A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (20 page)

Washington then saw his opportunity to mass his forces with Greene’s and take on Cornwallis one on one. Fielding 5,000 troops reinforced by another 5,000 French, Washington quickly marched southward from New York, joining with French Admiral Joseph de Grasse in a coordinated strike against Cornwallis in Virginia.

By that time, Washington’s men had not been paid for months, a situation soon remedied by Robert Morris, the “financier of the Revolution.” News arrived that the
Resolve
had docked in Boston with two million livres from France, and the coins were hauled to Philadelphia, where the Continental troops received their pay. Alongside the formal, professional-looking French troops, Washington’s men looked like a rabble. But having survived the winter camps and evaded the larger British armies, they had gained confidence. It was hardly the same force that Washington had led in retreat two years earlier. Now, Washington’s and Rochambeau’s forces arrived in the Chesapeake Bay region, where they met a second French column led by Lafayette, and together the Franco-American forces outnumbered the British by 7,000 men.

Cornwallis, having placed his confidence in the usually reliable Royal Navy, was distressed to learn that de Grasse had defeated a British fleet in early September, depriving the general of reinforcements. (It was the only major victory in the history of the French navy.) Although not cut off from escape entirely, Cornwallis—then fortified at Yorktown—depended on rescue by a British fleet that had met its match on Chesapeake Bay. Over the course of three weeks, the doomed British army held out against Henry Knox’s artillery siege and Washington’s encroaching trenches, which brought the Continentals and French steadily closer. Ultimately, large British redoubts had to be taken with a direct attack, and Washington ordered nighttime bayonet charges to surprise the defenders. Alexander Hamilton captured one of the redoubts, which fell on the night of October 10, 1781, and the outcome was assured. Nine days later Cornwallis surrendered. As his men stacked their arms, they “muttered or wept or cursed,” and the band played “The World Turned Upside Down.”
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Nevertheless, in October of 1781, Britain fielded four other armies in North America, but further resistance was futile, especially with the French involved. Washington had proven himself capable not only of commanding troops in the field but also of controlling a difficult international alliance. The colonists had shown themselves—in large part thanks to Robert Morris—clever enough to shuffle money in order to survive. Tory sentiment in America had not provided the support England hoped, and efforts to keep the rebels isolated from the Dutch and Spanish also had collapsed. As early as 1775, British Adjutant General John Harvey recognized that English armies could not conquer America, and he likened it to driving a hammer into a bin of corn, with the probable outcome that the hammer would disappear. Although they controlled Boston, New York, Newport, Philadelphia, and Charleston, the British never subdued the countryside, where nine out of their fourteen well-equipped forces were entirely captured or destroyed. In the nine Continental victories, British losses totaled more than 20,000 men—not serious by subsequent Napoleonic standards, but decisive compared to the total British commitment in North America of 50,000 troops.

Although Washington never equaled the great military tacticians of Europe, he specialized in innovative uses of riflemen and skirmishers, and skillfully maneuvered large bodies of men in several night operations, then a daunting command challenge. By surviving blow after blow, Washington (and Greene as well) conquered. (In 1781, Greene even quipped, “Don’t you think that we bear beating very well, and that…the more we are beat, the better we grow?”)
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The Treaty of Paris, 1783

In April 1782, John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin opened negotiations with British envoy Richard Oswald.
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Oswald knew Franklin and was sympathetic to American positions. By November, the negotiations were over, but without the French, who still wanted to obtain territorial concessions for themselves and the Spanish. Although the allies originally agreed to negotiate together, by 1783, French foreign minister Vergennes was concerned America might obtain too much western territory in a settlement, and thus become too powerful. America ignored the French, and on November 30, 1792, representatives from England and America signed the Treaty of Paris, ending the War of Independence.

The treaty also established the boundaries of the new nation: to the south, Spain held Florida and New Orleans; the western boundary was the Mississippi River; and the northern boundary remained what it had been
ante bellum
under the Quebec Act. Americans had the rights to fish off Newfoundland and in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, and vessels from England and America could navigate the Mississippi River freely. France, having played a critical role in the victory, came away from the conflict with only a few islands in the West Indies and a terrific debt, which played no small part in its own revolution in 1789. Spain never recovered Gibraltar, but did acquire the Floridas, and continued to lay a claim to the Louisiana Territory until 1802. Compensation for losses by the Tories was a sticking point because technically the individual states, and not the Continental Congress, had confiscated their properties. Nevertheless, the commissioners ultimately agreed to recommend that Congress encourage the states to recompense Loyalists for their losses. In sum, what Washington gained on the field, Jay and Franklin more than held at the peace table.
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One final ugly issue raised its head in the negotiations. American negotiators insisted that the treaty provide for compensation to the owners of slaves who had fled behind British lines. It again raised the specter, shunted away at the Continental Congress’s debate over the Declaration, that the rights of Englishmen—or, in this case, of Americans—still included the right to own slaves. It was a dark footnote to an otherwise impressive diplomatic victory won by the American emissaries at the peace negotiations.
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Inventing America

G
ary Wills aptly described the early Revolutionaries’ efforts at making new governments as “inventing America.”
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Jefferson’s Declaration literally wiped the slate clean, providing the new nation’s leaders with tremendous opportunities to experiment in the creation of the Republic. Yet these opportunities were fraught with dangers and uncertainties; the Revolutionary Whigs might fail, just as the Roundheads had failed in the English Civil War, and just as the Jacobins in France would soon fail in their own revolution.

Instead, these “founding brothers” succeeded. The story of how they invented America is crucial in understanding the government that has served the United States for more than two hundred years, and, more broadly, the growth of republican institutions in Western civilization. John Adams knew the opportunities and perils posed by the separation from England and the formation of a new government, noting that he and his contemporaries had been “thrown into existence at a period when the greatest philosophers and lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live. A period when a coincidence of circumstances…has afforded to the thirteen Colonies…an opportunity of beginning government anew from the foundation.”
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Contrary to popular belief, America’s federal Constitution was not an immediate and inevitable result of the spirit of 1776. Indeed, briefly, in March 1783, some question existed about whether an army mutiny over pay might not result either in a military coup or Washington relenting to pressures to “take the crown,” as one colonel urged him to do. Instead, Washington met with the ringleaders, and while putting on his eyeglasses, shattered their hostility by explaining that he had “not only grown gray but almost blind in service to my country.”
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Their resistance melted, as did the neonatal movement to make him king—though the regal bearing stayed draped over him until the end. As late as 1790, Franklin observed of Washington’s walking stick, “If it were a sceptre, he would have merited it.”
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More than anyone, Washington knew that he had helped found a republic and for that reason, if no other, his presence at the Constitutional Convention was important, if not necessary.

Washington’s actions aside, the story of the drafting and ratification of the federal Constitution was not one of “chaos and Patriots to the rescue,” with wise Federalists saving the nation from anarchy and disarray under the Articles of Confederation. Rather, a complex story emerges—one that contained the origins of political parties in the United States and the adoption of the legal basis of republican government.

Highways and Wolves

Having declared the American colonies independent of Great Britain, the patriot Whigs immediately set about the task of creating new governments as sovereign states. The task was huge and the possibilities were unprecedented; and one sentiment seemed unanimous:
no
kings! Americans, Jefferson observed, “shed monarchy” like an old suit of clothes. But what kind of government would the Whigs create? No nation in existence at the time had elected leaders; there were no precedents. On the other hand, Americans had considerable experience governing themselves, and they possessed a vast arsenal of ideas about the proper forms and nature of government.
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Governing a nation, however, was different. Adams worried that “the lawgivers of antiquity…legislated for single cities [but] who can legislate for 20 or 50 states, each of which is greater than Greece or Rome at those times?”
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His concerns, while not inconsequential, ignored the reality that the “lawgivers of antiquity” did not have a shared understanding of Enlightenment precepts—a rich tapestry interwoven with the beliefs of radical English Whigs. Adams also missed a fundamental demographic fact of the infant United States, namely that it was young. By 1790 half the nation’s population of four million was under sixteen years of age, meaning a homogenous revolutionary generation started with the same Whig/Enlightenment principles and, to some degree, matured in their thinking along similar lines. Probably the most important value they shared was a commitment to the principle that constitutions should take the form of succinct, written documents. They rejected the ethereal English “constitution,” with its diffuse precedent-based rulings, unwritten common law bases, and patchwork of historic charters spanning five hundred years of English history. About constitutions, Americans insisted on getting it down on paper, a trait that would characterize virtually all of their legal processes, even to a fault.

Second, the designers of the post-Revolutionary governments were localists and provincials. They wanted government small and close to home. Just as they opposed royal rule from a distance of fifteen hundred miles, so too they distrusted suggestions to form a centralized North American state. Aside from fighting the British, they had few needs from a grand governmental establishment—perhaps commercial treaties and common weights and measures, but even those came under scrutiny. One Briton sarcastically wrote that Americans were primarily concerned with “the regulation of highways and the destruction of wolves.”
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In eighteenth-century terms, these Whigs espoused egalitarianism and democracy: the struggling gods of monarchy, divine right, absolutism, and the rest of the feudal golems were utterly rejected. But one should take care to temper terms like “democracy” and “republicanism” in the understanding of the day. American Revolutionaries did not envision citizenship for Indians, women, and blacks, even in their most radical egalitarian fantasies. Yet despite their narrow definition of polity, these transplanted Englishmen lived in what was undoubtedly the most radically democratic society on the face of the earth. Land was abundant and cheap, and because they tied the right to vote to property ownership, more Americans became voters every year and, with the age demographic noted earlier, a mass of politically active men obtained the franchise at nearly the same time.

It is difficult to quantify data in the period before the first federal census, but most historians agree that 50 to 75 percent of the white, male Revolutionary population obtained the right to vote, leading Tory governor Thomas Hutchinson to write disparagingly that in America, the franchise was granted to “anything with the appearance of a man.”
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All did not share such a low view of the yeomen, though, especially Jefferson, who thought that if a farmer and a professor were confronted with the same problem, the “former will decide it often better than the latter, because he had not been led astray by artificial rules.”
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Surprisingly to some, Adams (initially) agreed: “The mob, the herd and the rabble, as the Great always delight to call them,” were as entitled to political rights as nobles or kings: the “best judges,” as editorialist Cato called the public.
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Implicit in the emerging vision of government was the separation-of-power doctrine borrowed from Montesquieu—the division of authority between executive, judicial, and legislative branches of government. This did not equate with a belief in the balance of powers, which became more popular after the Revolutionary War, especially among the Federalists. Rather, most Whigs argued that governmental branches should indeed be separate, but that one—the legislative—should retain most power. Given the colonists’ recent experience with King George and his royal governors, such a view is easy to understand. The legislature’s power of the purse entitled it, they held, to a paramount position in the government.

Whig political thinkers of the day also adopted what we today call civil libertarianism, or the organized articulation of the Whig fear of abusive power and the people’s need to sustain a militia and to keep and bear firearms. “Due process,” a term derived from the Whigs’ advocacy of jury trial; the right to file petitions of habeas corpus; opposition to cruel and unusual punishment—all flowed from this concern for government’s capacity for abuse. Other libertarian beliefs revolved around freedom of speech, petition, assembly, and religion, and freedom of the press. Except for religious practice, all of these freedoms dealt explicitly with
political
issues. “Free speech” meant the right to address publicly the shortcomings of government, the right to assembly related to groups massing to demonstrate against the state, and so on. By the twenty-first century, legislators would become so concerned about the impact of money in financing political advertisements that they would attempt to regulate it. But the founders’ intentions were clear: the right to speak out against government (including financing of pamphlets, broadsides, or other forms of “advertising”) was the single most important right they addressed, aside from possession of firearms. Other widely held beliefs included Locke’s declaration of a right to attain and keep property, which Americans radicalized even further by insisting on minimal taxation. All of it, of course, had to be written down.

Those who invented America did not forget their recent difficulties communicating with Parliament and George III, a point that led them to require that legislators directly represent their constituents. This translated into smaller legislative districts, short terms, and close contact with the constituents. It also meant, however, that since the legislatures would have the most power, the Whig constitution makers would bridle them even more through frequent (annual) elections, recall, and impeachment. Concerns about character, when legislators and their constituents knew each other personally and met frequently, could be addressed firsthand.

Thus, the Revolutionary Whigs came to the task of creating a government with an array of strong principles grounded in localism, egalitarianism, and libertarianism expressed through written constitutions, and constrained by separation of power, legislative dominance, and direct representation. Constraint, constraint, constraint—that was the overriding obsession of the Founders. Whigs recognized that while government was necessary to protect life, liberty, and property, the people who comprised the government inevitably tried to accumulate and abuse power unless properly checked by fundamental law. Sam Adams assessed it when he wrote, “Jealousy is the best security of publick Liberty.”
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Such priorities also underscored another important point, that despite enthusiastically accepting the end product of the Lockean view of rights, American political theorists had rejected the underlying assumptions of both Hobbes and Locke that government was artificial. Jefferson said so himself in the Declaration, insisting that even when people abolished a tyrannical government, they had to replace it with a just and benign one. At its very origins, therefore, the American idea had certain tensions between civil rights that emanated from a worldview and the basis of the worldview itself.

In part, the direction of the young Republic took the turns that it did precisely because the hands at the tiller were those of Revolutionary liberals who shared the basic Whig assumptions, and their dominance, in turn, had in part arisen from the departure of more conservative, pro-monarchy voices that found remaining in the new nation untenable. The flight of the Loyalists to Canada and England played no small role in guaranteeing one type of consensus at the deliberating bodies that produced the subsequent state and federal constitutions.

Chaos and Patriots to the Rescue?

The standard fare for most twentieth-century high school and college texts expressed the view that the Articles of Confederation period constituted a “critical period” during which America experienced a precarious brush with anarchy. Modern big-government liberals look upon the era with disgust. Genuine problems plagued the young nation. The economy plummeted and crowds rioted, with Shays’ Rebellion (1786) epitomizing the new nation’s problems stemming from the Articles. This “preconstitution” that governed the nation from 1783–87 proved ill suited to organizing the country, leaving the Confederation Congress corrupt, bankrupt, and inept—a body that bungled domestic affairs and drifted into weakness against foreign powers. Then, according to this story, a band of heroes galloped to the rescue. Washington, Hamilton, Jay, Franklin, and others called the 1787 Philadelphia Convention and wrote the Constitution, lifting the endangered nation out of its morass and providing a sensible governing framework. These Founders saved America from ruin and established a system of government that endured to the present day.
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Unfortunately, little of this interpretation is accurate. Historian Merrill Jensen, especially, spent much of his career debunking what he called the “Myth of the Confederation Era.”
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