Penguin History of the United States of America

by Hugh Brogan

  It is more than doubtful if, in the seventh year of the war, these calculations were sound any longer. True, in April 1781 Washington capped an endless gush of justified complaints about the state of affairs with the simple phrase, ‘We are at the end of our tether,’ but his position conditioned him to look on the gloomy side. It seems likeliest that, when the war broke out, there was a large patriot party, a substantially smaller Loyalist party and a majority of the population that was neutral. Subsequent events radically changed matters. The mere fact of war, the promulgation of independence and the survival of the Revolutionary governments tended to win recruits to the patriot party, which grew larger throughout the war, in spite of a dangerous war-weariness. Very foolishly, the British enlisted the Iroquois in the North-West. They did little for the imperial cause, but their depredations, carried out with their usual relentless cruelty, horrified and aroused every settler who had crossed, or was about to cross, the Appalachians in search of new land. (It was tales of Indian atrocities as much as anything else which brought out the New Englanders against Burgoyne.) Wherever the British won a temporary victory the Loyalists came out for them, only to find, at any rate in the North outside New York, that after a little while the British went away again,19 leaving their collaborators with no choice but to flee. This of course put military and political power even more firmly in the hands of the patriots, while the Loyalists became a mere floating refugee population.20 The most effective Loyalist, Banastre Tarleton, who raised a substantial and efficient fighting force for Cornwallis, fought with such savagery (the American way of war is, perhaps, more cold-blooded than the British) that he not only added the fullest horrors of civil war to the Revolution, but inspired active hatred and patriotism in equal amounts throughout the South. The terror of his name drove the timid to seek the protection of General Washington and his subordinates, while the patriots vengefully hunted out Tories from their jobs, property and country. The American general, Nathanael Greene, commented sadly in South Carolina that

  The animosity between the Whigs and Tories, renders their situation truly deplorable. The Whigs seem determined to extirpate the Tories, and the Tories the Whigs. Some thousands have fallen in this way, in this quarter, and the evil rages with more violence than ever. If a stop cannot be soon put to these massacres, the country will be depopulated in a few months more.

  After years of this sort of thing it grew less and less likely that any military victory would enable the British to reconstitute their rule. Their supreme war-aim had become unattainable long before they were forced to stop fighting for it.

  A good example of what all this meant to ordinary people is provided in the continuing career of young Andrew Jackson. When he was thirteen (1780) the war came to his neighbourhood. He and all his relations were soon made fugitives by Tarleton’s terrible incursions, and then turned to fight. The boy saw service as a mounted orderly, was captured by the British and nearly died of smallpox in jail. His mother and his two brothers did die, his mother of ‘ship fever’ while nursing prisoners of the British at Charleston. None of this endeared the invaders to young Jackson. But the episode that was to become legendary when he became famous was that of the English subaltern who commanded his young prisoner to clean his boots. Jackson, standing on his rights as a prisoner of war, refused, and got a cut on his head from the officer’s sword for his insolence. It left a scar which, as his biographer says, he was to carry through a life ‘that profited little to England or any Englishman’;21 more to the point, it was characteristic of the innumerable small strokes that were cutting the few remaining bonds between Britain and America. There must have been thousands of young sparks like Jackson. And George Washington was now a hero to all his countrymen; their admiration for him was uniting them as little else could. None of those who had learned to venerate him-least of all thosewhohad fought under him – would abandon the struggle before he did. However dark the outlook from time to time, it was always too early to talk of the Americans despairing.

  However, the assumptions underlying British strategy were never to be thoroughly tested, for the rashness of a general made them irrelevant. Cornwallis proved to be another Burgoyne. He began well, but in his quest for the decisive victory over Nathanael Greene he allowed the Americans to lure him further and further north, losing men and supplies all the way. Finally he realized that he could neither retreat nor go forward in face of the resistance he was meeting, so he dug in where he was, at Yorktown in Virginia (a few miles from Jamestown and Williamsburg), and waited to be rescued by the Royal Navy.

  Washington saw that this was the sort of opportunity that only comes once. His army had long been stationary in the North, pinning down the British in New York. Now was the time for it to move, if only because of the increasing war-weariness of the Americans and the desperate financial straits of the French, who had nevertheless sent him an army of some 6,700 regulars under the Comte de Rochambeau. A French naval squadron under Admiral de Grasse was at sea. Washington had been trying to concentrate all these forces for an attack on New York; but now he saw a chance, probably a last chance, for a decisive victory over the British. British carelessness had given the allies temporary naval superiority in Virginian waters: De Grasse was able to seal off Chesapeake Bay, thus putting himself between Cornwallis and his relief. Washington and Rochambeau marched briskly south. Before Cornwallis quite knew what was happening to him he was trapped. The inexorable work of an eighteenth-century siege went forward; and at last Cornwallis gave in. On 17 October 1781 – four years exactly since Burgoyne’ s misadventure – he asked for terms. Two days later he surrendered unconditionally. Legend has it that as he and his soldiers marched out, prisoners, their regimental bands played ‘The World Turned Upside Down’.

  Rightly, if so, for Yorktown was a decisive victory, though Washington could not at first believe it. It did the French little good (a few months later Admiral Rodney drubbed De Grasse in the Battle of the Saints); but it settled the question of American independence. The news provoked the House of Commons to mutiny at last. ‘Oh God! It is all over,’ said poor Lord North. His government fell, and a Whig ministry led by Rockingham, and after his death by Shelburne, lasted just long enough to negotiate a new Treaty of Paris (3 September 1783).

  This treaty gave the United States excellent terms (far better than France and Spain were to get), for which the American negotiators (Franklin, John Adams, John Jay) deserved most of the credit. Not only did the British recognize American independence and make peace, and grant valuable concessions to American fishermen in Canadian waters; they conceded most generous boundaries to the new republic. Up to a point, this only confirmed what was already clear on the ground. In a series of desperate campaigns against the British and the Indians, the Americans had already made good their claim to the trans-Appalachian West. Still, the British controlled large areas there, in the Great Lakes region, and their Indian allies were still unbroken; but they had no stomach for continuing the struggle and formally recognized northern and western frontiers for the United States on the Lakes and the Mississippi. America thus became the legally undisputed mistress of an immense territory. Next to independence itself it was the most notable gain from the War of the Revolution.

  At last General Washington was able to unbuckle his sword. He had had to repudiate a proposal that he make a bid for kingship, and to suppress a threatened mutiny over pay, which he did with a personal appeal to his officers. (‘Gentlemen, you must pardon me,’ he said, putting on his spectacles to read his manuscript. ‘I have grown grey in your service and now find myself going blind.’ That did the trick.) Sadly, he saw his cherished veterans going off to their homes like a ‘set of beggars’, still unpaid, though a body of mutinous soldiers had actually besieged the ungrateful Congress in State House at Philadelphia. Joyously, in November 1783, he entered New York as the British evacuated it; and in that city, on 4 December, he bade formal farewell to his officers, shaking each one by the hand, before he se
t off to the longed-for repose of Mount Vernon. Poor man: he was not to enjoy it for very long.

  11 The Peace and the Constitution 1783–9

  The Americans are the first people whom Heaven has favoured with an opportunity of deliberating upon, and choosing, the forms of government under which they shall live. All other constitutions have derived their existence from violence or accidental circumstances, and are therefore probably more distant from their perfection, which, though beyond our reach, may nevertheless be approached under the guidance of reason and experience.

  John Jay, 1777

  Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair. The event is in the hand of God.

  George Washington, 1787

  Having got rid of the British, the Americans had to cope with the difficulties that had baffled George III and his ministers. The victorious rebels had one advantage: the American Empire (a favourite phrase of the time) was smaller, more compact and more homogeneous than the British, so there was much less inducement to break it up. In fact most Americans wanted to make a success of their new Republic, and maintain their Union. But the obstacles were, in practice, daunting.

  The second Peace of Paris left many problems unsolved. It defined America’s place in the international system, but that place was an unsatisfactory one, at any rate to the Americans, and reflected the country’s weakness and unimportance in the scheme of things. Independence was qualified by the necessity of a French guarantee, of French protection. Until the United States could do without France, she would be no more than a satellite, unable to achieve or attempt much without permission. This might prove a disastrous position if, for example, she should clash with Spain. The Spanish alliance was a major component of French foreign policy; it would certainly not be sacrificed to the interests of an upstart little protégé. Yet Spain was now a principal obstacle to the growth and, perhaps, to the continued existence of the United States. The first Peace of Paris, in 1763, had given her Louisiana, which included New Orleans and all the country between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. By the second, in 1783, she had regained Florida, which then stretched right along the Gulf Coast across what is now southern Alabama. She disliked the republicans, and had two effective weapons against them. By her control of the Mississippi navigation and the market of New Orleans she could dictate terms to the western Americans, who had begun to settle the valleys of the Ohio and Tennessee rivers, for the only practicable outlet for their produce lay down the great rivers, since land carriage back across the Appalachians was so expensive; and she could stir up the powerful Indian tribes of the South-West-the Creeks and the Cherokees – against the weak new settlements of the Tennessee. By the winter of 1786–7 a full-scale frontier war was raging, and Spanish agents were at work plausibly suggesting to the Westerners that for protection in future they ought perhaps to look to the King of Spain rather than to the United States. Congress was as helpless as the individual state governments to do anything about these highly undesirable developments, which might end by robbing the United States of half her splendid Western heritage.

  Relations with Great Britain were even more important, and equally unsatisfactory. George III received John Adams in London as the first American minister to the Court of St James, in a ceremony that both men found deeply moving; but such occasions had little or nothing to do with the making of high policy. The English Cabinet had its own ideas. First, it discovered that more had been given away at the peace than had been intended or than was, perhaps, quite necessary. If the Great Lakes country was handed over to the United States the fur-trade would go with it, to the great impoverishment of Canada. England decided not to vacate Fort Detroit just yet, nor the other six frontier posts which she was pledged, by her signature of the treaty, to give up (the excuse was that America had not fulfilled some of the other terms of the peace). So for the time being much of the North-West would remain in British hands, while £200,000 worth of furs per annum found their way to London through Montreal, not through New York. As if that were not enough, England set out systematically to crush America’s maritime rivalry. The Navigation Acts were revised by Orders in Council. With seeming generosity, all duties were lifted from North American goods coming to Britain in British or American bottoms. This was a great encouragement to American producers to look to the British market. The catch was that at the same time the Americans were strictly forbidden to trade with the British West Indies; yet it was there that the colonists, before 1775, had always found their best customers. Now British ships alone would carry the produce of New England and Pennsylvania to the Caribbean and the produce of the sugar islands to Britain. With this immense advantage, British merchants soon began to drive out their American competitors from all the Atlantic routes, for they could afford to charge lower rates. It looked as if the British merchant marine would soon have a monopoly of Atlantic trade, and thus Great Britain would be able to dictate the economic future of the ports of her former colonies. Her statesmen looked with complacency on the bickering and feebleness of the US government; some began to speculate that before long economic pressure would force the New Englanders, at least, to see sense and come back to their true allegiance. Instead, the individual American states imposed discriminatory tariffs on British goods and passed navigation Acts to shut out British shipping; but although these measures were helpful, they could not of themselves defeat British policy. Besides, they set American merchants (who welcomed the navigation laws but disliked the protective tariffs) against American artisans (who were most interested in the tariffs). And, as in the matter of Spanish relations, there seemed to be nothing that Congress could do.

  The young Republic, then, endured something like an economic cold war in the first years of peace. Bad as this was, the internal situation was if anything worse. At times it seemed that the peace, by removing the British, had removed the one force capable of inspiring an effective Union. Each state began to go her own way. Even more depressing, the end of the war was followed (as has usually been the case with America’s wars) by an economic crisis.

  It will not do to exaggerate this. Benjamin Franklin, coming home for good in the autumn of 1785, was delighted with the evident prosperity of Pennsylvania, and wrote to all his friends in Europe telling them not to believe English assertions that the United States was on the brink of ruin. George Washington did the same. ‘It is wonderful to see how soon the ravages of war are repaired,’ he wrote:

  Houses are rebuilt, fields enclosed, stocks of cattle which were destroyed are replaced, and many a desolated territory assumes again the cheerful appearance of cultivation. In many places the vestiges of conflagration and ruin are hardly to be traced. The arts of peace, such as clearing rivers, building bridges, and establishing conveniences for travelling &c. are assiduously promoted. In short, the foundation of a great empire is laid.

  All this was no doubt true: America was and is an intrinsically rich country, and the inhabitants have never been backward in exploiting her resources. But in the wake of the Revolutionary War even this natural abundance could be an embarrassment, or at any rate of little use to the producers. The Americans were oppressed by all manner of debts, and the means of paying them seemed to be lacking. The foreign debt alone, including both capital and interest, went up from $7,885,085 in 1783 to $11,858,983 in 1789.1 Most of this was owed to France, which did not press for her money; but domestic creditors were less forbearing. They wanted to be paid, and to be paid in good currency, that is, in gold or silver: they spurned the grossly devalued paper money issued by the states and Congress. At the same time many debtors found it impossible to earn the necessary specie, for it could only come from abroad, and Great Britain, as we have seen, had cut off American farmers from their foreign markets. Their unsellable produce piled up in their barns, and their creditors took them to court. Matters were made worse all round by the pressure of the state governments. Public credit was exhausted, and could be renewed, so that government might continue,
only by a determined, successful effort to redeem the paper currency; and the only way by which such redemption might be achieved was by higher taxes. At the back of the queue came Congress, desperately pleading for enough money to pay the running expenses of the national government, if not to pay off the national debt.

  In the circumstances it is not surprising that there was a revival of the bitter battles between debtors and creditors that had marked the late colonial era. Defying the peace treaty, the Virginia legislature passed laws to stop British creditors suing to collect their pre-war debts, for, as George Mason wrote to Patrick Henry, ‘If we are now to pay the debts due to the British merchants, what have we been fighting for all this while?’ In Rhode Island, the debtor party won control of the state government, and tried by law to compel creditors to accept the depreciated paper currency in settlement of debts: this led to complete economic dislocation. Things were even worse in Massachusetts. There the debtor-creditor struggle merged with the long-standing feud between the eastern part of the state, dominated by Boston, the lesser ports and mercantile interests generally, and the farming west. To pay the public debt the Boston-influenced legislature decreed taxes which the West found intolerable. For the farmers of the up-country were not in the least like those of Pennsylvania, or the planters of the South. Their land was poor; they could not produce for the market, but only for their own subsistence, as is shown by the fact that they were not very eager customers for expensive things like imported cloth. Their contribution to trade lay only in the small amounts of tea and sugar for which they bartered what they could spare of their harvest. Some had done well from the sale of provisions during the war, but others were badly hit by the dislocation of the times: here and there land went out of cultivation and began to revert to wilderness. Harvests were good in 1784, but hardship grew worse as the pressure from the state government increased. As one sympathizer pointed out, … when a farmer brings his produce to market, he is obliged to take up with the buyer’s offer, and is forced, not infrequently, to take merchandise in exchange, which is totally insufficient to discharge his taxes. There is no family that does not want some money for some purposes, and the little which the farmer carries home from market, must be applied to other uses, besides paying off the [tax] collector’s bills. The consequence is, distraint is made upon his stock or real estate.2