Though political conflicts over slavery would dwarf all others in decades to come, the most explosive issue in the postwar era was a debt crisis that wreaked havoc on family farms. When American ports reopened to British trade, wartime shortages and inflation gave way to peacetime glut and depression. Small farmers were the hardest hit, for agricultural prices were the first to fall. By 1786, many farms were so heavily mortgaged that their owners stood on the brink of bankruptcy, and to make matters worse, merchants who had earlier extended credit now demanded that customers pay their accounts in full. In state after state, farmers pressed legislatures to lower taxes on farmland, suspend debt collection, abolish imprisonment for debt, and ease the depression by issuing large sums of paper money.
Nowhere was this agitation more ferocious than in Massachusetts, whose lawmakers resisted the debtor’s demands. In August and September 1786, many hundreds of armed farmers—most of them Continental Army veterans—seized courthouses to suspend debtors’ trials. Daniel Shays, a captain during the war, emerged as the movement’s leader. That fall he organized 1,000 men to march on Boston, whose merchants spent $200,000 to raise a private militia that turned back Shays’s troops. In January 1787, they regrouped to besiege the Springfield armory but this time suffered a decisive defeat. Rural uprisings were also suppressed in New Hampshire, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina.
In the wake of these rebellions, the wealthy classes moved to consolidate their political power. From late May to mid-September 1787, delegates from every state but Rhode Island held a closed-door convention in Philadelphia. George Washington chaired the gathering, whose participants came from the revolutionary elite. They included ambassadors, high-ranking army officers, Continental Congressmen, and the revolution’s financiers. As far as the public knew, the delegates would amend the Articles of Confederation that had established a national government during the war. Instead, they wrote an entirely new Constitution of the United States.
The Constitution divided the government into legislative, executive, and judicial departments, each authorized to curb action by the others. On the legislative side there was a bicameral U.S. Congress, made up of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Delegates to the House would be elected every two years by voters who met the minimum qualifications to cast ballots for their state legislature; and the number of seats apportioned to each state would depend on the size of its population. The senators—two for every state regardless of population—would be chosen by state legislatures and serve six-year terms. The president and vice president would be chosen every four years by appointees to an “electoral college” where each state had as many votes as it had seats in the House and Senate. From the Supreme Court to lower courts, federal judges would be selected by the president (subject to Senate approval) and serve indefinite terms.
Unlike the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution empowered the national government to levy taxes and tariffs, pay the war debt, regulate commerce, coin money and set its value, standardize bankruptcy laws, and otherwise look out for businessmen’s needs. New prohibitions on the states outlawed actions demanded by indebted farmers. No state could issue its own money, allow debts to be paid in anything but gold and silver coinage, or make laws that impaired contracts such as mortgages and loans.
Southern planters won a favorable compromise when the Philadelphia convention debated whether slaves should be counted for the purpose of apportioning seats in the House of Representatives. Under the “three-fifths clause,” 60 percent of the slave population was factored in and southern states got many more seats than they would otherwise possess. The Constitution also stipulated that states could import slaves from overseas for the next twenty years. Another clause obligated every state to return runaway slaves to their masters.
By summer 1788, the Constitution had been ratified by the required quorum of states, whose voters elected special conventions to debate the pros and cons. The patchwork of state restrictions on voting rights placed these proceedings in the hands of men who owned property—at least enough to make them taxpayers. This did not guarantee agreement, however. More often than not, ratification won by a nose.
While the wealthy generally endorsed it, state officials anxious to preserve their powers often came down on the other side. Popular radicals divided, many backing the Constitution as a means to solidify the republic, many others rejecting it as a yoke on democracy, and some waffling back and forth. Urban artisans championed ratification as the key to prosperity; a national government empowered to tax imports could protect American industries from foreign competition. Small farmers mounted the most resolute opposition, fearful that the new government would tax them into bankruptcy. As one farmer charged at the Massachusetts convention, the rich aimed to “get all the power and all the money into their own hands, and then . . . swallow up all us little folks.”
When the Constitution became law, cities across the country celebrated with parades that included everyone from merchants and lawyers to apprentices and common laborers. The largest took place in Philadelphia on July 4, 1788, led by local dignitaries, regiments of Continental Army troops, and a marching band. Some 17,000 people turned out, and artisans formed more than forty contingents representing their various crafts. But riots were brewing in rural Pennsylvania; just one week earlier, a band of farmers near Wilkes-Barre had kidnapped a judge involved with land speculators. In other states, too, the backcountry was as angry as the cities were joyous.
In spring 1789, the new government took power, with George Washington as president, both houses of Congress controlled by the well-to-do, and a great many citizens wary of or outright opposed to this concentration of power. That fall Congress proposed a series of constitutional amendments aimed at “extending the ground of public confidence in the Government.” Ten of these provisions, known as the Bill of Rights, were subsequently ratified by the states and added to the Constitution in December 1791. The First Amendment declared that Congress would not abridge popular rights to religious freedom, to free speech and a free press, to peaceful assembly, or to petition government to redress grievances. Other amendments guaranteed rights to bear arms, to protection from unwarranted searches and seizures, to trial by an impartial jury, and to other safeguards against abuse by criminal and civil courts.
So ended the American Revolution, the Bill of Rights pledging to protect the many from persecution by the governing few. For forty years both the presidency and Congress belonged to the revolutionary elite and their protégés. In the 1790s, they split into rival parties, the Federalists backed by merchants and financiers, and the Democratic-Republicans favored by planters, farmers, and artisans. By the mid-1820s, the Federalists had collapsed into the Democratic-Republicans, whose rival sectors would regroup as the Democratic Party and the Whigs. These factional divisions and redivisions were intensely acrimonious, but however federal elections turned out, certain basics remained the same: a coalition of planters and urban businessmen ran the government; federal policies fostered slavery, industrial development, and national expansion; the U.S. Army was perpetually at war with Indian nations resisting encroachment on their land.
REPUBLICAN LEGACIES
In 1794, Independence Day gatherings outstripped anything the nation had seen since the Philadelphia parade of 1788, and this time their tone was more defiant than triumphant. In city after city craftsmen came out to damn the reigning Federalist Party, cheer Democratic-Republicans, and celebrate the Fourth of July as “a memento to the oppressed to rise and assert their rights.” These sentiments resonated with broader patterns. In years to come working people of all sorts challenged oppression on republican grounds, defining liberty and equality not as privileges or prizes but as inherent rights. Common ideals did not, however, mean common cause in a political system increasingly open to white men, closed to other free workers, and tryannical toward slaves.
The Federalist regime of the 1790s enraged masses of Americans by rul
ing like British aristocrats. National and state legislators repeatedly held secret sessions and passed laws written in such arcane language that the general public could not decipher their meaning. In 1792, Congress enacted a militia law that authorized the states to draft men into service. In 1794, President Washington sent some 13,000 militiamen into Pennsylvania’s backcountry to crush popular resistance to a federal tax on whiskey, which farmers distilled from their excess corn. In 1798, Congress tried to silence anti-Federalists with a Sedition Act that made it a crime punishable by fine and imprisonment to publish statements that subjected the government to “contempt or disrepute.” Especially damaging to craftsmen, the Federalists constructed a legal system based on British law, which treated labor unions as criminal conspiracies.
The earliest American unions appeared in the 1790s. They were established by white craft journeymen, starting with Philadelphia shoemakers in 1792. Other pioneers included tailors in Baltimore and printers and cabinetmakers in New York City. In the early 1800s, the movement spread to carpenters, masons, and tailors in New York; shoemakers in Baltimore and Pittsburgh; and printers in seven cities from Boston to New Orleans. Condemning employers for “depriving free men of their just rights,” unionists aimed to carry republican self-government into the workplace—to regulate wages and hours of labor, to secure jobs for union members and to keep others out of union shops. Whenever they made progress on these goals, unionists were hauled into court and convicted on charges of conspiracy. Long after the Federalist Party was a dead letter, the jurists it had appointed and the legal doctrines it had embraced undercut union organizing.
Politics offered a clearer field. In the mid-1790s, white craftsmen, seamen, and farmers joined with some well-to-do dissidents in a large network of political clubs that soon merged into the Democratic-Republican Party headed by Thomas Jefferson. The clubs championed causes the aristocratic Federalists despised: extensions of voting rights, an end to closed-door law-making, the establishment of public schools. They held dinners to honor the French Revolution of 1789–99, circulated radical pamphlets such as Tom Paine’s Rights of Man (1791–92), and in 1800 helped to propel Jefferson into the presidency.
Jefferson’s election ushered in twenty-four years of Democratic-Republican administrations headed by Virginia planters and widely supported by white workingmen. In some respects democracy advanced. Federalists slowly lost their hold on state and local governments, which began to provide for public education and to increase the portion of public officials who were elected rather than appointed. By 1825, all but three states (Virginia, Rhode Island, and Louisiana) granted voting rights to every white male citizen, and all but two (South Carolina and Delaware) chose presidential electors by polling voters instead of state legislators. White servitude receded as the white electorate expanded. State and local courts stopped enforcing indenture contracts for craft apprentices. The indenture of European immigrants died out as state lawmakers eliminated imprisonment for debt and thus liberated redemptioners from debt bondage.
Jeffersonian democracy did not expand women’s rights, however. As under British rule, the legal system gave husbands absolute title to their wives’ personal property, including any wages they earned. As in the past, husbands could legally subject their wives to beatings that did not cause irreparable bodily harm. As white men gained wider access to the ballot, moreover, women were left behind. They even lost what little ground they had gained in New Jersey, where Democratic-Republican lawmakers disfranchised women in 1807.
Industrial development added to women’s subordination in some ways and liberated them in others. The earliest U.S. factories—textile mills in northern states—recruited a white workforce largely composed of women and girls. Some mills hired whole families, and in such cases male heads of household received the wages for all of their kin. By the 1820s, however, it was more common for textile manufacturers to staff their mills with young unmarried women, especially farmers’ daughters. Mill jobs regimented their lives. They worked at least twelve hours a day, six days a week, and resided in company-owned boarding houses that imposed strict rules regarding curfews, bedtimes, church attendance, and so forth. But their wages went into their own pockets, and that gave most mill women a greater sense of independence than they had ever before known.
As one worker later recalled of newcomers to the mill complex in Lowell, Massachusetts, “When they felt the jingle of silver in their pocket, there for the first time, their heads became erect and they walked as if on air.” While many women sent money to their families, just as many spent their earnings on themselves, buying new clothes, saving up dowries, sometimes sending themselves to school. Writing home from Lowell, a worker told her family, “Others may find fault with me and call me selfish, but I think I should spend my earnings as I please.”
Mill women’s independent spirit sparked labor protests as well. In December 1828, a strike by women at the Cocheco mill in Dover, New Hamshire, forced the company to rescind new rules that fined workers for lateness and forbade them to talk on the job. To publicize their demands, the strikers staged a parade that resembled Fourth of July celebrations. Accompanied by a brass band, they marched through town carrying flags, setting off firecrackers, and shouting their determination to resist “the shocking fate of slaves.”
If slavery shocked some white Americans, it flourished nonetheless. As agreed at the Constitutional Convention, Congress outlawed the importation of slaves as of January 1, 1808. By then, however, slaves numbered about 1 million; and new births together with illegal importations would double that figure by 1830. The free black population grew at a slower pace, from about 180,000 in 1808 to 320,000 in 1830.
Congressional policy on admitting new states to the federal union helped slavery spread far beyond its old strongholds. From the 1790s onward, admissions proceeded according to a quota system designed to equalize the numbers of slave states and “free states” (where slavery was either illegal or marked for death via gradual emancipation). Slaveholders thus controlled half of the U.S. Senate, where their spokesmen could derail legislation unfriendly to slavery. This arrangement almost broke down in 1820, when Congress debated the admission of Maine as the twelfth free state and Missouri as the twelfth slave state. Northerners in the House of Representatives vehemently objected to slavery in Missouri, which lay in territory earlier designated “free soil.” In the end, however, conciliation carried the day. Under a plan called the Missouri Compromise, Congress agreed that Missouri could come in with slavery intact, that additional slave states would have to lie to the south of Missouri, and that slave states and free states would continue to join the union in pairs.
While politicians sought to reconcile slavery and liberty, rebellious slaves carried republican doctrines to more radical conclusions. In fall 1800, Virginia militiamen broke up an underground army of about 600 slaves and some free black workers poised to march on the capital city of Richmond. Their leader was a young blacksmith named Gabriel, one of the 5 percent of U.S. slaves who could read and write. He had worked in Richmond since 1798, identifying white abolitionists, mixing with white craftsmen active in the Democratic-Republican movement, and avidly following news from the island of San Domingo (Hispaniola), where slaves’ successful war for emancipation had widened into a fight for national independence. Along the way he came to believe that a slave revolt in Virginia could spark a more general uprising. His army planned to enter Richmond behind a banner proclaiming “Death or Liberty,” rally support from many whites as well as the black populace, and force the state government to complete the American Revolution by ending slavery and upholding equal rights for every man.
Gabriel and twenty-five of his lieutenants went to the gallows for daring to think such things possible. One of them told the court, “I have nothing more to offer than what General Washington would have had to offer had he been taken by the British and put to trial. I have adventured my life in endeavoring to obtain the liberty of my countrymen, and
am a willing sacrifice in their cause.” Within a year some veterans of Gabriel’s army regrouped under a ferryman named Sancho and laid plans for a rural uprising along the border of Virginia and North Carolina, once again expecting help from poor whites. When authorities got wind of the project in spring 1802, another twenty-five bondsmen were hanged. Following the executions in Virginia, the American Revolution receded as a reference point for slave resistance. But republican ideals remained a rich source of inspiration thanks to events in San Domingo, where black revolutionaries overthrew French colonialism and founded the independent republic of Haiti in 1804.
In 1822, authorities in Charleston, South Carolina, hanged thirty-five men for inciting a plot to replicate what Haiti modeled. The mastermind was the carpenter Denmark Vesey. A former slave who had purchased his freedom in 1800, he was the only freeman in the conspiracy’s inner circle. Like Gabriel, Vesey could read, and Charleston’s slaves had long relied on him for news of Haiti. In 1821, when Haitian troops overcame a protracted Spanish effort to recolonize their country, he turned from agitation to organizing. As one recruit later testified: “He said, we were deprived of our rights and privileges . . . and that it was high time for us to seek our rights, and that we were fully able to conquer the whites, if only we were unanimous and courageous as the St. Domingo people were.” The result was the largest slave conspiracy in U.S. history. At least several thousand people took part; some said as many as 9,000.
From the Folks Who Brought You the Weekend Page 7
