United States History

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The American Revolution

In 1776 the prospects for American victory seemed small. Britain had a population more than three times that of the colonies, and the British army was large, well–trained, and experienced. The Americans, on the other hand, had undisciplined militia and only the beginnings of a regular army or even a government. But Americans had powerful advantages that in the end were decisive. They fought on their own territory, and in order to win they did not have to defeat the British but only to convince the British that the colonists could not be defeated.

The British fought in a huge, hostile territory. They could occupy the cities and control the land on which their army stood, but they could not subdue the American colonists. Two decisive battles of the war—Saratoga and Yorktown—are cases in point. At Saratoga, New York, a British army descending on the Hudson Valley from Canada outran its supply lines, became tangled in the wilderness, and was surrounded by Americans. The Americans defeated a British detachment that was foraging for food near Bennington, Vermont, then attacked the main body of the British army at Saratoga. The British surrendered an army of about 5,800 (see Battles of Saratoga).

More important, the American victory at Saratoga convinced France that an alliance with the Americans would be a good gamble. The French provided loans, a few troops, and, most importantly, naval support for the Americans. The French alliance also turned the rebellion into a wider war in which the British had to contend not only with the colonials but also with a French navy in the Caribbean and on the American coast.

In the battle of Yorktown, the climactic campaign of the war, the vastness of America again defeated the British. In 1781 Lord Charles Cornwallis led an army through Virginia almost without opposition, then retreated to a peninsula at Yorktown. There he was besieged by George Washington’s army and held in check by the French navy. Unable to escape or to get help, Cornwallis surrendered an entire British army. His defeat effectively ended the war. In the Treaty of Paris of 1783, the British recognized the independence of the United States and relinquished its territory from the Atlantic to the Mississippi.

The Revolution: Winners and Losers

Colonial elites—large landholders and plantation masters—benefited most from American independence: They continued to rule at home without outside interference. Below them, property–holding white men who became full citizens of the American republic enjoyed the “life, liberty, and property” for which they had fought. White women remained excluded from public life, as did most white men without property. But the Americans for whom the legacy of revolution proved disastrous—or at best ambiguous—were Native Americans and African American slaves.

In 1760 the British defeated the French in North America, and Native Americans lost the French alliance that had helped protect and strengthen them for 150 years. In the Revolution, they tended to side with the British or to remain neutral, knowing that an independent republic of land–hungry farmers posed a serious threat. The six Iroquois nations divided on this question, splitting a powerful confederacy that had lasted more than 200 years. When some Iroquois raided colonial settlements, Americans responded by invading and destroying the whole Iroquois homeland in 1779. Further south, the Cherokee people sided with the British and lost heavily. Up and down the frontier, Native Americans and backcountry militia kept up unsettling and sporadic fighting throughout the war. After the British ceded territory on both sides of the Appalachians to the Americans in 1783, Native Americans—who had not been defeated—ignored maps drawn by whites and continued to fight through the 1790s. Native American military power east of the Mississippi was not broken until 1815. The key to that defeat was the fact that the independent American republic was now expanding without opposition from either France or Britain.

The results of the American Revolution for American slaves were ambiguous. Early in the war, the governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, had promised freedom to any Virginia slave who joined the British army. Thousands took the offer, and many more thousands seized wartime opportunities to disappear. (When Colonel Banastre Tarleton raided Charlottesville, Virginia, many of Thomas Jefferson’s slaves cheered the British as liberators.) On the other hand, thousands of blacks (primarily in the North) fought on the patriot side.

American independence had differing effects on blacks. On the one hand, it created an independent nation in which slaveholders wielded real power—something that slaves would remember in the 1830s, when Parliament freed slaves in the British Caribbean without asking the planters. On the other hand, the ideology of natural rights that was fundamental to the Revolution was difficult to contain. Many whites, particularly in the North, came to see emancipation as a logical outcome of the Revolution. Vermont outlawed slavery in its constitution, and in the 1780s and 1790s most Northern states took steps to emancipate their slaves. Even Chesapeake planters flirted seriously with emancipation. Perhaps most important, slaves themselves absorbed revolutionary notions of natural rights. Following the Revolution, slave protests and slave rebellions were drenched in the rhetoric of revolutionary republicanism. Thus American independence was a short–term disaster for the slaves, but at the same time, it set in motion a chain of events that would destroy American slavery.

Forging a New Nation

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State Constitutions

In May 1776, even before declaring national independence, the Second Continental Congress told the states to draw up constitutions to replace their colonial regimes. A few ordered their legislatures to draw up constitutions. By 1777, however, the states had recognized the people as the originators of government power. State constitutions were written by conventions elected by the voters (generally white men who held a minimum amount of property), and in a few states the finished constitutions were then submitted to voters for ratification. The Americans (white men who owned property, that is) were determined to create their own governments, not simply to have them handed down by higher authorities.

Without exception, the states rejected the unwritten constitution of Britain—a jumble of precedents, common law, and statutes that Americans thought had led to arbitrary rule. The new American states produced written constitutions that carefully specified the powers and limits of government. They also wrote the natural rights philosophy of the Declaration of Independence into bills of rights that protected freedom of speech and of the press, guaranteed trial by jury, forbade searching without specific warrants, and forbade taxation without consent. Seven states appended these to their constitutions; some of the other states guaranteed these rights through clauses within their constitutions.

These first state constitutions, although all republican and all demonstrating distrust of government power—particularly of the executive—varied a great deal. In Pennsylvania, radicals wrote the most democratic constitution, in 1776. It established a unicameral (one–house) legislature to be chosen in annual secret-ballot elections that were open to all male taxpayers; the executive was a 12–man committee without real power. Nearly all of the other states adopted constitutions with two–house legislatures, usually with longer terms and higher property qualifications for the upper house. They had elective governors who could veto legislation, but who lacked the arbitrary powers of prerevolutionary executives. They could not dissolve the legislature, they could not corrupt the legislature by appointing its members to executive office, and the legislature could override their vetoes.

In these revolutionary constitutions—drawn up hurriedly in the midst of war—Americans were groping toward written constitutions with clearly specified powers. These constitutions featured limits for legislatures, executives, and the courts, with a clear separation of power among the three. They also guaranteed the citizens certain inalienable rights and made them the constituent power. On the whole, state constitutions reflected fear of government (and particularly executive) tyranny more than they reflected the need to create forceful, effective government.

The Articles of Confederation

Americans began their revolution without a national government, but the Continental Congress recognized the need for a government that could conduct the war, form relations with other countries, borrow money, and regulate trade. Eight days after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a committee headed by John Dickinson of Pennsylvania submitted a blueprint for a powerful national government. Among other things, Dickinson’s plan gave all the states’ western land claims to the national government, and it created a congress in which states were represented equally rather than by population. The plan shocked delegates who considered the new nation a loose confederation of independent states, and they rejected it.

The Articles of Confederation, which included a strong affirmation of state sovereignty, went into effect in March 1781. They created a unicameral legislature in which each state had one vote. The articles gave the confederation jurisdiction in relations with other nations and in disputes between states, and the articles won control of western lands for the national government. In ordinances passed in 1784, 1785, and 1787 the Confederation Congress organized the new federal lands east of the Mississippi and between the Ohio River and the Great Lakes as the Northwest Territory. This legislation organized the land into townships six miles square, provided land to support public schools, and organized the sale of land to developers and settlers. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 guaranteed civil liberties in the territory and banned the importation of slaves north of the Ohio River. The creation of the territory was among the solid accomplishments of the Confederation government. Still, the government lacked important powers. It could not directly tax Americans, and the articles could be amended only by a unanimous vote of the states. Revolutionary fear of centralized tyranny had created a very weak national government.

The weakness of the national government made resolving questions of currency and finance particularly difficult. Neither the national government nor the states dared to tax Americans. To pay the minimal costs of government and the huge costs of fighting the war, both simply printed paper money. While this money was honored early in the war, citizens learned to distrust it. By 1780 it took 40 paper dollars to buy one silver dollar. When the Confederation Congress requisitioned funds from the states, the states were very slow in paying. And when the Congress asked permission to establish a 5 percent tax on imports (which would have required an amendment to the articles), important states refused. Under these circumstances the national government could neither strengthen the currency nor generate a stable income for itself.

The Confederation also had problems dealing with other countries. In the Treaty of Paris that ended the Revolution, for instance, Americans agreed to pay prerevolutionary debts owed to British merchants, and to restore confiscated property to colonists who had remained loyal to the king (Loyalists). States refused to enforce these provisions, giving the British an excuse to occupy forts in what was now the Northwest Territory of the United States. In 1784 Spain closed the port of New Orleans to Americans, thus isolating farmers in the western settlements whose only access to the rest of the world was through the Mississippi River that ended below that port. The Confederation Congress could do little about these developments. These problems also extended to international trade. In the 1780s Britain, France, and Spain all made it difficult for Americans to trade with their colonies; at the same time, the British flooded American ports with their goods. Gold and silver flowed out of the country. The result was a deep depression throughout most of the 1780s. The Confederation Congress could do nothing about it.

The Confederation also had trouble dealing with Native Americans. The Confederation Congress negotiated doubtful land–cession treaties with the Iroquois in New York and with the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw nations in the South. The Creeks (as well as many of the Native Americans supposedly represented at the negotiations) resisted the onslaught of white settlers, and the Confederation was powerless to do anything about the wars that resulted.

The Confederation had internal problems as well. The economic disruptions of the Revolution and the 1780s left many farmers unable to keep up with their mortgages and other debts. State governments had often met this problem by printing paper money and by passing stay laws that prevented creditors from seizing the property of their debtors. In Massachusetts, however, the upper house of the legislature protected the investments of creditors by voting down debtor–relief legislation. In 1786 farmers in the western counties, led by revolutionary veteran Daniel Shays, held conventions to demand the abolition of the upper house. They then mobbed county courthouses and destroyed the records of many of their debts. They then marched on a federal arsenal at Springfield, where they were repulsed and scattered by the militia (see Shays’ Rebellion). Yet Shays’ rebels retained enough support to elect a legislature that in the following year enacted a stay law.

The Constitutional Convention

International troubles, the postwar depression, and the near–war in Massachusetts (as well as similar but less spectacular events in other states) led to calls for stronger government at both the state and national levels. Supporters wanted a government that could deal with other countries, create a stable (deflated) currency, and maintain order in a society that some thought was becoming too democratic. Some historians call the citizens who felt this way cosmopolitans. They tended to be wealthy, with their fortunes tied to international trade. They included seaport merchants and artisans, southern planters, and commercial farmers whose foreign markets had been closed. Most of their leaders were former officers of the Continental (national) army and officials of the Confederation government—men whose wartime experiences had given them a political vision that was national and not local.

In the 1780s cosmopolitans were outnumbered by so-called locals, who tended to be farmers living in isolated, inland communities with only marginal ties to the market economy, and who tended to be in debt to cosmopolitans. In the Revolution, most locals had served in militias rather than in the national army, and they preserved a localist, rather than nationalist, view of politics. They also preserved a distrust of any government not subject to direct oversight by citizens. The new state governments had often reapportioned legislative districts to give new, fast-growing western counties greater representation. Locals tended to control legislatures and (as in Shays’ Massachusetts) promote debtor relief, low taxes, and inactive government—a situation that caused cosmopolitans to fear that the republic was degenerating into democracy and chaos.

In September 1786 delegates from several states met at Annapolis, Maryland, to discuss ways to improve American trade. They decided instead, with the backing of the Confederation Congress, to call a national convention to discuss ways of strengthening the Union. In May 1787, 55 delegates (representing every state but Rhode Island, whose legislature had voted not to send a delegation) convened in Philadelphia and drew up a new Constitution of the United States. The delegates were cosmopolitans who wanted to strengthen national government, but they had to compromise on a number of issues among themselves. In addition, the delegates realized that their Constitution would have to be ratified by the citizenry, and they began compromising not only among themselves but also on their notions of what ordinary Americans would accept. The result was a Constitution that was both conservative and revolutionary.

The biggest compromise was between large and small states. States with large populations favored a Virginia Plan that would create a two–house legislature in which population determined representation in both houses. This legislature would then appoint the executive and the judiciary, and it would have the power to veto state laws. The small states countered with a plan for a one–house legislature in which every state, regardless of population, would have one vote. In the resulting compromise, the Constitution mandated a two-house legislature (see Congress of the United States). Representatives would be elected to the lower house based on population, but in the upper house two senators would represent each state, regardless of population. Another compromise settled an argument over whether slaves would be counted as part of a state’s population (if they were counted, Southern representation would increase). The convention agreed to count each slave as three–fifths of a person.

The president would be selected by an electoral college, in which each state’s number of votes equaled its congressional representation. Once elected, the president would have important powers: The president appointed other officers of the executive department as well as federal judges. Commander-in-chief of the military, the president also directed foreign affairs, and could veto laws passed by Congress. These powers, however, were balanced by congressional oversight.

Congress, or just the Senate, had to ratify major appointments and treaties with foreign countries, and only Congress could declare war. Congress also had the power to impeach the president or federal judges, and Congress could override a president’s veto. The Constitution also declared itself the supreme law of the land, and listed powers that the states could not exercise. See also United States (Government).

Thus the Constitution carefully separated and defined the powers of the three branches of the national government and of the national and state governments. It established checks and balances between the branches—and put it all in writing. The stated purpose of the document was to make a strong national government that could never become tyrannical.