Founding America: Documents from the Revolution to the Bill of Rights (3 page)

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.

Even 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 representatives. 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.

By then, many national leaders recognized that the Articles would not give Congress the range of powers that the war had revealed it needed. Congress could only issue recommendations and requisitions to the states. It could not enact laws binding individuals to obey its decisions. And it lacked independent sources of revenue or the authority to levy taxes. The states generally did the best they could to comply with congressional decisions. But the impression inevitably took hold that a federal union that depended on the good faith of its member states was a government in name only.

In 1781 Congress sent its first proposed amendment of the Articles to the states: a request to be able to levy an impost (duty) on selected imports (p. 194). Like the original Confederation, this amendment required the unanimous approval of the states. And like all subsequent efforts to amend the Articles, this amendment failed to surmount that hurdle. In 1783 Congress proposed a new set of amendments designed to answer its need for revenue; these also failed (p. 213). In 1784, with the country slipping into a postwar recession and British goods flooding American markets while American ships were excluded from British harbors, Congress submitted two more proposals asking the states to grant it authority over foreign commerce (p. 217). These also failed.