1789 On March 4, the U.S. Constitution takes effect, and the first Congress of the United States convenes. On April 1, the House achieves quorum and elects Frederick Muhlenberg the first House Speaker; on April 6, the Senate reaches quorum and chooses John Langdon as the first Senate President (pro tempore). On April 30, President George Washington delivers his first inaugural address. On June 8, James Madison, the representative from Virginia, proposes a set of amendments to the Constitution. North Carolina ratifies the Constitution. Washington appoints John Jay the first chief justice of the Supreme Court. Hamilton is appointed secretary of the Treasury. On July 14, the French Revolution begins with the storming of the Bastille in Paris.
1790 After returning to America from his service as minister to France, Thomas Jefferson accepts appointment as the first Secretary of State.
1791 In England, Thomas Paine publishes the first part of Rights of Man, in part a response to Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790). On December 15, the Bill of Rights, the name given to the first ten amendments to the U.S. Constitution, is ratified.
General Introduction
A decade after signing the Declaration of Independence, the Philadelphia physician Benjamin Rush made an important observation that historians are fond of citing. “There is nothing more common than to confound the terms of the American revolution with those of the late American war,” Rush wrote in 1786. “The American war is over: but this is far from being the case with the American revolution. On the contrary, nothing but the first act of the great drama is closed” (pp. 308-309).
As Rush recognized, the events he consciously called a revolution had two main elements. The first, which had ended successfully only three years earlier, was to secure political independence from Great Britain. That story in turn hinged on two great questions. First, how did the colonists move from resistance to revolution, from seeking to maintain their rights within the British Empire to renouncing its authority entirely? Second, once the last hopes for reconciliation had evaporated, how did the Americans prevail in a long and difficult military struggle against the greatest power in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world?
But winning independence, Rush also recognized, was only the first part of a greater story. In his mind, the Revolution was more than a struggle for independence and home rule. It had also become a movement to establish new forms of government, modeled on republican principles that made the people the only proper source of political authority. Rush devoted the remainder of his essay to discussing how this new form of government could be “perfected.” Within a year, this effort culminated in the form of the federal Constitution drafted at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787, a Constitution whose first stated purpose was “to form a more perfect union.”
These two great themes—the achievement of independence and the “perfection” of republican government—are the subject of the documents collected in this volume. These documents cannot capture the experience of the Revolution in its totality. No single volume, however carefully edited, could illustrate the diversity of experience and the range of issues that were felt and voiced during the quarter century of history that separates the beginning of the crisis with Britain in the mid-1760s from the adoption of the Constitution in the late 1780s.
When Benjamin Rush spoke of the Revolutionary War, he meant both the movement that led to independence and the military struggle that secured it. Defined in this way, the Revolution really began in the mid-1760s, when the colonists first argued that Parliament had no authority to impose taxes or other laws on a people who sent no representatives of their own to distant London. In the crises over the Stamp Act ( 1765-1766) and the Townshend duties ( 1767-1770), Americans and Britons defined and sharpened their arguments about the nature of the British Empire and the rights and duties of its American colonies.
By 1773 these rival theories had exposed a deep fault line between the dominant political views in each country. Americans insisted that they could be governed only by laws to which they had directly consented, through the votes of their freely elected representatives in their own separate legislative assemblies. The British position rested on different assumptions. Since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Parliament had been recognized as the sovereign source of law within Britain. If Americans were part of that realm, as they professed to be, then they were ultimately subject to Parliament, even if no American members sat in the House of Commons.
Even in 1773, however, no one in America was actively promoting the idea of national independence. Nor, of course, was anyone in Britain intent on forcing the colonies into a state of rebellion. On both sides of the Atlantic, political leaders of goodwill hoped the controversies of the late 1760s would soon be forgotten, and the underlying harmony of the empire restored. What happened instead was that a crisis no one had foreseen erupted in the fall of 1773 and then spun out of control in the spring and summer of 1774.
Its immediate cause was Parliament’s passage of a Tea Act, adopted to alleviate the financial woes of the East India Company by giving this powerful corporation a monopoly over the sale of tea in America. The colonists disliked the idea of a monopoly, but what disturbed them even more was that the Act retained the duty on imported tea that had been left in place in 1770, when colonial protests finally persuaded the British government to repeal the duties on other imports levied in the Townshend Act of 1767. Once again, colonists protested. In most ports, royal officials prudently allowed the tea ships to return to Britain, their cargoes unloaded. In Boston, however, Governor Thomas Hutchinson insisted on enforcing the letter of the law, and refused to grant the three ships the necessary clearances. Rather than allow the tea to be landed and the duties paid, the townsmen held their own Tea Party on the evening of December 16, 1773. Some 342 chests of tea, valued at £9000, were soon brewing in Boston Harbor.
In London, the following winter was given over to concocting a different, more potent brew of measures. In response to the news from Boston, the government of Lord North, firmly backed by King George III, asked Parliament to approve a set of acts to punish Boston and the province of Massachusetts for their defiance of the empire. These measures, known as the Coercive or Intolerable Acts, had several goals. The first, the Boston Port Act, closed the town harbor to commerce until full restitution was made for the destroyed tea. Next came the Massachusetts Government Act, altering the colony’s royal charter of government in ways that would presumably strengthen the authority of the empire. In adopting these acts, the King, his ministers, and their loyal majority in Parliament had two further objectives. One was to isolate Massachusetts by showing the other colonies just how costly defiance of the empire could be. The other was to provide a conclusive demonstration of just how sovereign Parliament really was. A Parliament that could adopt these measures and see them enforced would indeed be America’s sovereign.
Both calculations failed, and their failure converted American opposition to the claims of Parliament into a genuine revolution against the empire. Far from isolating Massachusetts, the Coercive Acts persuaded the other provinces to rally to its defense because it was only “suffering in the common cause” of securing American rights. At the First Continental Congress of September-October 1774, delegates from twelve colonies (only the frontier settlement of Georgia did not attend) adopted a common strategy of resistance and agreed upon the basic constitutional positions Americans would uphold. A Second Continental Congress met at Philadelphia in early May 1775. Three weeks earlier, violence had erupted in Massachusetts when its new royal governor, General Thomas Gage, sent soldiers to seize colonial arms and munitions stored in nearby Concord. Faced with the specter of civil war, the Second Congress did not flinch from converting the Massachusetts provisional army into a Continental Army under the command of George Washington, the colonies’ best-known soldier. Nor were the delegates (now including representatives from Georgia) willing to modify the strong positions they had adopted the previous fall.
E
ven though a full year passed before Congress felt that Americans were ready for independence, the outbreak of war made that decision inevitable because neither Congress nor the British government was prepared to retreat from the positions each had adopted. Neither side had sought this result. The colonists had no cadre of revolutionary agitators seeking to foment crises or exploit British miscues in the cause of national liberation. Most Americans would have been content to remain subjects of the British Crown. And the British obviously had no reason to try to provoke Americans into acts of defiance as a pretext for cracking down on colonial rights. But on the key issue of Parliament’s jurisdiction over America, the two countries found themselves in fundamental disagreement. Both had valid and potent arguments to make, and neither side could see how its fundamental concerns would be answered if its positions were not vindicated. Both found themselves increasingly suspicious of the other’s motives—even though Americans repeatedly declared they sought nothing more than the restoration of rights, while spokesmen for the British position argued that it was only reasonable to require the colonists to contribute to the costs of the empire. Had the British government ever offered the colonists a bona fide opportunity to negotiate, or had Congress agreed to send a peace delegation to London, it is entirely possible that war could have been averted. But neither was prepared to take that initiative, and so the war came.
The military conflict that began in April 1775 finally ended eight years later, when the Treaty of Paris formally acknowledged the independence of the United States. The war placed an enormous strain on American resources. If the British had thought that Americans would simply break and run when faced with the disciplined formations of the royal army, the engagements at Concord and later at Bunker Hill quickly disabused them of that hope. In 1776 a massive British fleet brought 30,000 soldiers to New York. In a series of engagements, this force repeatedly outmaneuvered and pummeled Washington’s army, first occupying New York City, then threatening to liberate New Jersey from patriot control. Only Washington’s daring raids on Trenton and Princeton kept the American cause from collapsing.
The campaign of 1777 was arguably the turning point of the war. The strategic initiative belonged to Britain. While one British army, led by General John Burgoyne, was sent south from Canada, the forces based in New York under the command of General Sir William Howe and his brother, Admiral Lord Richard Howe, prepared to occupy Philadelphia, the American capital. But these campaigns were poorly coordinated, and both started late. While the Howes undertook a laborious movement by sea, sailing all the way up the Chesapeake Bay, Burgoyne’s force was slogging through the New York wilderness to transfer its line of attack from Lake Champlain to the Hudson River. American forces commanded by Horatio Gates built up strength by drawing on the militia of densely populated New England. In October, Burgoyne, short on supplies, surrendered his army at Saratoga, while the Howes occupied Philadelphia, which had little strategic significance.
The news of Saratoga had its decisive impact in Paris, where a trio of American commissioners, led by Benjamin Franklin, had been attempting to negotiate an alliance with Britain’s ancient enemy, France. In February 1778 the government of King Louis XVI was finally prepared to enter the war as America’s ally. Hard pressed to supply its army across 3,000 miles of Atlantic Ocean, Britain now faced a graver strategic challenge.
The British responded with a significant change of strategy. Late in 1778, they shifted the theater of operations from the Middle Atlantic states to the South, first occupying Savannah, then preparing to carry the war into the Carolinas and Virginia. There were significant pockets of loyalist strength in this region. The British also knew that the presence of hundreds of thousands of African-American slaves made these states the soft underbelly of the American union.
Over the next three years, British forces carried the war northward, until Virginia became the major site of battle. Other British forces remained encamped in New York City, under Washington’s watchful eye. The decisive development came in 1781, when a British army commanded by General Charles Cornwallis encamped on the peninsula between the York and James Rivers. Aware that a French fleet was available to clamp off seaward access, Washington secured a promise that the ships of Admiral Rochambeau would descend on the Chesapeake, while he himself managed a skillful march of a Franco-American force southward from New York. Isolated and besieged at Yorktown, Cornwallis surrendered on October 19, 1781.
News of this defeat led to the fall of Lord North’s government and the installation of a new ministry committed to ending the war and recognizing American independence. At Paris a peace commission of John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin negotiated ably on behalf of American interests, securing favorable terms that granted the United States boundaries stretching westward to the Mississippi River. In April 1783 the definitive terms of the treaty were set.
So closed what Benjamin Rush later called “the first act of the great drama.” To squeeze into one act all the scenes of military and political action required to secure independence would be a great understatement. But Rush was right to think that the meaning of the Revolution could not be limited to the struggle for independence alone. What made it more than a war of national liberation, what made it truly revolutionary, was the common belief that Americans had been granted an opportunity few other peoples had known, and that none had managed to fulfill: in the words of John Adams, “to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive” (p. 86). Such governments, Adams further observed, had to be “republican” in form and principle. They had to draw their authority from the people, yet at the same time be so balanced as to prevent the people from misusing their power.
This part of the drama took the form of an experiment that accompanied the movement toward independence in 1776. During the preceding two years, the authority of the legal governments in most of the colonies had collapsed, because governors appointed by the Crown could not collaborate in organizing defiance to its rule. Real power flowed instead to the network of committees, conventions, and congresses that had first formed in 1774 to carry out the urgent work of resistance and to implement the program of Congress. This apparatus had grown more potent with the outbreak of civil war in April 1775.
With each passing month, however, Americans grew more nervous about the absence of legal government. With courts closed in most colonies, many normal operations of government ceased. By early 1776 individual colonies were petitioning Congress to be allowed to resume legal government. Congress first granted this permission on a case-by-case basis. Then, in May 1776, it adopted a blanket resolution authorizing new governments to be created everywhere.
Americans could not simply restore their prior colonial governments. Except in Rhode Island and Connecticut (the two colonies that appointed all of their officials), executive and judicial office-holders served under the authority of either the Crown or the proprietary families (the Penns in Pennsylvania and Delaware, the Calverts in Maryland) in whom the Crown had vested the right of government. Some new way had to be found to reconstitute executive and judicial power. Moreover, the colonists harbored an array of grievances and grudges against the distribution of power among the different parts of government under the old imperial regime. In the first enthusiastic blush of revolution, they were inclined to strengthen the authority of the most representative branch of government—the legislature—while weakening the executive. Given that wars ordinarily place a premium on the effective use of executive power, this might seem like a naive decision. But it was also a natural reaction to past grievances, when governors acting under instructions from London had often prevented colonial legislatures from pursuing the measures they favored.
Acting under these assumptions, the colonies began writing constitutions that made the legislature the dominant branch of government. If any check were needed upon government, it would come from the people themselves, relying on the practice of annual elections to control their r
epresentatives. This assumed that the people would be willing and able to carry out this duty—that they possessed the virtue (meaning commitment to the public good) that the citizens of a republic were expected to maintain.
By May 1777 most of the states had adopted new constitutions. In doing so, they also established a new definition of what a constitution was. In Britain, the word constitution was commonly used to describe the underlying traditions, conventions, and principles of government. In America, however, the word acquired a more precise meaning. A constitution was a document, adopted at a known historical moment, that explicitly established and empowered, and thereby potentially limited, the authority of a government. In Britain, the leading principle of constitutional government was the legal supremacy of a sovereign Parliament. In America, it was to become the supremacy of the Constitution over all government.
That understanding did not take hold immediately. Its acceptance was more the result of the ways in which these new governments had to use their power to support the war effort. The Revolution required governments to act far more extensively and intrusively than their colonial predecessors had ever done. They had to raise taxes, soldiers, and supplies from a people who had never been asked to support a war on this scale. Inevitably, the reactions this activity provoked went beyond criticisms of specific policies to consider whether the new constitutions were as well framed as they could have been. They had been written, after all, in the midst of war, by provincial conventions that had other business to transact and little experience on which to rely.
Constitution-making also had a national dimension. In June 1776 Congress drafted Articles of Confederation to provide a constitutional framework of union. But three issues prevented it from reaching agreement on this plan of union: the rules of voting within Congress; the apportionment of expenses among the states; and the control of interior western lands. In the wake of the great victory at Saratoga in 1777, Congress mustered the determination to complete the task and sent the Articles to the states for approval. But because this completed draft granted Congress no authority over western lands, a bloc of landless states (that is, states lacking claims to lands west of the Appalachians) delayed ratifying the Confederation. Maryland, the last holdout, withheld its assent until February 1781.
Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights Page 2
