Forming A Government
·
What were the
two main obstacles in the way of forming a strong central government?
From 1775-1781 the thirteen American states united to win their independence from the most powerful country in the world. In many ways this unity was threatened as soon as the surrender of General Cornwallis’ army at Yorktown. The common purpose of the war had ended, and the great differences that had divided the colonies before the war again became apparent. There were, however, two things that all of the states shared. They had just concluded a twenty-year struggle against the power of the British government, and few wanted to replace the British with a strong, centralized national government of their own. In addition, all of the states were jealous of surrendering any of their individual sovereignty (final authority) to a national government.[1] Even as colonies, most had maintained that they were sovereign entities, and it was unrealistic to expect that these feelings would change as a result of the war.
·
What were the
two main common characteristics of the early state constitutions?
·
What problems
did state governments experience during the Revolutionary War?
·
How did the
constitution of Massachusetts differ from earlier state constitutions?
·
What actions did
the states take on land ownership, religion, and slavery?
Even before the end of the Revolutionary War, Americans were forced to create systems of government to replace British authority. This began at the state level. Two states, Rhode Island and Connecticut, simply deleted the references to the British king from their colonial charter and adopted them as state constitutions. The eleven other states went about the process of creating completely new constitutions.
The first and perhaps most basic decision was that the constitutions were to be written down. In England, the constitution was not a document but a vague (uncertain) set of understandings and precedents (examples to be followed in the future) concerning the way that the government should operate. Americans believed that the unwritten nature of the British constitution had allowed the government to become corrupt and abusive during the eighteenth century. To avoid a similar fate, they insisted that their own governments rest upon clearly stated written laws so that no individual or group could pervert them.
The second decision was that the power of the executive, which Americans still associated with a tyrannical king, was be severely limited. Only one state, Pennsylvania, went so far as to eliminate the executive altogether, but most states inserted provisions sharply limiting the power of the governor. The new state constitutions reducing or eliminating the governor's right to veto bills (potential laws), and preventing him from dismissing or otherwise interfering with the legislature. Above all, every state forbade the governor or any other executive officer from holding a seat in the legislature, thus ensuring that the two branches of government would remain wholly separate. This marked a distinct departure from the British parliamentary system in which the leader of the dominant party in the legislature also functioned as the chief executive.
In limiting the executive and expanding the power of the legislature, the new constitutions were moving in the direction of direct popular rule. They did not, however, move all the way. Only in Georgia and Pennsylvania did the legislature consist of only one house. In all the other states, there was an upper and a lower chamber. In most cases, the upper chamber was designed to represent the "higher orders" of society. While the lower chamber retained most of the power, the upper chamber had to give its consent to bills before they could become law. The upper chamber was usually viewed as a moderating influence on the popularly elected lower chamber.[2] In order to reflect the will of the people, legislative terms were very short. In some cases, the lower chamber of the legislature was elected on a yearly basis. In all states, there were property requirements for voters. In some states, only a modest amount of property would qualify a person as a taxpayer; in other states there were somewhat greater requirements. In most states such requirements tended to have little impact since property ownership was widespread among the white male population, but universal suffrage (the right to vote) was not yet an accepted part of American government.
By the end of 1776, ten states had adopted new constitutions; however, during the course of the war several problems soon became apparent. Legislatures were the scene of constant squabbling and governors were unable to exercise sufficient power to provide any real leadership. As a result, it proved extraordinarily difficult to get the new governments to accomplish anything at all. To many observers, the problem appeared to be one of too much democracy. By placing so much power in the hands of the people (through their elected representatives in the legislature), the state constitutions were inviting disorder.
As a result, most of the states began to revise their constitutions to cope with these problems. Massachusetts was the first to act on the new concerns. By waiting until 1780 before finally ratifying its first constitution, Massachusetts allowed the difficulties of the other states to shape its government and produced a constitution that was to serve as a model for the efforts of others. Two changes in particular characterized the Massachusetts and later constitutions. The first was a change in the process of constitution writing itself. Earlier state constitutions had usually been written by state legislatures. As a result, they could easily be amended (or violated) by those same bodies. By 1780, sentiment was growing to find a way to protect the constitutions from the people who had written them, to make it much more difficult to change the documents once they were approved. The solution was to hold a constitutional convention, a special assembly that would meet only for the purpose of writing the constitution and would never (except under extraordinary circumstances) meet again. Amendments to the constitution would require procedures much more difficult than those for the passage of ordinary laws. The constitution would, therefore, be the product of the popular will; but once approved, it would be protected from the whims of public opinion and from the political moods of the legislature.
The second change was similarly a reflection of the new concerns about excessive popular power: a significant strengthening of the executive. In Massachusetts, the position of governor under the 1780 constitution became one of the strongest in any state. He was to be elected directly by the people; have a fixed salary (in other words, he would not be dependent on the good will of the legislature each year for his wages); have expanded powers of appointment; and be able to veto legislation. Other states soon followed Massachusetts's example. Most states increased the powers of the governor; and Pennsylvania, which had had no executive at all, now created a strong one. By the late 1780s almost every state had either revised its constitution or drawn up an entirely new one to reflect the need for greater centralized authority and stability.
The new state governments, both under the first constitutions and under the later revised ones, adopted a number of policies that increased opportunities for social and political mobility. In one way or another, they multiplied opportunities for land ownership and thus enlarged the voting population. An example of this was the elimination of primogeniture, which required that a father's estate be passed wholly intact to his first son. They also moved far in the direction of complete religious freedom. Some Americans continued to believe that religion should play some role in government, but most did not wish to give special privileges to any particular denomination. The role of religion is often overestimated in analyzing the philosophy of the revolution. Even Jefferson’s use of the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” in the Declaration of Independence was more properly associated with the philosophy of Deism rather that Christianity.[3] Having escaped from the state-established religions of Europe, only 7% of the people in the colonies belonged to a church at the time of the revolution. This figure is somewhat misleading in that some churches had requirements for membership that prevented willing adherents from becoming members; however, it would be an error to assume that there was any widespread view of the nation being founded upon specific religious beliefs. Among the ranks of believers there was a great deal of homogeneity as almost all were Christians of some Protestant denomination. In some states, religious tests survived as a qualification for officeholding. Professed atheists, and in a few places Catholics, were barred from office; but since there were few of either in most of the states in question, the requirements were largely meaningless. More characteristic, however, was the elimination of the privileges that established churches had once enjoyed. New York and the Southern states, in which the Church of England had been tax-supported, soon saw to the complete disestablishment of the church; and the New England states stripped the Congregational Church of many of its privileges. Boldest of all was Virginia, which in its Declaration of Rights announced the principle of complete religious toleration:
That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity towards each other.
In 1786, Virginia also enacted a Statute of Religious Liberty, written by Thomas Jefferson, which called for the complete separation of church and state.
More difficult to resolve than political or religious issues was the question of slavery. The ideology of the Revolution, which emphasized the importance of liberty, could not help but direct attention to America's own "peculiar institution." In New England, where there had never been many slaves, and in Pennsylvania, where the Quakers were outspoken in their opposition to slavery, it was gradually abolished. Pennsylvania passed a gradual emancipation (freedom) act in 1780; and the Supreme Court of Massachusetts ruled in 1783 that the ownership of slaves was impermissible under the state's bill of rights. Even in the South, there were some pressures to amend the institution.[4] Every state but South Carolina and Georgia prohibited the further importation of slaves from abroad. Slavery, however, survived in all the Southern and border states; and would continue to exist for nearly another century.
·
What powers did
the national government have under the Articles of Confederation?
·
How were states
represented in Congress?
·
Why was it
difficult to pass laws under the Articles?
What were the seven other main deficiencies of the Articles?
Americans were much quicker to agree on the proper shape of their state institutions than they were to decide on the form of their national government. At first, most believed that the central government should remain a relatively weak and unimportant force with each state virtually a sovereign nation. National institutions would serve only as loose, coordinating mechanisms, with little independent authority. It was in response to such beliefs that the Articles of Confederation emerged.
No sooner did the Continental Congress appoint a committee to draft a declaration of independence in 1776 than it appointed another to draft a plan of union. After much debate and many revisions, the Congress adopted the committee's proposal in November 1777 as the Articles of Confederation.
The Articles provided for a national political structure very similar to the one already in operation under the Second Continental Congress. Congress was to remain the only institution of national authority with the power to conduct wars and foreign relations and to appropriate, borrow, and issue money. Each of the state legislatures was to elect two to seven delegates to the national congress with each state delegation having a single vote. At least nine of the states (through their delegations) would have to approve any important measure, such as a treaty, before Congress could pass it; and all thirteen state legislatures would have to approve before the Articles could be ratified or amended.
More important than the powers that the Articles gave Congress were those that it did not grant. Congress was given no power to draft troops or levy taxes. For these measures, Congress would have to ask the states which could, and often did, refuse their requests. There was to be no separate, single, strong executive (the "President of the United States" was to be merely the presiding officer at the sessions of Congress). Congress could not regulate trade, create a system of national courts, nor maintain a peacetime army. In addition, states retained the right to coin their own money.[5]
·
Why was the sale
of the western lands so important to the new government?
·
Describe the two
laws that were supposed to prepare the Northwest Territory for settlement.
·
What were the
two main problems that delayed western settlement?
The most obvious difficulty of the new government was to raise money to pay off the debts accumulated during the war. The great hope was that this money could be raised through the sale of the lands west of the Appalachian Mountains. During the course of the war, the states had been forced to cede (give up) their extensive western land claims to the national government. Virginia, who had sent troops under George Rogers Clark to secure these lands during the war, was reluctant to give up its interest in this area, but the British invasion of Virginia a year before the war ended forced them to relent.
When the war began, only a few thousand whites had lived west of the Appalachians, but by 1790 their numbers had increased to 120,000. In the Land Ordinance of 1785, Congress devised a system for surveying and selling the Western lands. The territory north of the Ohio River was to be surveyed and marked off into neat rectangular townships, each six miles square and containing thirty-six one-square-mile sections. In every township, four sections were to be set aside for the United States; and the revenue from the sale of one section was to be used to support the creation of a public school (the first example of federal aid to education). Sections were to be sold at auction for not less than one dollar an acre. Since there were 640 acres in a section, the prospective buyer of government land had to have at least $640, a very large sum by the standards of the day.
In 1787 Congress passed another law governing western settlement, which became known as the Northwest Ordinance. The Ordinance created a single Northwest Territory which might subsequently be divided into between three and five territories (eventually the states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin grew out of the Northwest Territory). It also specified the process by which each territory could become a state. Initially the territories would be governed directly by Congress, but when they reached a population of 5,000, they could elect a territorial legislature that would share the responsibility for government with a territorial governor appointed by Congress. When a territory established a population of 60,000, it could apply for statehood. The law also guaranteed freedom of religion and prohibited slavery throughout the territory.
Congress’s careful plans to sell the western lands were frustrated by two major deficiencies of the Articles: the lack of an army and the difficulty of making treaties. Despite the provisions of the 1783 peace treaty, British forces continued to occupy a string of frontier posts along the Great Lakes within the United States. The British wanted to maintain points of contact with Indian tribes in the Northwest for the fur trade. The British justified this violation of the treaty by pointing to American violations of the same agreement. The United States had not honored its promise to make restitution to the Loyalists forced from their property during the war; nor the agreement to honor debts to English creditors (Congress had no money with which to meet these obligations). Supported by the British, the Indians of the Northwest were also determined to resist white settlement. Congress tried to resolve that problem by persuading Indian leaders to sign several treaties ceding substantial Western lands in the North and South to the United States, but those agreements proved largely ineffective. In 1786, the leadership of the Iroquois Confederacy repudiated (rejected) the treaty it had signed just two years earlier and threatened to attack the white settlements in the disputed lands. Other tribes, among them the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, Ottawa, and Chippewa, some of whom had once been represented in negotiations with whites by the Iroquois, formed new confederations of their own in an effort to strengthen their hand in dealings with the U.S. government. Both Britain and the Indian Confederations were aware that the United States lacked a national army and the political unity to force them from the western lands.
Foreign problems did not end with the difficulties with Britain in the Northwest. The Spanish refused to allow American goods to be transported down the Mississippi River through the port of New Orleans, which they controlled. The two nations were also embroiled in a dispute over the border of Georgia and Spanish Florida. Spain, unlike Britain, was at least willing to discuss its differences with the United States, and in 1785 its representative arrived in New York to negotiate with the secretary for foreign affairs, John Jay. An agreement was arrived at, but the treaty came to naught. Jay could not win ratification of the treaty by the necessary nine states.
·
Explain why the
end of the Revolutionary War harmed American industries? Why was the government powerless to address
this problem?
·
What problems
hampered American trade?
·
Explain the
problems that the national government had raising money.
During the war many small American industries emerged. The long years of prewar boycotts directed at Britain, followed by the cutoff of trade during the war, had shut off America’s main source of imported manufactured goods. This greatly encouraged the development of domestic industries. After the war ended, British merchants, eager to regain their American markets, flooded the country with goods that were both cheaper and better in quality than those made by the infant American industries. Prohibited from regulating trade, Congress was powerless to enact a tariff that would tax foreign imports to enhance the attractiveness of domestic manufactures. Since most of the industries had emerged in the Northeast, these states favored protective tariffs, but they were opposed by the agricultural South who wanted to resume their prewar trade patterns with Britain.
American exports were frustrated by the fact that they were now outside of the British Empire. Traditional trade partners in Britain and the British West Indies now treated American goods as foreign and either taxed them or prohibited them entirely. Absent the protection of the British Navy, pirates frequently seized American ships on the high seas. In 1784, Congress sent John Adams to London with instructions to get a commercial treaty and speed up the evacuation of the frontier posts; but that effort simply produced more humiliation for the Confederation. Taunted by the question of whether he represented one nation or thirteen, Adams made no headway in England. Throughout the 1780s, the British government refused to even send an ambassador to the American capital.
In addition to the difficulties with foreign countries, the states were unwilling to cooperate with each other. Unwilling to risk the political ire of their own voters by raising property taxes, most states tried to raise money by taxing trade with other states. As a result, trade wars developed between the states. Those states without a significant port suffered the most. New Jersey was forced to pay huge sums to ship its goods through New York City and Philadelphia. Eager to monopolize trade, both Virginia and Maryland attempted to prevent ships of the other from using Chesapeake Bay and the Potomac River.
Squabbling between the states and the inability to raise money constantly hampered the government under the Articles. Only one-sixth of the money it requisitioned from the states was received. As a result, Congress was forced to print more and more paper money without any resources to back it up. The value of the Continental currency plummeted, and a common curse was that a worthless person was “not worth a Continental (dollar).” By 1781, twenty dollars of paper money was worth only two cents in coin. Due to its inability to raise funds, Congress was also unable to borrow money. The debt that the U.S. owed from the Revolutionary War was triple the Confederation’s annual budget. No country would loan money to a government that was already deep in debt with no way to raise revenue.
Several leading Americans, led by Robert Morris, the head of the Confederation's treasury, soon advocated a five percent tax on imported goods to fund the debt. The first effort to secure this plan in 1781 received the approval of twelve state delegations in Congress; but it required unanimity, and Rhode Island's refusal to agree killed the plan. A second effort in 1783 also failed to win approval.
·
Describe the
1786 financial crisis in Rhode Island.
·
Explain the
causes of Shays’ Rebellion.
·
What factors led
to the calling of the Philadelphia Convention in 1787?
Individual states, although permitted under their constitutions to tax, were similarly hampered by a lack of funds. Seven states depended almost entirely on paper money, which soon became worthless. When the government of Rhode Island passed a law in 1786 making it a crime for businesses to refuse to accept their paper money, businesses closed down in protest, paralyzing the entire state.
The legislature of Massachusetts attempted to avoid the financial chaos that had engulfed Rhode Island by raising land taxes in order to pay its debts and avoid inflating the currency. Wealthy merchants and bankers applauded this action, but poor farmers, already burdened by debt and now burdened again by taxes on their lands, considered such policies unfair and reminiscent of the tyrannical British taxes that had led to the revolution. Debtors who failed to pay their taxes saw their mortgages foreclosed and their property seized. In many cases, debtors were even imprisoned.
Throughout the late 1780s, mobs of distressed farmers periodically rioted in various parts of New England. They caused the most serious trouble in Massachusetts, demanding that the state government issue paper currency to increase the money supply and make it easier for them to meet their obligations. Dissidents in the Connecticut Valley and the Berkshire Hills, many of them Revolutionary veterans, rallied behind Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army who had fought in the Battle of Bunker Hill. Organizing and drilling his followers like an army, Shays put forth a program of demands that included paper money, tax relief, a moratorium (suspension) on debts, the removal of the state capital from Boston to the interior, and the abolition of imprisonment for debt. During the summer of 1786, Shays’ rebels concentrated on the immediate task of preventing the collection of debts and went in armed bands to keep courts from sitting and to prevent sheriffs' sales of confiscated property. In Boston, members of the legislature, including Revolutionary War firebrand Samuel Adams, denounced Shays and his men as rebels and traitors.
When winter came, 1,200 rebels advanced on Springfield hoping to seize weapons from the arsenal (place where weapons are stored) there. An army of 4,400 state militiamen, financed by a loan from wealthy merchants who feared a new revolution, set out from Boston to confront them. In January 1787, this army met Shays’ ragged troops, killed several of them, captured many more, and scattered the rest to the hills in a blinding snowstorm. Shays’ Rebellion was not a totally isolated incident. In many states, angry farmers armed themselves to prevent the seizure of their property.
As a military enterprise, Shays’ Rebellion was a fiasco, but it had important consequences for the future of the United States. In Massachusetts, it resulted in a few immediate gains for the discontented groups. Shays and his lieutenants, at first sentenced to death, were soon pardoned, and some concessions to Shays’ earlier demands were granted in the way of tax relief and the postponement of debt payments. Far more significant, however, the rebellion added urgency to a movement already gathering support throughout the new nation--the movement to produce a new, national constitution that would significantly strengthen the powers of the national government.
Wealth Americans, led by New York’s Alexander Hamilton, began to call for a revision of the Articles and a dramatic strengthening of the central government. A meeting for resolving trade difficulties was held in Annapolis, Maryland in 1786. The gathering failed to produce any relief because only five states sent delegates. Realizing that any effort to resolve America’s economic problems would required extensive alteration of the Articles, Hamilton and James Madison of Virginia persuaded the Annapolis Convention to issue a call to the thirteen states to send delegates to a meeting in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 for the expressed purpose of revising the Articles. In the wake of Shays’ Rebellion, the Continental Congress endorsed the proposal for a Philadelphia Convention.
The Philadelphia Convention was attended by all of the thirteen states except for Rhode Island. More importantly, George Washington agreed to attend, lending his enormous prestige to the effort. Washington was joined by such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, George Mason, Roger Sherman, as well as Hamilton and Madison. Not all Americans, however, embraced the idea of a stronger government. Both Sam Adams and Patrick Henry refused to attend, Henry commenting that, “he smelt a rat.” Nevertheless, almost all of the delegates in attendance shared Hamilton and Madison’s view that a stronger government was vital to the country’s survival. Within days, the meeting that had been called to revise the Articles evolved into something vastly different, a convention to write an entirely new constitution.[6]
Jeffrey T. Stroebel, The Sycamore School, 1995. Revised 1999.
[1] Throughout the rest of the world, the term "state" means a sovereign government and is synonymous with the term "country." The fact that the U.S. uses the term "state" to refer to a government that is subservient to the national government is a heritage of the revolutionary era when each of the states viewed themselves as a separate, sovereign country.
[2] This was similar to the relationship of Britain's House of Lords (the upper chamber of the legislature) to the House of Commons.
[3] Deism was a popular religious belief during the Enlightenment. Deists believed in a God that created the universe but then took no further role in day to day activities. Deists rejected the Bible as nonsense. Presidents Adams, Jefferson, and Madison all wrote items so critical of organized religion that it is doubtful that they could be elected to public office today
[4] Between 1775 and 1800 the number of free African-Americans rose from 14,000 to 100,000.
[5] Most of these restrictions reflected the experiences of 1763-1776. Taxation by a distant central government conjured up images of the dreaded taxes that the British had attempted to impose on the colonies. A national system of courts evoked opposition because it was reminiscent of British efforts to remove smuggling cases from areas where the local population was hesitant to convict smugglers. The presence of a peacetime army brought back images of British Redcoats and the Boston Massacre.
[6] The deliberations of the convention were kept secret. Madison later wrote that "no Constitution would ever have been adopted…if the debates had been public." Much of what we know about the convention's deliberations has been taken from Madison's copious notes. Portions of the material in this chapter has been adapted from Chapter 5 “The American Revolution.” Compton's Encyclopedia of American History. Compton's NewMedia, 1994.