to approve the impost amendment, but many were slow in supplying the money that had been requisitioned by Congress. Nor was Congress able to get even a restricted authority to regulate commerce.

After the allied victory at Yorktown in October 1781 and the opening of peace negotiations with Great Britain, interest in the Congress declined and some individuals became desperate. The prospect of Congress’s demobilizing the army without fulfilling its promises of back pay and pensions created a crisis that brought the United States as close to a military coup d’état as it has ever been. In March 1783, the officers of Washington’s army encamped at Newburgh on the Hudson River issued an address to the Congress concerning their pay. They actually plotted some sort of military action against the Confederation. Only when Washington personally intervened and refused to support a movement that was designed, he said, “to open the floodgates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood” was the crisis averted.

News of the peace in 1783 shattered much of the unionist sentiment that had existed during the war. By December 1783 the Congress, in Jefferson’s opinion, had lost much of its usefulness. “The constant session of Congress can not be necessary in time of peace,” he said. After clearing up the most urgent business, the delegates should “separate and return to our respective states, leaving only a Committee of the states,” and thus “destroy the strange idea of their being a permanent body.”

Congressional power, which had been substantial during the war years, now began to disintegrate. The delegates increasingly complained how difficult it was even to gather a quorum. The Congress could not even agree on a permanent home: It wandered from Philadelphia to Princeton to Annapolis to Trenton and finally to New York City. The states reasserted their authority and began taking over the payment of the federal debt that many had earlier hoped to make the cement of union. By 1786 the states had converted nearly one third of the federal securities into state bonds, thus creating a vested interest among public creditors in the sovereignty of the individual states. Under these circumstances the influence of those, as Hamilton called them, “who think continentally” rapidly declined, and the chances of amending the Confederation piecemeal declined with them. The only hope of reform now seemed to lie in some sort of convention of all the states.

In Europe the reputation of the United States dwindled as rapidly as did its credit. The Dutch and French would lend money only at extraordinary rates of interest. Since American ships now lacked the protection of the British flag, many of them were seized by corsairs from the Muslim states of North Africa and their crews were sold into slavery. The Congress had no money to pay the necessary tribute and ransoms to these Barbary pirates.

Amid a world of hostile monarchical empires the new republican confederacy was even hard-pressed to maintain its territorial integrity. Britain refused to send a minister to the United States and ignored its treaty obligations to evacuate its military posts in the Northwest, claiming that the United States had not honored its own commitments. The treaty of peace had stipulated that the Confederation would recommend to the states that loyalist property confiscated during the Revolution be restored to its owners and that neither side would make laws obstructing the recovery of prewar debts. When the states flouted these treaty obligations, the impotent Confederation could do nothing.

Britain was known to be plotting with the Indians and encouraging separatist movements in the Northwest and in the Vermont borderlands, and Spain was doing the same in the Southwest. Spain in fact refused to recognize American claims to the territory between Florida and the Ohio River. In 1784 in an effort to bring American settlers moving into Kentucky and Tennessee under its control, Spain closed the Mississippi to American trade. Many westerners were ready to deal with any government that could ensure access to the sea for their agricultural produce. As Washington noted in 1784, the western settlers were “on a pivot. The touch of a feather would turn them any way.”

In 1785–86, John Jay, a New York aristocrat and the secretary of foreign affairs, negotiated a treaty with the Spanish minister to the United States, Diego de Gardoqui. By the terms of this agreement Spain was opened to American trade in return for America’s renunciation of its right to navigate the Mississippi for several decades. Out of fear of being denied an outlet to the sea in the West, the southern states prevented the necessary nine-state majority in the Congress from agreeing to the treaty. But the desire of a majority of seven states to sacrifice western interests for the sake of northern merchants aroused long-existing sectional jealousies and threatened to shatter the Union.

Despite the efforts of the diplomatic commission of Jefferson, Franklin, and Adams to negotiate liberal commercial treaties, the mercantilist empires of the major European nations remained generally closed to the new republic in the 1780s. The French were unwilling to take as much American produce as had been expected, and Britain effectively barred competitive American goods from its markets while recapturing American consumer markets for its own goods. The Confederation lacked the authority to retaliate with its own trade regulations, and several attempts to grant the Congress a restricted power over commerce were lost amid state and sectional jealousies. The Confederation Congress watched helplessly as the separate states attempted to pass ineffectual navigation acts of their own. By the mid-1780s, for example, Connecticut was laying heavier duties on goods from Massachusetts than on those from Great Britain.

In the end, the Confederation’s inability to regulate commerce finally precipitated reform of the Articles. Jefferson, Madison, and other leaders with agrarian interests wanted American farmers free to sell their surplus crops abroad. They feared that if they were prohibited from doing so the farmers would sink into lethargy and lose their industriousness. More important, if the United States did not sell its agricultural produce in Europe, it would be unable to pay for manufactured goods imported from Europe and would therefore be compelled to begin large-scale manufacturing for itself. These developments in turn would eventually destroy the farmer-citizenry on which republicanism was based and would create in America the same kind of corrupt, rank-conscious, and dependent society that existed in Europe. Thus the Confederation desperately needed commercial regulatory power in order to compel the European states to open their markets to American agricultural goods.

THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION

By 1786 these accumulated pressures made some sort of revision of the Articles inevitable. Virginia’s desire for trade regulation led to a convention of several states at Annapolis in September 1786. Those who attended the meeting quickly realized that commerce could not be considered apart from other problems and called for a larger convention in Philadelphia in May of the following year. After several states agreed to send delegates to Philadelphia, the Confederation Congress belatedly recognized the approaching convention and in February 1787 authorized it to revise the Articles of Confederation.

By 1787 almost every political leader in the country, even those who later opposed the new Constitution, expected some new powers to be added to the Confederation Congress. Reform of the Articles in some way or other—particularly by granting the Congress a limited authority to tax and the power to regulate trade—was in the air. This desire to do something about the central government gave the nationalists like James Madison their opportunity, and it helps explain the willingness of people to accede to the meeting at Philadelphia.

Yet few people expected what the Philadelphia Convention eventually created—a new Constitution that utterly transformed the structure of the central government and promised a radical weakening of the states. The extraordinarily powerful national government that emerged from Philadelphia possessed far more than the additional congressional powers that were required to solve the United States’ difficulties in credit, commerce, and foreign affairs. Given the Revolutionaries’ loyalty to the sovereignty of their states and their deep-rooted fears of centralized governmental authority, the formation of the new Constitution was a truly remarkable achievement. It cannot be explained simply by the obvious weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation.

In the end, it was also the problems within the separate states in the 1780s that made possible constitutional reform of the central government. The unjust and confusing laws coming out of the state legislatures, Madison informed Jefferson in 1787, had become “so frequent and so flagrant as to alarm the most stedfast friends of Republicanism.” These popular abuses by the state legislatures, said Madison, “contributed more to that uneasiness which produced the Convention, and prepared the public mind for a general reform, than those which accrued to our national character and interest from the inadequacy of the Confederation to its immediate objects.”

In 1786 a rebellion of nearly 2,000 distressed debtor farmers threatened with foreclosure of their mortgages broke out in western Massachusetts. The rebellion, led by a former militia captain, Daniel Shays, closed the courts and threatened to take over a federal arsenal. But more alarming, it occurred in the very state, Massachusetts, that was considered to have the best-balanced constitution. Although Shays’s rebels were defeated by militia troops, his sympathizers were victorious at the polls early in 1787. Consequently the newly chosen state representatives soon enacted the kinds of debtor relief legislation that Shays had wanted and that other states were enacting. This legislation convinced many that calling for people to obey the law was a remedy for insurrections only; it did not solve the peculiar problem of legislative tyranny. By voting the sympathizers of Shays into legislative office, the people had made it possible, as one Boston newspaper complained in May 1787, for “sedition itself [to] make laws.”

Thus by 1786–87 the reconstruction of the central government was being sought as a means of correcting not only the weaknesses of the Articles but also the democratic despotism and the internal political abuses of the states. A new central government, some believed, could save both the Congress from the states and the states from themselves. New groups joined those already working to invigorate the national government. Urban artisans hoped that a stronger national government would prevent competition from British imports. Southerners, particularly in Virginia, wanted to gain proportional representation of their growing population. And most important, members of the gentry up and down the continent momentarily submerged their sectional and economic differences in the face of what seemed to them a threat to individual liberty from the tyranny of legislative majorities within the states. Creating a new central government was no longer simply a matter of cementing the union, or of standing strong in foreign affairs, or of satisfying the demands of particular creditor, mercantile, and army interests. It was now a matter, as Madison declared, that would “decide forever the fate of republican government.”

Fifty-five delegates representing twelve states attended the Philadelphia Convention in the summer of 1787. (Rhode Island, which was acutely jealous of its local autonomy, refused to have anything to do with efforts to revise the Articles.) Although many of the delegates were young men—their average age was forty-two—most were well-educated and experienced members of America’s political elite. Thirty-nine had served in Congress at one time or another, eight had worked in the state constitutional conventions, seven had been state governors, and thirty-four were lawyers. One third were veterans of the Continental Army, that great dissolvent of state loyalties, as Washington once called it. Nearly all were gentlemen, “natural aristocrats,” who took their political superiority for granted as an inevitable consequence of their social and economic position.

Washington’s presence was crucial, but he hesitated to attend. In December 1783 he had voluntarily surrendered his sword to the Congress and had retired to Mount Vernon, promising never again to engage in public affairs. This almost unprecedented willingness to give up political power had electrified the world and had established his worldwide fame as a modern version of the ancient Roman farmer-soldier Cincinnatus. Washington’s earlier pledge to withdraw from public life, however, made him reluctant to risk his reputation by getting involved in politics. But friends convinced him that people might think that by not attending the Convention he wanted the federal government to fail so that he could manage a military takeover. So he came and was immediately made president of the Convention.