Chapter 8
New Beginnings: The 1780s
Chapter Outline
Beating Swords into Plowshares
Competing for Control of the Mississippi Valley
Debtor and Creditor, Taxpayer and Bondholder
Drafting a New Constitution
Ratification and the Bill of Rights
Conclusion
Sites to Visit
For Further Reading
During the Revolutionary War years, between 1775 and 1782, a huge smallpox epidemic ricocheted relentlessly across broad sections of North America. At times the epidemic entwined itself with the war, traveling on supply ships and moving with marching troops. In the Northeast, it struck during the siege of Boston and the attack on Quebec. In the South, it cut down hundreds of Virginia slaves who had escaped at the start of the war to join Governor Dunmore’s “Ethiopian Regiment.” The disease found additional victims during the British siege of Charleston in 1780.
Like the war itself, smallpox erupted first in Massachusetts. But the devastating contagion spread far more widely than the military destruction, proving truly continental in scope. It gained a foothold in New Orleans, Mexico City, and the trading posts that dotted the Canadian interior. In 1781 the disease ravaged Indian villages on the Northwest Coast, devastated missions on the Baja Peninsula, and erupted at California’s San Gabriel Mission, where Spanish-speaking newcomers were building a village named Our Lady of the Angels (the start of modern-day Los Angeles). On the Atlantic coast, smallpox menaced Virginia as French and American troops surrounded the British at Yorktown. As the War of Independence ended, the transcontinental epidemic also drew to a close.
The contagion left a patchwork of destruction from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Smallpox losses were greatest among Native Americans, and few groups or regions remained untouched. British sea captain George Vancouver, probing Puget Sound in 1792, observed numerous skulls, ribs, and other human remains “scattered about the beach.” When Vancouver’s pilot, Peter Puget, pressed farther into the sound that is named for him, he found deserted villages that only a dozen years earlier had bustled with people. In its eight-year course, the fearsome virus took more than 130,000 North American lives, many times the total of 25,000 Americans lost in service during the Revolution.
As the dual scourges of epidemic and war subsided, fresh problems confronted North America’s inhabitants. Great Britain’s mainland colonies had won their independence, but questions remained as to which European powers would exert the most influence on the huge continent. British power ruled Canada; Spanish authority claimed much of the West; and French officials still dreamed of regaining control over the Mississippi Valley. In the North Pacific, Russians intruded on the Alaskan coast, and soon the prospect of trade with China lured sea captains from the United States to seek furs along the Northwest Coast.
In the woodlands between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River, Indians whom Pontiac had sought to unify once again endured sudden transfers of their ancestral land between distant powers. But now the rapid incursion of American settlers added new urgency to their situation. Farther east, inhabitants of the Atlantic seaboard faced an array of thorny problems after warfare and smallpox loosened their grip. Half a million people remained legally enslaved, and they were potential allies for any European power seeking to disrupt the fragile new federation.
In addition, members of the Confederation’s Continental Congress in Philadelphia had a restless army to pay, a weak government to reform, and enormous war debts to confront. Acceptance of the Articles of Confederation in 1781 had not come easily, and all assumed that the basic structure of governance would demand further revision and adjustment. However, few could foresee that within eight years it would be set aside for a more centralized federal design.
At first, in the wake of military victory over Britain, the short-term survival of the new United States of America seemed assured, thanks to years of intense fighting and skillful diplomacy. The former colonies had banded together under the Articles of Confederation, finally ratified in 1781, which placed specific governmental powers in the hands of an elected national legislature, or Continental Congress. But deeper questions persisted regarding the new republican experiment. With peace at hand, how would citizens transform their “swords into plowshares,” as urged by the Biblical prophet, Isaiah? Should power rest primarily with the victorious army, the wealthy merchants, or the artisans and farmers central to the revolutionary movement? Should authority be consolidated in the hands of a well-educated, new national elite, or should it be widely dispersed, with local communities and states empowered to manage their own affairs? Equally important, what cultural patterns would take hold within the fledgling society in these postwar years?
Will the Army Seize Control?
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After their triumph at Yorktown, Washington’s men had moved north to press British forces to evacuate New York City. More than 10,000 American troops and 500 officers encamped at Newburgh, on the Hudson River. Exhausted soldiers were eager to receive long-overdue pay and return home. Clearly, they could negotiate best for promised wages while they were still together and armed. Officers were especially reluctant to disband without certain assurances of money. In 1780 they had extracted from the Congress a promise of half pay for life. In December 1782, with no sign of compensation in sight, disgruntled officers sent a delegation to Philadelphia to press their claims.
Within Congress, the men around financier Robert Morris, including James Wilson and Alexander Hamilton, wanted to bolster and centralize the Confederation’s finances. To that end, they sought a new duty of 5 percent on imported goods to raise money from the states. Revenue from this “continental impost” could make the Confederation solvent and allow it to assume responsibility for paying off war debts. In turn, this commitment would tie the interests of wealthy citizens to the Confederation government’s success. Morris even threatened to resign his post if the “nationalists” did not get their way. Rumblings from the officer corps would help these politicians push through the impost measure, crucial to their long-term goals. So they quietly encouraged the military dissidents in Newburgh.
In March 1783, anonymous petitions circulated among officers encamped at Newburgh. These inflammatory “addresses” contained a veiled threat of military takeover in order to impose stability after a turbulent revolution. They suggested that officers should sit tight, neither fighting nor laying down their arms, until Congress guaranteed their payment. Without Washington’s approval, the officers at Newburgh arranged a meeting to discuss their plight.
If the plotters hoped to draw Washington into the scheme, they were sorely disappointed. He did attend the officers’ meeting on March 15, but he used his commanding presence to discredit the ill-advised plan. His eyes weakened by endless wartime correspondence, he drew a pair of spectacles from his pocket, a surprising gesture that underscored his years of dedication and sacrifice. He then read a letter from Congress containing assurances of support, and he urged his officers not to take any actions that would undermine the honor they had earned. Within Congress, the frightening prospect of a coup dissolved resistance to certain demands from the officers. Chastised by Washington, the officers disavowed the “infamous propositions” and accepted a congressional offer of full pay for the next five years. In April 1783, word spread that preliminary articles of peace had been signed in Paris. By June most soldiers were headed home.
The Society of the Cincinnati
Washington’s strong stance against the suspected Newburgh conspiracy reminded his admirers of the familiar story of Cincinnatus, a general in Rome’s early Republic. The Roman Senate called Cincinnatus from his farm to command an army against invaders. After defeating the enemy, he put down his sword and took up his plow again rather than seize power as a military ruler. His selfless act earned Cincinnatus the lasting respect of the Roman people. Similarly, at a crucial moment for the American republic, Washington urged fellow officers to respect the fragile principle of civilian control over the military. Your action, Thomas Jefferson told Washington, “has probably prevented this revolution from being closed as most others have been by a subversion of that liberty it was intended to establish.”
Still, Jefferson and others had grounds to fear that some military officers might meddle in politics while hiding behind the noble name of Cincinnatus. In May 1783, General Henry Knox announced formation of the Society of the Cincinnati. The new organization invoked the name of the famous Roman, in a plural form, to put its members in the best light. But it was open only to officers in the Continental Army, their descendents, and invited honorary members, so some onlookers sensed that the “Cincinnati Club” had a sinister purpose. After all, members contributed to a charitable fund that resembled a political war chest, and they maintained contact with each other through newsletters concerning “the general union of the states.” Critics feared a separate, self-perpetuating aristocracy of the very kind Americans had fought to erase.
Washington was automatically a member of the society, but Jefferson and other friends urged the general not to accept a leadership position. Struck by this “formidable” opposition, Washington suggested changes in the society, including doing away with the hereditary and honorary memberships. However, he never played a central role in the organization, and Washington’s well-publicized alterations were never implemented. The Cincinnati exerted influence as a pressure group before receding from politics in future generations.
Renaming the Landscape
The controversy over the Society of the Cincinnati represented part of a larger debate about the direction of postwar life. Many Americans—despite continuing disagreements—set out to build a national culture and a shared identity. Like the Puritans before them, they aspired to provide new models for the Atlantic world.
They began with names. Everywhere, people christened new towns, counties, streets, and schools and renamed old ones. They replaced numerous British names, such as those of hated prewar governors, so Virginia’s Dunmore County received the Indian name Shanando (later spelled Shenandoah). Because most people found references to royalty distasteful, King Street in Boston quickly became State Street. Still, royal figures who had aided the revolution received their due. Newcomers on the Ohio River named their town Louisville, honoring America’s wartime alliance with King Louis XVI of France.
Political leaders popularized Christopher Columbus as well. For generations, the English had downplayed the explorer’s importance as they contested Spanish claims in the Western Hemisphere. Now, American writers coined the ringing term Columbia for their land to stress its separation from Britain. In South Carolina, citizens named their new capital Columbia in 1786. Five years later, the proposed national capital was christened the District of Columbia. In New York City, when King’s College reopened in 1784 under local governance, it was called Columbia College (later Columbia University).
Of all the new names, those honoring individual war heroes became the most popular. Citizens hailed foreign supporters of the revolution—such as Lafayette, Pulaski, and Steuben—by using their names on streets and towns. They saluted American officers the same way. Washington’s name was used most often, but those of Montgomery, Wayne, Greene, Lincoln, Mercer, Marion, and others popped up as well. North Carolina named one of its trans-Appalachian forts on the Cumberland River Nashborough, after General Francis Nash, who had died at the battle of Germantown. Citizens changed the fort’s name to Nashville in 1784. Two years later, inhabitants of a site on the Tennessee River named their new town Knoxville in honor of General Knox, who had become the Confederation’s secretary of war the previous year.
An Independent Culture
New names were just part of the story. Many felt that the American language needed to be made more independent and accessible. Noah Webster, a schoolteacher who had fought against Burgoyne, believed that “as an independent nation, our honor requires us to have a system of our own, in language as well as government.” In his American Spelling Book (1783), Webster championed a simple, uniform written language that rejected English conventions. Words such as colour and labour lost their silent u, theatre became theater, and plough was shortened to plow. The New Englander followed this success with an influential grammar book and a popular reader. Webster went on to produce An American Dictionary of the English Language (1828) that incorporated 5,000 new words, many of them reflecting Indian origins (tomahawk) and American nature (rattlesnake).
Webster also joined other reformers in lobbying state legislatures for copyright laws to protect the literary works that poured from the pens of ambitious writers. Philip Freneau, a classmate of James Madison at Princeton, drafted a poem titled “The British Prison Ship” (1781), about his war experiences. Authors living near Hartford, known as the Connecticut Wits, wrote similarly nationalistic poetry. Timothy Dwight, future president of Yale College, created “The Conquest of Canaan” (1785), and Joel Barlow composed an epic titled “The Vision of Columbus” (1787), heralding a bright future.
Increasingly, the land itself captured the imagination of Americans. In 1784 a Connecticut silversmith engraved the first map of the new United States, and a recent Yale graduate, Jedidiah Morse, published Geography Made Easy, which went through twenty-five editions. (Five years later, Morse created The American Geography and earned his reputation as the “Father of American Geography.”) In Philadelphia, Quaker naturalist William Bartram drafted a pioneering nature book about his travels throughout the Southeast, and the versatile painter and patriot Charles Willson Peale launched a museum to promote interest in art and the natural world. At Monticello, Thomas Jefferson corresponded with Peale and pursued his own fascination with the American landscape. He promoted exploration, tested new crops, and excavated ancient Indian mounds. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson detailed his region’s geography, society, and natural history.
In 1782 Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, a Frenchman who made his home in America, published Letters from an American Farmer, posing the question “What is an American?” According to Crèvecoeur, free people flourished in America because of “a new mode of living, a new social system” that nurtured community growth. Societies for bettering jails, assisting debtors, and building libraries had existed before independence, but after the war Crèvecoeur watched a new generation creating voluntary associations at an unprecedented rate. Reformers launched more than thirty new benevolent organizations between 1783 and 1789, offering aid to the poor, the sick, and the disabled.
In 1785 prominent New Yorkers John Jay and Alexander Hamilton joined like-minded citizens to form a Society for the Promotion of the Manumission of Slaves. In Connecticut, citizens banded together in an early temperance organization to stop the abuse of liquor. Similar efforts to reform and improve the new nation sprang up everywhere. Amid such optimism, no sooner had the former British colonists disentangled themselves from the British Empire than they began to speak of shaping an expansive empire of their own.
“It has ever been my hobby-horse,” John Adams wrote in 1786, “to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three hundred millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. You say it is impossible. . . . I would still say, let us try the experiment.” Westward expansion became a persistent American theme. But during the postwar decade, interest and activity centered mostly on the land just beyond the Appalachian Mountains, territory reserved for Indians by the British until Britain ceded the lands to the United States at the end of the Revolution.
In the South in the 1780s, pioneer families searching for land pushed west through Cumberland Gap and spread out across parts of the lower Mississippi River valley, a region that eventually became known as the Old Southwest. These homesteaders promptly faced resistance from Native American inhabitants and their Spanish supporters. At the same time, north of the Ohio River, other American migrants were flocking to newly claimed woodlands later remembered as the Old Northwest. They, too, met stiff opposition from Native Americans and their British allies in neighboring Canada. By the time the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, the Continental Congress of the existing Confederation government was busy revising an elaborate plan to draw this territory into the Union.
Disputed Territory: The Old Southwest
For a generation, Spain had been rebuilding its position north of the Gulf of Mexico and east of Texas in the Old Southwest. The Spanish had acquired Louisiana from France in 1763 and had conquered West Florida. In a 1783 treaty, Britain gave back East Florida to the Spanish and agreed that Spain would retain West Florida as well. The Spanish occupied St. Augustine, Pensacola, New Orleans, and Natchez, as well as St. Louis farther north.
Because Spain controlled both banks of the lower Mississippi, the Spanish determined who could use the huge river for trade. Since 1763 they had let British subjects navigate freely on the Mississippi, so trans-Appalachian fur traders had become accustomed to using this thoroughfare. Louisiana merchants paid for goods in Spanish silver, and settlers upriver needed the hard currency. During the Revolutionary War, Americans had retained access to the river, and the Spanish in New Orleans depended on produce from the north. Still, Spanish authorities feared American expansion into the Mississippi Valley. They debated whether to resist migrants pushing from the east, or to co-opt newcomers and profit from their trade.
In 1783 Spain was shocked when Britain, through its separate treaty with the United States, granted the Americans a generous southern boundary: the thirty-first parallel. The treaty terms also included the right of Americans to navigate the Mississippi. The Spanish believed that they should be the only ones to decide whose boats had access to the Mississippi. Moreover, Spain had good reason to claim that its West Florida province stretched north above 31 degrees at least to the mouth of the Yazoo River and perhaps as far as the Tennessee River.
For its part, the new Confederation had the force of numbers working to its advantage. The threat of Indian attacks had dammed up westward expansion since 1775. After the war, Americans migrated by the thousands to three existing centers of Anglo settlement in the Old Southwest. By 1785, 10,000 recent migrants clustered along several rivers above Knoxville. Nearly three times that many newcomers had already staked claims to the rich land between Lexington and Louisville. In addition, another 4,000 were clearing farms along the Cumberland River around Nashville, and aggressive Americans talked about pushing even farther. They imagined establishing a foothold on the Mississippi at Chickasaw Bluffs (modern Memphis) or perhaps seizing Natchez or New Orleans.
American Claims and Indian Resistance
Powerful land speculators pressed southern legislatures to support expansion. Georgia, unlike many other states, had not relinquished its western lands to the Confederation. The state’s 35-million-acre Yazoo claim stretched west from the Chattahoochee River (Georgia’s present boundary with Alabama) to the Mississippi River and from the lower border of modern-day Tennessee to the thirty-first parallel. “I look forward to a time, not very far distant,” wrote Judge George Walton, when Georgia “will be settled and connected . . . from the shores of the Atlantic to the banks of the Mississippi.” By 1789 Walton had been elected governor of the state, and the land business boomed. During his tenure, Walton signed warrants for huge tracts up to 50,000 acres, sometimes selling unusable or even nonexistent acreage.
Unlike Georgians, pioneers from Virginia and the Carolinas faced a rugged mountain barrier. But they still trekked west through Cumberland Gap. In the decade after the war, backwoodsman Daniel Boone worked as a surveyor for these migrants in the trans-Appalachian region of Virginia that became Kentucky in 1792. During that same decade, North Carolina issued more land patents than it had created during the entire colonial era, most of them deeds for homesteads west of the mountains. Some of North Carolina’s western landholders tried to create their own separate jurisdiction: the mountain state of Franklin. Without recognition from the Confederation government, their venture soon failed. Instead, all of North Carolina’s western territory—from the Appalachians to the Mississippi—became the state of Tennessee in 1796.
Native American southerners, living in all these lands, suddenly found themselves caught between the competing claims of Spain and the United States. The Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw—numbering roughly 40,000 people—all debated over which leaders and strategies to follow. Some responded to their new situation by selecting leaders with European-American ties. Among the Creek, for example, Alexander McGillivray rose to prominence. The son of a wealthy Scottish trader and a Creek woman, he had been raised on his father’s Georgia plantation before becoming the Creek leader in 1782. He was well equipped to bargain with Spanish and American officials.
The renegade Cherokee warrior Dragging Canoe, who had split with tribal elders before the Revolution broke out, offered a different approach. Hundreds of militant Indians, discouraged by the compromises of their leaders, had joined his band of guerrilla fighters known as the Chicamauga living along the Tennessee River. From this well-protected location—near where Alabama, Georgia, and Tennessee now meet—the Chicamauga recruited allies and led forays to stop American encroachment. But Dragging Canoe died in 1792 before he could build a strong alliance with Indians north of the Ohio River.
“We Are Now Masters”: The Old Northwest
Native Americans in the North also struggled to maintain their way of life and resist the newcomers. But white Americans lost no time in claiming Indian domains ceded by Britain in the 1783 Treaty of Paris. “We are now Masters of this Island,” General Philip Schuyler boasted to the Iroquois, “and can dispose of the Lands as we think proper.” Britain refused to vacate western forts on the pretext that Americans still owed prewar debts to London merchants. Even so, the British could provide little material support to the region’s Indians.
American delegations moved quickly to draft treaties with the Iroquois and the Ohio Valley tribes. Delegates bluntly asserted the right of the new United States government to Indian lands, treating the Native Americans as dependents rather than equals. The negotiators even took hostages to force the Indians to accept their terms. Ordinary Americans sealed these claims with a surge of migration into western Pennsylvania and beyond. “The Americans . . . put us out of our lands,” Indian leaders complained to the Spanish in 1784, “extending themselves like a plague of locusts in the territories of the Ohio River which we inhabit.”
Americans initially remained divided among themselves over who would control the region. Connecticut retained a “western reserve” of 4 million acres south of Lake Erie that it used to satisfy claims from the state’s war veterans. Similarly, Virginia held onto land rights for an even larger “military district” to repay soldiers and war victims. But one by one, the states of Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, and Virginia ceded large territorial claims to the Confederation government.
These western acquisitions transformed the Confederation into something more than a league of states. With lands of its own to organize, the Confederation government took on attributes of a sovereign ruling body. As the number of cessions increased, Congress put Thomas Jefferson in charge of a committee to draft “a plan for the temporary Government of the Western territory.” Before he departed for Europe to replace Benjamin Franklin as the American minister to France, Jefferson drew up a design for western land distribution.
After Jefferson sailed for France, his report became the basis for the Land Ordinance of 1785. Jefferson knew that in the South, where surveyors often staked out piecemeal claims on a first-come, first-served basis, the best property had gone to wealthy investors. Moreover, boundary litigation over odd-shaped lots had proved endless. To avoid these complications, the 1785 ordinance called for surveyors to lay out a grid of adjoining townships, beginning at the point where the Ohio River flowed out of Pennsylvania. A township would contain thirty-six numbered sections, each 1 mile square (640 acres). The ordinance reserved the income from one valuable section near the heart of every township to support public education.
But orderly surveying and public education were just parts of Jefferson’s plan. Hoping to populate the region with self-sufficient yeomen farmers, he proposed that the government give away land in small parcels. He envisioned self-government for these new inhabitants, not colonial status. For Jefferson, the more weight these independent farmers obtained in the American government the better, so he urged the rapid entry of numerous new territories into the Union on an equal footing with the thirteen original states. He suggested creating up to fourteen small, rectangular districts in the west. At least nine would be north of the Ohio River, and each could become a separate state with voting rights in Congress.
According to Jefferson’s report, the first settlers arriving in a district were to form a temporary government. When the local population reached 20,000, residents could call a convention, frame a constitution, and send a delegate to Congress. When the district’s population equaled the number of free inhabitants living in the smallest of the thirteen original states, that district could enter the Union if certain conditions were met. Each new state must agree to support a republican form of government, remain part of the Confederation, and accept a share of the federal debt. It must also agree to exclude slavery after 1800. Congress accepted Jefferson’s report, but then it modified the plan greatly. In its Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress removed his call for numerous districts, dismissed the notion of free land, and dropped the idea of ending slavery.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787
The huge task of surveying the wilderness north of the Ohio River into neat geometric squares would take years to complete. Almost immediately—and long before the initial ordinance could take hold—political shifts produced an entirely new law from Congress: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. This law determining how territories north of the Ohio River would be governed contained a number of additional changes to Jefferson’s original plan. For example, it reversed direction on the slave question once again, introducing an immediate prohibition of slavery north of the Ohio River. However, it made arrangements to deport fugitive slaves back to their owners in slaveholding states.
In various ways, the new ordinance proved less democratic than earlier versions. Congress cut the possible number of new states from the Old Northwest, specifying there could be only three to five new states. This move limited the potential political weight of the vast territory. In addition, the ordinance increased property requirements for citizens who wanted to vote or hold office. It also slowed the process by which new states could gain admission to the Union. Eventually, Congress granted statehood to five new entities, but the process took more than half a century.
Most members of Congress feared democratic governance in the Old Northwest and the prospect of giving a strong voice to people with different regional interests. To retain control over the domain, they provided for the appointment of territorial officials—a governor, a secretary, and three judges—instead of allowing elected governments. Even when territorial legislatures formed, the governor would have veto power over their actions. James Monroe, head of the committee that moved the bill through Congress, wrote candidly to Jefferson, “It is in effect to be a colonial gover[nme]nt similar to wh[at] prevailed in these States previous to the revolution.”
These changes benefited eastern speculators—some of whom were members of Congress—who hoped to control these lands for profit. In 1786 former army officers in New England, joined by five surveyors, organized the Ohio Company to buy up western land. They dispatched Massachusetts minister Manasseh Cutler to lobby Congress to sell a huge tract at bargain rates. Cutler joined forces with congressional insiders associated with another venture, the Scioto Company. Together, they engineered a deal providing 1.5 million acres to the Ohio Company and another 5 million acres for Scioto investors.
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