The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789
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It was only by accident, really a series of accidents, that Jefferson was present at this propitious moment. As noted earlier, he was supposed to be in Paris as part of the American negotiating team, but he had declined the appointment, citing the recent death of his wife in childbirth. Once recovered, he reluctantly agreed to brave the Atlantic voyage to join the ongoing peace negotiations, only to discover that the British navy had imposed a more stringent blockade of American ports, making his capture on the high seas extremely likely. (Indeed, that is what happened to Henry Laurens, sent as Jefferson’s replacement.) Though he preferred to remain in splendid isolation at Monticello, the Virginia legislature decided that a man of his proven talents should not be allowed to retire from public life, so it elected him as a delegate to the Confederation Congress. He took his seat in November 1783, just in time to guide the Virginia cession through Congress and then be appointed chair of the committee that would prepare a plan for developing and governing the western lands. The result was the Ordinance of 1784, in all respects save one a thoroughly Jeffersonian document.
There was no need to encourage migration. The flow of settlers over the Alleghenies already threatened to become a flood. The challenge was to channel it in accord with republican principles. For Jefferson, that meant westward expansion should benefit settlers rather than speculators; that each new territory, once sufficiently populated at twenty thousand souls, should decide on what form of republican government it wanted; and then, when its population matched that of the smallest state, it could apply for admission into the confederation. There would be no permanent colonies in the expanding American republic. If you decided to carry your family west, you would know that there was a plan in place to ensure that you and your descendants would be folded into the United States as equal citizens.
In order to underline the presumption that the core principles of the American Revolution would prevail in the steady march across the continent, Jefferson insisted that all hereditary titles and privileges would be repudiated and that slavery would end no later than 1800. Though it is mere speculation, the entire course of American history might have been different if the stipulation on slavery had won acceptance by the Congress, but it lost by one vote.15
Jefferson attempted to provide some semblance of geographic coherence to this visionary plan by sketching the borders of fourteen prospective states. Several generations of historians have enjoyed a field day ridiculing Jefferson’s attempt to impose a geometric grid over the mountains and rivers of the early northwest, and they have made even greater fun of the names he suggested for the states—for example, Sylvania, Metropotania, Cherronerus, Polypotamia. This is not quite fair, since Jefferson was only attempting to provide the first draft of a territorial scheme that, in fact, did become quite geometric once westward expansion crossed the Mississippi. And the names he suggested, no matter how silly they might seem now, were driven by the desire to combine classical and Native American vocabularies, a thoughtful if, in the end, futile effort.16
All in all, the Ordinance of 1784 benefited from Jefferson’s fortuitous presence in two enduring ways. First, he brought his impeccable revolutionary credentials to the task and insisted that the settlement of the western domain occur within a framework true to the principles on which the American republic was founded. Second, although he never traveled farther west than the Natural Bridge in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, Jefferson owned the finest collection of North American maps extant at the time. When a self-proclaimed geographer named Thomas Hutchins published a pamphlet purporting to show that the Ohio Valley was a vast tract of one million square miles, Jefferson corrected him. The Ohio Valley was truly vast, Jefferson observed, but only one-quarter the size that Hutchins described. Hutchins quickly apologized for his error. In terms of maps, Jefferson was the reigning expert on all the land east of the Mississippi.17
In one respect, however, Jefferson saw fit to modify his vision, not so much on how the new states would be configured as on how they would be settled. His original formulation gave no role to the federal government in managing westward migration, which he thought would occur naturally and freely—two primal Jeffersonian values—as individuals and families moved over the mountains, found the land they liked, and put down stakes. Initially, he even thought the land should be free. But conversations within the Congress, and especially in the Virginia delegation, convinced Jefferson that this laissez-faire approach would produce multiple problems that he had not foreseen.
None other than George Washington was the first to sound the warning. “To suffer a wide extended country to be over run with Land Jobbers, Speculators, Monopolizers, or even with scatter’d settiers,” Washington declared, “is, in my opinion inconsistent with the wisdom and policy which our true interest dictates.” A policy of unregulated “diffusion” would be sure to generate Indian wars up and down the frontier, the kind of legal confusion over land patents that had already produced vigilante violence in Kentucky, and the likelihood that some settlers would move so far west that they would repudiate their American citizenship and set up independent states or seek support from foreign powers like Spain or Great Britain.18
The vastly preferable alternative was called “compact” or “progressive seating,” meaning a more managed and monitored approach to westward migration that ensured a steadier and more staged march of more densely populated settlements across the continent. There would always be free spirits—Washington usually described them as “banditti”—who refused to comply and were prepared to take their chances with the Indians. But the westward flow of population should assume the shape of a concentrated wave rather than a free-floating gush.
The full implications of “progressive seating” required the Ordinance of 1785. (By that time Jefferson was in Paris, not so much replacing Franklin, as he put it, since no one could do that, but succeeding him as American minister to France.) The new ordinance organized the western border into townships of thirty-six square miles that would be surveyed, sold for no less than a dollar an acre, then settled as the surveyors moved on to the next range. It was presumed, correctly it turned out, that the bulk of the settlers would come from New England, drawn from that rocky region to the more lush and fertile soil of the Ohio Valley, so the townships resembled a parade of New England communities marching at a stately pace into the wilderness.
By controlling the demographic flow of western migration and ensuring its density, the Ordinance of 1785 minimized the likelihood of Indian wars, the idea being to sign treaties with the resident tribes in advance of the surveyors. The treaties signed with the Six Nations at Fort Stanwix, the Cherokees at Hopewell, and the Ohio tribes at Fort McIntosh were all one-sided affairs in which American negotiators claimed ownership of all the land east of the Mississippi, citing the Treaty of Paris, which rendered the Native American population “a conquered people” who should be grateful to be consulted at all.19
But the conquest theory had the distinct appearance of imperialism in the European mode, making it awkwardly clear that the republican principles that were supposed to govern westward expansion did not apply to Native Americans. Although there was an unspoken understanding that Indian removal east of the Mississippi was inevitable, how that removal was to occur did matter, meaning that outright coercion needed to be replaced with some semblance of mutual consent.
Philip Schuyler, a former general in the Continental Army who had extensive experience dealing with the Six Nations during the war (and who, it so happened, was Alexander Hamilton’s father-in-law), came up with an alternative way of thinking about Native Americans other than as “a conquered people.” “As our settlements approach their country,” Schuyler explained, “they [Indians] must, from scarcity of game, retire further back, and dispose of their lands, until they dwindle comparatively to nothing, as all savages have done…when compelled to live in the vicinity of civilized people.” In effect, demography would do the work of armies.20
Wha
t Schuyler attributed to a cultural collision that would cause Native American societies to disintegrate upon contact with white civilization was most probably as much biological as cultural. Settlers of European ancestry carried diseases, chiefly smallpox and measles, to which most Native Americans had never been exposed, making them vulnerable to epidemics that on occasion generated mortality rates of 90 percent or higher. The real weapons of mass destruction in the eighteenth century were viruses, and the major reason the Native American population would recede upon contact with the front edge of white settlements was that they were defenseless against such biological weapons. What Schuyler liked to think of as the march of civilization was in fact a policy of genocide in slow motion, in which the march of white migration was accompanied by an artillery barrage of microbes that cleared the way.21
Both the cultural and biological versions of westward expansion led to the same inevitable conclusion: Indian removal east of the Mississippi—achieved in a way that avoided any explicit embrace of imperialistic assumptions that defied America’s republican principles. The less attractive features of the western story were thereby conveniently obscured, allowing the conversation to focus on the white beneficiaries rather than the Indian victims.
The Ordinances of 1784 and 1785 defined the western domain as a sacred trust, requiring management by a federal government that was prepared to deliver the full promise of its boundless bounty into the coffers of the United States. The management of western expansion thus became a domestic version of foreign policy, demanding a unified response that spoke with one voice. Unfortunately, the Confederation Congress had never been designed to function in that fashion, and the end of the war had removed its primary motive for political cooperation. Whether management of the domain would replace the war as a collective responsibility was not at all clear.
To the extent that the correspondence of the delegates at the Confederation Congress is an accurate barometer of the political pressures of the moment, nothing could replace the war as a unifying force. The absenteeism and inability to muster a quorum did not just impede any semblance of competence or coherence; more ominously, it suggested a prevailing indifference to any national project at all, perhaps the most palpable manifestation of the quite simple conviction that no one cared. When the delegates realized that they could not decide between two locations for a permanent capital, one on the Delaware (presumably Trenton) and one on the Potomac, an editorial in the Freeman’s Journal proposed constructing an “imperial city on wheels” and rolling it from place to place.22
Before he departed for Paris, Jefferson was interviewed by a visiting Dutch nobleman, who asked his opinion of the current American government. Comparing the Confederation Congress to those heady days of 1775–76 in the Continental Congress, Jefferson saw a precipitous decline. “The members of Congress are no longer, generally speaking, men of worth or distinction,” he lamented. “For Congress is not, as formally, held in respect; there is indeed dread of its power, though it has none.” Benjamin Harrison, the governor of Virginia, concurred, observing that the very survival of the Congress “seems to be problematical.” Like Jefferson, Harrison looked back to better days, “when the eyes of the world were upon us, and we were the wonder and envy of all,” whereas now “we are sinking faster in esteem than we rose,” and European nations were waiting “like buzzards to feast on the spoils of our demise.” “Let the Blame fall where it ought,” wrote one delegate to Washington, “on those Whose attachment to State Views, State Interests, & State prejudices is so great as to render them eternally opposed to every Measure that can be devised for the public good.”23
All the news Washington was getting followed the same dispiriting script. “We have no politics excepting those creeping principles of self and local interest,” wrote Henry Knox, his old artillery commander, “which are the reverse of what ought to actuate us in the present moment, and which can neither form the dignity nor strengths of a great nation.” For both private and public reasons, Washington worried most about the inherent inability of the Congress to supervise the integration of the western domain into the confederation, which he regarded as the great project that would decide whether such a thing as a union would endure. After returning from a trip to visit his own western lands—over thirty thousand acres on the borders of what is now Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia—he let it be known that the fate of his own fortune and the future of the American experience in republican government were inextricably bound together.24
It was the political version of the decisive moment in a great battle, he claimed, that could go either way, depending on how western expansion was managed. “The western settlers stand as if it were upon a pivot,” he warned, “and the touch of a feather would turn them any way.” Unless there was a viable American nation-state to join, Washington worried that the western territories would drift into the orbit of lurking European powers or go off on their own to form independent states. Washington’s great fear was that North America would become a version of Europe, a collection of coexistent sovereignties rather than a coherent nation of its own. All the evidence seemed to support the conclusion that the very term United States was becoming a preposterous illusion.25
The one group expressing unrelieved optimism about the domain was the tiny tribe of bards and poets, who almost by definition felt free to levitate out of the messy particularities of westward expansion in favor of more visionary vistas. David Humphreys saw a quasi-paradise where the skies were always bright:
Then let us go where happier climes invite,
To midland seas and regions of delight;
With all that’s ours, together let us rise,
Seek brighter plains and more indulgent skies.26
Philip Freneau had a more practical vision, emphasizing the commercial potential of the underdeveloped land:
No longer shall they useless prove,
Nor idly through the forest rove….
For other ends the fates decree,
And commerce plans new freights for thee.27
Perhaps the most uplifting interpretation of all came from David Howell. As a Rhode Island delegate, Howell was on record as regarding the western lands as a source of revenue. But as a true believer in the semi-sacred character of republican values, his view of the west assumed a spiritual aura that Jefferson himself would later embrace in the wake of the Louisiana Purchase:
The Western World opens an amazing prospect. As a national fund, in my opinion, it is equal to our debt. As a source of future population & strength, it is a guarantee of our Independence. As its Inhabitants will be mostly cultivators of the soil, republicanism looks to them as its Guardians. When the States on the eastern shore, or Atlantic shall have become populous, rich, & luxurious & ready to yield their Liberties into the hands of a tyrant—The Gods of the Mountains will save us.28
This kind of political redemption of the east by the west could occur, of course, only if the two sections remained politically connected. The pessimistic prophets harbored serious doubts, envisioning a series of independent republics or, worse yet, autocratic states just as jealous of their sovereignty as the thirteen original states were jealous of theirs. After all, why should one expect the western territories to join a union that was on the verge of dissolution?
Both the optimists and the pessimists were just guessing, but the increasingly dysfunctional character of the Confederation Congress seemed to tilt the argument toward the pessimists, since the emergence of a gigantic American nation required the existence of a national government that did not exist. Washington regarded this as a failure of will, a fundamental misreading of what the American Revolution intended, and perhaps the greatest lost opportunity in recorded history. In 1785 Washington’s nightmare scenario grew even darker as a sectional split emerged within Congress over what came to be called the Mississippi Question.29
On the North American continent, the Mississippi was the Nile, the Amazon, and the Danube all rolled into on
e. Even though the front edge of American settlements remained over five hundred miles to the east, and the Ordinance of 1785 decreed that westward expansion would proceed only in a compacted fashion at a stately pace, meaning that it would not reach the Mississippi until early in the next century, for palpably geographic and more elusively mythic reasons, the Mississippi loomed large both as a destination and as the futuristic focus for American destiny. All talk about the emergence of America as a continental empire recognized the Mississippi as the centerpiece in the conversation.
Jay’s Mississippi credentials were impeccable, so when he assumed office as secretary of foreign affairs in December 1784, there was little reason to expect that he would become the center of a controversy over the role of that great river in shaping American expansion. After all, Jay had been the dominant voice at the Paris peace negotiations, insisting on the Mississippi as the western border of the domain and American navigation rights as nonnegotiable. He had also served for two frustrating years as American envoy to Spain, where he had concluded that the once-great Spanish Empire was in a state of steady and irreversible decline, so that despite the presumptive posture of the courtiers in Madrid, Spain was the ideal European power to claim control over the vast region west of the Mississippi. In effect, Spain was like a cowbird that occupied the nest until the American eagle, in the form of a relentless demographic wave of settlers, arrived to replace her as the dominant power on the North American continent.30
From the very start of his tenure, Jay assumed that he possessed sweeping powers over American foreign policy, much as Robert Morris had assumed over fiscal policy. And lurking beneath that assumption was an even grander presumption that his role as de facto secretary of state would contribute to an inevitable evolution from an American confederation to an American nation. “Our federal government is incompetent to its objects,” he explained to Adams, “and so as it is in the Interest of our Country, so it is the Duty of our leading Characters to Cooperate in measures for enlarging and navigating it.” Jay believed that the incoherent course of the current confederation was suicidal: “It will unless checked Scatter our Resources and in every View enfeeble the Union.” As he saw it, his role was to avoid that fate by deploying the imperatives of a coherent American foreign policy to galvanize support for a singular sense of a truly United States.31