The American Revolution: A History (13 page)
Throughout the eighteenth century, liberal intellectuals had looked forward to a new enlightened world in which corrupt monarchical diplomacy, secret alliances, dynastic rivalries, and balances of power would be abolished. Since war was promoted by the dynastic ambitions, the bloated bureaucracies, and the standing armies of monarchies, then the elimination of monarchy would mean the elimination of war itself. A world of republican states would encourage a peace-loving diplomacy—one based on the natural concert of international commerce. If the people of the various nations were left alone to exchange goods freely among themselves—without the corrupting interference of selfish monarchical courts, irrational dynastic rivalries, and the secret double-dealing diplomacy of the past—then, it was hoped, international politics would become republicanized and pacified.
Suddenly in 1776, with the United States isolated and outside Europe’s mercantile empires, the Americans had both an opportunity and a need to put into practice these liberal ideas about international relations and the free exchange of goods. Thus commercial interest and Revolutionary idealism blended to form the basis for much American thinking about foreign affairs that lasted well into the twentieth century; to some extent this blending is still present in American thinking about the world.
“Our plan is commerce,” Thomas Paine told Americans in 1776, “and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe; because it is the interest of all Europe to have America a free port.” America had no need to form traditional military alliances. Trade between peoples alone would be enough. Indeed, for Paine and other liberals peaceful trade among the people of the various nations became the counterpart in the international sphere to the sociability of people in the domestic sphere. Just as enlightened thinkers like Paine and Jefferson foresaw a republican society held together solely by the natural affection of people, so too did they envision a world held together by the natural interests of peoples in commerce. In both the national and international spheres monarchy and its intrusive institutions and monopolistic ways were what prevented a natural harmony of people’s feelings and interests.
In 1776 members of the Continental Congress attempted to embody these liberal principles in a model treaty that would be applied to France and eventually to other nations. This model treaty, drafted mainly by John Adams in July 1776, promised the greatest possible commercial freedom and equality between nations. Were the principles of the model treaty “once really established and honestly observed,” John Adams later recalled, “it would put an end forever to all maritime war, and render all military navies useless.” In duties and trade restrictions foreigners were to be treated as one’s own nationals were treated. Even in wartime trade was to be kept flowing. Neutral nations were to have the right to trade with and carry the goods of the belligerent nations—the right expressed in the phrase “free ships make free goods.” The list of contraband articles—that is, articles subject to seizure by belligerents, including those articles owned by neutral nations—were to be limited and would not include, for example, provisions and naval stores. In addition, blockades of belligerent ports had to be backed up by naval power and not simply declared on paper.
Ultimately the Americans did not get much of what they wanted in the treaties they signed with France in 1778. Although the commercial treaty they made with France did contain the principles of free trade, they also had to agree to a traditional political and military alliance. Despite this concession to realpolitik, however, the Americans’ enlightened dream of a new world order based on commerce was not lost. In 1784 the United States authorized a diplomatic commission composed of Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin to negotiate commercial treaties with sixteen European states based on the liberal principles of a revised 1784 model treaty. The hope was to have America lead the way to an “object so valuable to mankind as the total emancipation of commerce and the bringing together all nations for a free intercommunication of happiness.”
The major European nations, however, refused to open themselves freely to American trade; and only two states—Prussia and Sweden, peripheral powers with little overseas trade—agreed to sign liberal treaties with the United States. Yet despite the indifference of most European states, many Americans, and especially Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, remained confident of the power of commerce to influence international politics. This confidence in the power of American commerce and these liberal principles of free trade continued to influence many Americans’ thinking about the world into the early decades of the nineteenth century. It explains the idealistic efforts of the Jeffersonian Republicans to resort to nonimportation measures and eventually in 1807 to a wholesale embargo of American overseas trade as a grand experiment in what Jefferson called “peaceful coercion.” Indeed, even today the common resort to economic sanctions in place of military force is a legacy of these enlightened principles.
VI
Republican
Society
The republican Revolution had transforming effects everywhere. It shook up traditional hierarchies, cut people loose from their customary ties as never before, and brought authority of all sorts into question. To be sure, there was no immediate collapse of the social order, and no abrupt and wholesale destruction of familiar social institutions. But everywhere there were alterations in the way people related to government, to the economy, and to one another. Many of these changes were the accelerations of deeply rooted forces long in motion. But others were the recent and direct results of the Revolution itself.
EFFECTS OF THE WAR
One sudden effect of the Revolution was the departure of tens of thousands of loyalists—or Tories, as the patriots called them. The loyalists may have numbered close to half a million, or 20 percent of white Americans. Nearly 20,000 of them fought for the crown in regiments of His Majesty’s army, and thousands of others served in local loyalist militia bodies. As many as 60,000 to 80,000 loyalists, it is estimated, left America for Canada and Great Britain during the Revolution, although many of these returned after the war and were reintegrated into American society. Although the loyalists came from all ranks and occupations of the society, a large proportion of them belonged to the upper political and social levels. Many had been officeholders and overseas merchants involved with government contracting; in the North, most were Anglicans. Their regional distribution was likewise uneven. The loyalists were a tiny minority in New England and Virginia; but in western frontier areas, where hostility to eastern oppression went back to pre-Revolutionary times, they were numerous. The loyalists also made up a considerable part of the population in the regions of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Deep South, where the British army offered them protection. Their flight, displacement, and retirements created a vacuum at the top that was rapidly filled by patriots. The effects were widespread. Crown and Tory property and lands valued at millions of pounds were confiscated by the Revolutionary governments and almost immediately thrown onto the market. The resulting speculation contributed to the sudden rise and fall of fortunes during the Revolutionary years.
The South suffered the greatest disruptions from the war. Not only did it lose its established markets for its tobacco and other staple crops, but the British freed tens of thousands of its slaves to fight for the crown. At the end of the war the British settled these former slaves in Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of the world. Indeed, the British army was perhaps the greatest single instrument of emancipation in America until the Civil War. But these dislocations only speeded up an agricultural diversification that had begun before the Revolution. The Upper South in particular recovered rapidly. Tobacco production in the 1780s equaled prewar levels, involving, however, many new participants and new marketing arrangements.
Although the war had devastating effects on particular sections and individuals, its overall results were stimulating. Merchants who had previously been on the fringes of economic activity found new opportunities at the center of things. In Massachusetts, provincial families like the Higginsons, Cabots, and Lowells quickly moved into Boston to form the basis for a new Massachusetts elite. By the end of the war many, like Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, could “scarcely see any other than new faces,” a change, he said, almost as “remarkable as the revolution itself.” The same mobility was duplicated less notably but no less importantly elsewhere. New merchants pushed out in all directions in search of new markets, not only into the once restricted colonial areas of the West Indies and South America, but throughout Europe and even as far away as China.
Postwar trade with Great Britain quickly reached its earlier levels. By the 1780s, aggregate figures suggest an amazing recovery of commerce. Yet gross statistics do not do justice to the extent of change that was involved. In all the states there were new sources of supply, new commercial patterns, and new and increased numbers of participants in the market. The wartime collapse of British imports had encouraged domestic manufacturing; and although the purchase of British goods resumed with the return of peace, societies were formed to promote protective legislation for American manufacturing. Although exports abroad soon surpassed their prewar levels, they now represented a smaller part of America’s total economic activity. Already people were beginning to turn inward—toward trading with one another instead of abroad; a remarkable spread of internal commerce would soon generate demands for new roads and canals. In these changing circumstances, towns without hinterlands to exploit began a relative decline. A city like Newport, Rhode Island, had been a flourishing colonial port; but lacking an inland area for supply and marketing, it now rapidly slipped into commercial insignificance.
The Revolutionary War itself was at once both a disruptive and a creative force, and it touched nearly everyone one way or another. Like all wars, it destroyed familiar channels of trade and produced new sources of wealth. During the eight long years of the war, perhaps as many as 200,000 men bore arms at one time or another in the Continental Army and state militias. All these soldiers had to be clothed, fed, housed, armed, and moved about. Thomas Paine did not realize the half of it when he wrote in 1776 that “the necessities of an army create a new trade.” The inexhaustible needs of three armies—the British and French as well as the American—for everything from blankets and wagons to meat and rum brought into being hosts of new manufacturing and entrepreneurial interests and made market farmers out of husbandmen who before had scarcely ever traded out of their neighborhoods. At the same time military purchasing agents became the breeding grounds for both petty entrepreneurs and powerful postwar capitalists like Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, who were in charge of congressional financing and contracting.
Because the Revolutionary states were reluctant to tax their citizens, and because the Congress did not have the legal authority to tax, the American governments had to rely on borrowing to pay for all the goods they needed for the war effort. But borrowing could scarcely raise the needed sums. Both the Congress and the state governments therefore resorted to the extensive printing of paper currency. These bills of credit, which the governments promised to redeem at some future date, were given to citizens in return for supplies and services.
The currency that was issued by the congressional and state governments eventually totaled nearly $400 million in paper value and led to a socially disintegrating inflation. By 1781, $167 of congressional paper was worth only $1 in specie (gold and silver), and the depreciation of the states’ bills was nearly as bad. While creditors, wage-earners, and those on relatively fixed incomes were hurt by this inflation, many of those who were most active in the economy—those who were buying and selling goods rapidly—were able to profit. These circulating government bills enabled countless commodity farmers and traders to break out of a simple barter or personal-book-account economy and to specialize and participate more independently and impersonally in the market than they had in the past. In the end, the Revolution released latent economic energies that set America on a course of rapid commercial development rarely matched by any country in the history of the world.
EFFECTS OF THE REVOLUTION
Beyond these immediate social and economic effects of the war, there were other, deeper, and more long-lasting forces that were greatly affected by the Revolution and its republican ideas. Despite a slackening of immigration and the loss of the loyalist émigrés, the population continued to grow. In fact, the 1780s saw the fastest rate of demographic growth of any decade in American history—a consequence of early marriages and high expectations for the future. After being delayed for several years in the late 1770s by intermittent warfare against the British and Indians, this swelling population resumed its roll westward. “The population of the country of Kentucky will amaze you,” wrote one migrant in 1785; “in June, 1779, the whole number of inhabitants amounted to 176 only, and they now exceed 30,000.” Within a decade Kentucky had become more populous than most of the colonies had been at the time of the Revolution. In fact, more western territory was occupied in the first post-Revolutionary generation than in the entire colonial period.
Of course, the dreams of white Americans for this trans-Appalachian West had little or no place for the tens of thousands of Indians who lived there. Although the Confederation Congress in 1787 promised that “the utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians, [and that] their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent,” the Northwest Ordinance itself took for granted that the destiny of the Northwest belonged to the white American settlers.
Although many whites admired the Indians for their freedom, the Anglo-American idea of liberty and independence was very different from that of the Indians. Where ordinary white American men conceived of freedom in terms of owning their own plot of cultivated agricultural land, Indian males saw liberty in terms of their ability to roam and hunt at will. Like many American gentry, the Indian warriors did not believe they should actually work tilling fields; they thus left manual labor to the women—to the shock of many whites. Indeed, so unnatural to European Americans was the idea of women farming that they had a hard time acknowledging that the Indians practiced any agriculture at all. Ultimately, this denial that the Indians actually cultivated the land became the white Americans’ justification for taking it from them. They expected the Indians to become farmers, that is, to become civilized, or to get out of the way of the settlers.
The achievement of American independence from Great Britain in 1783 was a disaster for the Indians. Many of the tribes in the Northwest and Southwest had allied with the British, and with the peace treaty they discovered that Great Britain had ceded sovereignty over their land to the United States. As one speaker from the Weas complained to their British ally upon learning of the treaty, “In endeavouring to assist you, it seems we have wrought our own ruin.” Because so many of the Indians had fought on the side of the British, Americans tended to regard as enemies even those Indians who had been their allies during the Revolution. By the 1780s many western Americans shared the expectation of the Indian fighter George Rogers Clark that all the Indians would eventually be wiped out.
Based as it was on an unequal and hierarchical society, the British crown could easily treat the Indians as subjects. But the new Republic of the United States did not have subjects, only equal citizens. Since white Americans could scarcely conceive of the Indians as citizens equal to themselves, they had to regard the Indian peoples as foreign nations. In the 1780s the Confederation government sought to assume control of Indian affairs and to establish peaceful relations with the Indians. Although the Confederation Congress repeatedly spoke of its desire to be just and fair with the Indians, it considered them as conquered nations. In several treaties between the Confederation government and some of the various nations or tribes in the mid-1780s, the United States attempted to establish more or less fixed boundary lines between whites and Indians in return for Indian cessions of rights to land. Believing that America owned the lands by right of conquest, the United States offered the Indians no compensation for the ceded lands.
But the Confederation government was weak. Not only did the states ignore the Confederation’s treaties and make their own agreements with the Indians, but white settlers and squatters acted without regard to any authority. The assumption of the congressional land ordinances of the 1780s that people would move west in a neat and orderly fashion was illusory. Instead, people shunned the high-priced land, violated Indian treaty rights, and moved irregularly, chaotically, and unevenly, jumping from place to place and leaving huge chunks of unsettled land and pockets of hemmed-in Indians behind them. By 1787 many of the Indians had repudiated the treaties some of their members had been compelled to sign and attempted to form loose confederations in order to resist the white advance. War and bloodshed inevitably followed.
Despite the presence of the Indians, the American population continued to grow and move in a spectacular manner, further weakening the traditional forms of social organization. Such a mobile population, one Kentuckian told Madison in 1792, “must make a very different mass from one which is composed of men born and raised on the same spot. . . . They see none about them to whom or to whose families they have been accustomed to think themselves inferior.” The ideology of republicanism intensified these developments. In a republic, declared a writer in 1787 in the
American Museum
(the most important of the several new American magazines created in the postwar years), “the idea of equality breathes through the whole and every individual feels ambitious, to be in a situation not inferior to his neighbour.”
This republican equality now became a rallying cry for people in the aspiring middling ranks who were now more openly resentful than before of those who had presumed to be their social superiors. The widespread protest against the Society of the Cincinnati expressed this resentment. In 1783, Revolutionary army officers, in order to commemorate and perpetuate their participation in the Revolutionary War, formed the hereditary Order of the Cincinnati, named after the legendary Roman republican leader Cincinnatus, who had retired from war to take up his plow. Although Washington had agreed to lead the organization, the Cincinnati aroused angry hostility. Old patriots such as Samuel Adams thought that the Order represented “as rapid a Stride towards an hereditary Military Nobility as was ever made in so short a time.” This sort of ferocious criticism forced the army officers to deny some of their pretensions and the Cincinnati soon became just another one of the many pressure groups emerging in a country that, as the governor of South Carolina said in 1784, had gone “society mad.”
