Conceived in Liberty (273 page)

Perhaps the most remarkable influence of Burke’s pamphlet was in France. There, Franklin gave the pamphlet to the liberal leader Comte Honoré de Mirabeau, who was moved to expand it into a pamphlet of his own,
Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus,
which was quickly translated into English and German. Mirabeau’s pamphlet, evidently written with the particular conditions of his own country in mind, included a bitter attack on the monarchy and aristocracy under which, in contrast to republics, men were not equal before the law. The Cincinnati, in opposition to republican principles, would introduce into America an “eternal race of aristocrats, who may soon usurp those insulting titles by which the European nobility crush the simple citizens, their equals and brothers.”

Buffeted by the upsurge of hostility, Washington asked Thomas Jefferson, now in Congress, his opinion of the order, and this moderate liberal’s view proved decisive in determining Washington’s course. Jefferson wrote strongly that the society’s very foundation violated both the natural equality of man and the spirit of such equality before the law upon which American institutions were built. At the first general meeting of the Cincinnati in May 1784, in response to this opinion, Washington once again smashed at a particularly cherished goal of his friends on the far right. He forced the meeting to abolish all inherited and honorary memberships, and to confine the organization to dispensing charity. But this time his well-meaning intervention had quite a different impact, for the national meeting’s changes were null and void unless ratified by each of the constituent state societies, and this they refused to do. Yet public opinion took the shadow for the substance, and it was widely believed that the sweeping changes demanded by Washington had in fact been made. Criticism died down, and the Order of the Cincinnati remained as a reactionary canker upon the body politic.

As the Revolutionary War drew to a close, the settlement of the sovereignty over the lands of the Northwest became even more important. At the beginning of 1781, Virginia had ceded the lands north of the Ohio River to the Continental Congress, and Maryland was then persuaded to drop her objections to the Articles of Confederation. But the problem of the western lands was far from over, for Virginia had agreed to cession only if Congress voided the claims of the land speculators influencing middle states opinion. The speculative Indiana, Illinois and Wabash land companies fought back, urging Congress to refuse cession on those terms. The companies’ powerful lobbyists included James Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Wharton (Congressman from Delaware), and Bernard Gratz.

With the Virginians battling the land speculators, a lengthy stalemate developed in Congress. The western domain, however, looked attractive to Congress as a means of raising revenue by selling parcels of land; furthermore, it had promised land bounties to veteran officers, and these could only be extracted from the western lands. Congressional favor began to shift toward cession and against the land companies. Finally, a committee of Congress which included such pro-Virginians as John Rutledge and James Madison reported in early June 1783, implicitly accepting Virginia demands. Maryland and New Jersey delegates objected strenuously but were overruled. Virginia’s cession was then finally accepted in mid-September and Virginia reaffirmed the cession of Northwest claims on modified terms at the end of the year, but had to be content with a tacit rather than an explicit acceptance of her proviso. The following March 1,
Congress officially ratified the confirmed Virginia cession, with only New Jersey (and presumably Maryland, if she had been represented in the chamber at the time) voting nay. New Jersey, it may be noted, had come so thoroughly under the spell of the land companies that George Morgan, agent of the Indiana Company, had also been appointed agent of the state by the New Jersey legislature.

The terms of Virginia’s cession had not only worked to void the claims of the land speculators; they also pledged Congress eventually to carve several states out of the new territory, each to have the same rights as other states to “sovereignty, freedom, and independence.” This provision was embodied in the Ordinance of 1784, adopted in late April and drafted and steered through Congress by Jefferson. This ordinance laid down the pattern for future American land policy, especially in the carving out of separate states. While the public domain was unfortunately nationalized and the settlers subjected to the domination of Congress, Virginia’s proviso made sure that the new territories would eventually govern themselves, and not remain as permanent subjects of the original eastern states. But that tutelage period of congressional domination was long enough to make the Civil War inevitable—for it meant that the governing of new areas would have to be decided by a Congress which might contain within it irreconcilable sectional or ideological conflicts. Nationalizing the public domain meant also the nationalizing—the maximizing—of conflicts over its political and social systems. The broad impact of the Ordinance of 1784, furthermore, was heightened by the fact that it applied not only to the Northwest lands but also to any other lands that might be ceded to Congress by the individual states, a reflection of Jefferson’s anticipating Virginia’s ceding of the Kentucky lands into a separate state.

The specific form of government for all new territories under the ordinance was to create temporary territorial self-governments, followed by the formation of permanent states. Both would be subject to the Articles of Confederation. They would not be allowed to secede from the United States, they would be responsible for their share of the public debt, and they would be republican in form. Jefferson tried manfully to include the requirement that the western territories create no hereditary titles, nor allow any slaves or indentured servants after 1800. Given national control over western territories, only
one
proviso would have been consistent with liberty and justice
and
would have avoided the Civil War from the very beginning: Jefferson’s plan for the early outlawing of slavery. Only nipping the slave question in the bud might have prevented the vast conflict and bloodshed that was to come. But the slavery proviso—which significantly applied to Southwest as well as Northwest lands—lost by a single vote: only six states agreed out of thirteen. The four New England states, New York, and Pennsylvania voted for the prohibition; but the illness of
New Jersey’s John Beatty deprived the proviso of the seven affirmative votes required. The opposition to the slavery proviso was led by Richard Dobbs Spaight of North Carolina and Jacob Read of South Carolina. All of this points up the growing sectional North-South division over slavery in the United States, a division that had begun years before around the controversy over the basis of apportioning tax requisitions under the Articles. In the 1784 vote, the northern states were lined up against slavery, and the southern—with the exception of a few liberals such as Jefferson and his young Virginian disciple James Monroe—in favor.
*

*
In the controversy concerning the impost proposed by Congress in April 1783, the northern states had won a victory by projecting a change in the basis of requisitioning under the Articles. Instead of the value of ground land and improvements, the basis was proposed to be population—but this time a concession was made to the South in that only three-fifths of the slaves would be counted. This again points up the growing sectional disputes based upon slavery.

Following the work of Max Farrand at the beginning of the twentieth century, historians have, until very recently, almost completely deprecated the important role of sectional and slavery conflicts during the 1780s. For an analysis of this error, see Staughton Lynd, “The Abolitionist Critique of the United States Constitution,” in Martin Duberman, ed.,
The Anti-Slarery Vanguard
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965), pp. 209–239. On the Ordinance of 1784,
see ibid.,
pp. 221ff.

Still another territory of ambivalent status was Vermont. As late as 1778, Vermont, an independent republic, had not been recognized by the United States or accepted as a state. The acceptance of the western New Hampshire river towns as part of Vermont incurred the intense hostility of New Hampshire and of the United States, and the Westside Vermont towns succeeded in expelling their new acquisition, though at the price of threatened secession by the Eastside towns in union with their confreres on the other side of the Connecticut River. Soon the Eastside towns erupted against their tormentors in the West. In the spring of 1779, the bulk of the towns on both sides of the Connecticut River inconsistently called for the New Hampshire conquest of all Vermont. (Any stick with which to beat their Westside oppressors!) But the major war raged in the southeastern towns, which were generally loyal to New York. Vermont —not very consistently—was unwilling to allow its southeastern towns (Brattleboro, Guilford, and others) the self-determination that it claimed for itself. It began confiscating cows in lieu of compulsory military service in the southeast, and Yorker crowds led by Eleazer Patterson, colonel in the New York militia, began recapturing the cows and returning them to their original owners. The “Cow War” was on. Patterson kept pleading with Governor Clinton of New York to come to the aid of the suffering Yorkers against the Vermont invasion, but Clinton, beset by a large threat from the British, sent only promises and encouragement.

Unchecked by New York intervention, the petty despots of Vermont sent Ethan Allen and a hundred men to crush the lower Eastside rebellion. No resistance was offered to the formidable Allen, who arrested Patterson
and all the Yorker militia officers. The hapless militiamen were tried under a new law, ironically prohibiting the disregard of “constituted authority.” But Vermont shrewdly let the insurgents off with light fines and granted amnesty to all political prisoners, thus taking all the steam from Congress’ order, incited by New York, to release all such prisoners.

During the summer of 1779, the lower Eastsiders petitioned Congress for New York’s claim and against Vermont’s admission as a state, while New Hampshire voted to incorporate Vermont into her own territory. In the face of these conflicting threats, Vermont acted boldly, defying one and all, and subtly raised the spectre of a possible separate peace with Great Britain. This placed her existence in great peril, for all of her enemy states agreed to place the power of decision over her fate into the hands of Congress. Congress arranged to make the decision on February 1, 1780, meanwhile ominously ordering Vermont to cease granting land or selling confiscated Tory property. The death knell seemed at hand for the independent state of Vermont.

But under the leadership of the Aliens, Vermont defied Congress. As a separate republic, she continued to make land sales and published several pamphlets by Ethan and Ira Allen for the Vermont cause. Under this shrewd defiance and the blows of the British invasion in the South, Congress sidestepped any real decision, and confined itself to strongly denouncing Vermont’s behavior. Then, in mid-September, Vermont Governor Thomas Chittenden presented to Congress a flat and open threat. Since Congress had refused to admit Vermont as a state, Vermont would feel free to accept separate peace terms from Great Britain. Great Britain began secret negotiations with the little republic, and Vermont shrewdly used these to continue to stave off a British invasion from the north. A Congress frightened by this great show of determination postponed matters once more.

Meanwhile, all the disaffected men of the Eastside—the river towns as well as the Yorkers—decided to unite against their Vermont oppressors. Meeting at Charlestown, on the east bank of the Connecticut River, in mid-January 1781, delegates from 43 towns in eastern Vermont and western New Hampshire decided overwhelmingly to join the state of New Hampshire. But Ira Allen, wheeling and dealing, persuaded the convention to reverse itself and vote the Eastside towns back into Vermont. In return, he promised once again that Vermont would take the western New Hampshire towns back into the Vermont republic—an act that would mollify the towns on both sides of the Connecticut River.

Vermont’s daring in the face of enemies on all sides was phenomenal. Dickering with Britain to stave off attack, defying New Hampshire by incorporating her western towns once again, it now moved to incorporate New York towns on her western boundary which were disgruntled by
New York’s failure to protect them against Carleton and grateful for Vermont’s truce with Great Britain which by design included them as well. The New York towns lying west of Vermont’s border and east of the Hudson and Lake George responded to the invitation with enthusiasm, and met in mid-May at Cambridge to apply immediately for inclusion in Vermont. The June session of the Vermont legislature eagerly accepted the reentrance of the New York towns.

Vermont was now united internally, but at the expense of the implacable enmity of New Hampshire and New York. In response to Congress’ demand to surrender the towns that had seceded from New Hampshire and New York, she sturdily informed it that she could not do so until admitted as a state. Yorktown finally eliminated the threat of British invasion, but again opened Vermont to attacks from its jealous neighbors. New York sent a troop of militia under Col. John van Rensselaer to try to recover the seceding New York areas, called “the West Union.” But New York militiamen began to desert en
masse
and defect to the ranks of Vermont, and the New York force, worn down to 80 men, fled at the arrival of Ethan Allen and his 500 Vermonters. Trouble also sprang up in the “East Union,” the former New Hampshire river towns, with Vermont and New Hampshire imprisoning each other’s officials. An angry mob rescued a pro-Vermont official from a jail in Keene, and the furious New Hampshire legislature delivered an ultimatum to Vermont to get off the East Union territory in 40 days or suffer a full-scale invasion by 1,000 New Hampshire troops. And the southeast Yorkers sprang up once more to urge Vermont inclusion in the state of New York.