Knowing as we do that these huge political and constitutional questions over sovereignty, slavery, and size would define the history of the emerging American republic well into the next century, the belief that these problems could be solved in a few weeks of earnest effort during the summer of 1776 seems unrealistic in the extreme. Looking back from the edge of the grave over forty years later, Adams recalled that it was “a standing miracle” that the delegates could agree on anything:
The colonies had grown up under conditions so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a difficult enterprise.15
But that was not how he felt in the crucible of the moment. Adams was especially distraught to discover that the near-unanimous consensus on American independence was followed by almost total disagreement over how an independent American republic should be configured. “Thus we are sowing the Seeds of Ignorance, Corruption, and Injustice,” he lamented, “in the fairest Field of Liberty ever appeared on Earth, even in the first attempts to cultivate it.” It was distressing to realize that, beyond independence, there was no consensus on what being an American meant, or whether there was such a thing at all. For Adams it was especially distressing to witness such conspicuous failure “in the first formation of Government erected by the People themselves on their own Authority, without the poisonous Interposition of Kings and Priests.” There was, to be sure, such a thing as “The Cause,” but the glorious potency of that concept did not translate to “The People of the United States.”16
The debate over the Dickinson Draft was simultaneously revealing and inconclusive, the former because it exposed the severe limits that would be imposed on any robust expression of federal power, the latter because final resolutions on all the controversial questions had to be deferred. The delegates in the Continental Congress could not afford to sustain focus on the unresolved political issues because in late August and early September the Continental Army suffered a series of devastating defeats on Long Island and Manhattan that put its very survival at risk. It made no sense to debate the future shape of the American government if the Continental Army was annihilated, rendering any independent American future highly problematic.
Over the course of the next year, from the fall of 1776 to the fall of 1777, the primary focus of the Continental Congress, again for understandable reasons, remained the war. With the exception of George Washington’s splendid victories at Trenton and Princeton, General William Howe and the British army dominated the battlefield, producing victories at Brandywine and Germantown that led to the capture and occupation of Philadelphia, which prompted the flight of the Continental Congress (as Adams put it, “like a covey of pigeons”) to York, Pennsylvania. Revisions of the Dickinson Draft had to take a backseat to the pressing imperative of sustaining the Continental Army and not losing the war.
But despite those rather essential distractions, revisions of the Dickinson Draft proceeded apace. And all the revisions reduced the prospective power of any central government. Article XIX of the Dickinson Draft, for example, had contained language that might be interpreted to give the Confederation Congress authority over foreign policy. It was dropped. The Dickinson Draft gave the Congress ultimate authority in resolving questions about western borders. This was blurred. And the inherent ambiguity of the Dickinson Draft on the question of state versus federal sovereignty was clarified in an amendment by Thomas Burke of South Carolina: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom and independence, and every Power, Jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation expressly delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”17
The final draft of the Articles of Confederation that was sent to the states in November 1777, then, had been cleansed of any language that envisioned the existence of an American nation-state after the war. To be sure, the Dickinson Draft had always been a tortured document that leaned toward a state-based confederation. And it was always clear that the vast majority of Americans did not regard the war for independence as a movement for American nationhood, to the extent they gave the matter any thought at all. The final draft of the Articles of Confederation, then, merely confirmed and institutionalized that conviction.
When the Articles were sent to the states, the letter accompanying the document urged ratification more as a wartime measure than as any commitment to a future American union. Failure to ratify, the letter warned, would send a signal of weakness to the British government, which would then redouble its military effort, thereby forcing America “to bid adieu to independence, to liberty, to safety.” Even the states that swiftly ratified submitted amendments, nearly a hundred, most designed to protect local and state interests from federal encroachment. The Congress simply ignored them, but they constituted another sign that whatever pretensions for a national union might have existed in the early months of the war had wholly evaporated as the conflict drew to a close.18
Then there was the matter of the army, along with the Continental Congress the other institutional projection of collective commitment with national implications. As the war dragged on, the same centrifugal forces that moved political power from the Congress to the states also undermined popular support for the Continental Army. Over two hundred years later, when paintings, films, and histories remind us of the deplorable conditions endured by ordinary men to win American independence—and most of the images and words are utterly accurate—it is difficult to recover the combination of abuse and neglect directed at the Continental Army by most of the American citizenry at the time.19
There are two enormous and overlapping ironies at work here, which taken together represent a central paradox of the American Revolution: namely, the two institutions that made victory in the war for independence possible, the Continental Congress and the Continental Army, represented a consolidated kind of political and military power that defied the republican principles on which the American Revolution was purportedly founded. If we wished to push this line of argument to its logical limit, we would say that the ideological and emotional hostility to any conspicuous and centralized expression of political authority rendered a viable American nation inherently incompatible with the goals of the American Revolution.
The military side of this story had its origins in the fall of 1776. The American debacle on Long Island and Manhattan prompted a conference among Washington, his staff, and a delegation from the Congress. It was now clear for all to see that the Continental Army, as currently configured, was no match for the combined force of the British army and navy. Washington insisted, and the civilian delegates agreed, that there needed to be a “New Establishment,” consisting of an American army three times larger than the current fifteen-thousand-man force, with enlistments to last three years or, better yet, “for the duration.” Given the overall size of the American population, Washington argued that he was asking for only a fraction of what was demographically possible, meaning that the number of American males available for military service was several times larger than what was needed to overwhelm the British army. If provided with such a large, enduringly dedicated force, Washington and his staff believed they could end the war in a year.20
In October 1776 Congress approved all the requests. But when President John Hancock sent the troop quotas to the respective state legislatures, they were regarded as requests, and none of the states complied. What was militarily necessary was clear, but what was politically impossible was clearer. The states, after all, needed to protect their own people, best done with militia, often paid at a higher rate than soldiers in the Continental Army. As for the creation of a cadre of Continentals committed to service “for the duration,” that smelled distinctly like a “standing army” in the British mode, which the American Revolution was
designed to destroy. The hard core of the Continental Army was eventually comprised of misfits—indentured servants, recently arrived immigrants, emancipated slaves, unemployed artisans. The vast majority of “the soldiery,” as Washington called them, were one-year enlistees who came and went like transients, an army of amateurs.
Washington’s reports from the field became a litany of lamentations: bemoaning the lack of food, clothing, shoes, ammunition; warning that the one-year enlistments put the very survival of the army at risk on an annual basis; urging the necessity of a larger army of veteran troops who could assume the offensive instead of fighting a purely defensive war. But the unspoken and unattractive truth was that the marginal status of the Continental Army was reassuring for the vast majority of Americans, since a robust and professional army on the British model contradicted the very values it was supposedly fighting for. It had to be just strong enough to win the war, or perhaps more accurately not lose it, but not so strong as to threaten the republican goals the war was ultimately about.21
Beginning in 1780, Washington went on the offensive, claiming that the lack of support for the Continental Army was a direct consequence of the failure of the Continental Congress to impose its will on the states. “Certain I am,” he warned, “that unless Congress speaks in a more decisive tone; unless they are vested with powers by the several states competent to the great purpose of War…, that our Cause is lost…. I see one head gradually changing into thirteen.” Over and over he repeated the refrain that a confederation of sovereign states, almost by definition, lacked the unity of purpose necessary to win the war: “In a word, our measures are not under the influence and direction of one council, but thirteen, each of which is actuated by local views and politics.” As a result, “we have become a many-headed Monster, a heterogeneous Mass, that never will Nor can steer to the same point.” Though his own personal honor was obviously invested in the eventual triumph of American independence, he wanted it placed in the record that “if we fail for want of proper exertions in any of the State Governments, I trust the responsibility will fall where it ought, and that I shall stand justified to the Congress, to my Country, and to the World.” If a potent Congress and powerful army were, in fact, incompatible with the principles on which the American Revolution was based, then everyone needed to realize that the war could not be won, and all those principles would prove meaningless.22
Despite his own personal preference for political unity vested in the Continental Congress, in 1777 Washington started writing a series of “Circular Letters to the States.” It had become obvious that the power of the purse now resided in the state governments, and if he wanted to lobby for longer enlistments and money to give his troops shirts and shoes, the governors and legislatures of the states were the proper place to direct his attention. Doing so was itself a statement about the increasingly diffuse political realities that the protracted conflict had created. The survival of the Continental Army was now dependent on persuading thirteen provinces, each of them divided into multiple counties and towns, to act together.23
If there was any doubt in Washington’s mind whether the center was going to hold—and there was—there was no doubt in anyone’s mind about who was the one-man centerpiece of the American Revolution. Even before independence was declared, Washington had become the chief symbol of resistance to British rule.
It helped that he looked the part. Biographers do not agree about his height.* But all concur that he was a full head taller than the average male of his time, a physical specimen at just over two hundred pounds, who was also reputed to be the finest horseman in Virginia. In his youth he had earned fame during the French and Indian War for surviving the massacre at the Monongahela in 1755, when the British army under General Edward Braddock was ambushed outside modern-day Pittsburgh and Washington lived to tell the tale, despite bullet holes in his coat and hat and two horses shot out from under him. He then parlayed his military reputation into marriage with Martha Custis, the wealthiest widow in Virginia, which propelled him into the upper ranks of the Tidewater aristocracy.
He was a literate but not well-read man. Adams had gone to Harvard, Jefferson to William and Mary, but Washington had gone to war, meaning that his education possessed a more primal quality that aligned itself nicely with his commanding physical presence. He was not well versed in the constitutional arguments about Parliament’s limited authority over the American colonies, often deferring to his neighbor George Mason on such questions. His own encounter with British imperialism had been more personal and palpable, based on his experience with the London mercantile house Cary & Company, which he believed was bleeding him to death by charging extravagant fees for its services. For Washington, the imperious face of the British Empire was not Parliament but Robert Cary and his band of London merchants, whose profits were driving the entire planter class of Virginia into bankruptcy. Washington’s towering ego could not stand the realization that his very fate was in the hands of British creditors an ocean away, who were manipulating interest rates—or so he believed—in a massive imperial swindle.
His hostility to British authority, then, had a personal edge. While he understood and endorsed the political arguments about American rights, such arguments struck him as abstractions. His grievances were more palpably economic and even emotional. He was similarly indisposed toward proposals by moderates in the Continental Congress to make plaintive appeals to the presumed generosity of George III, which struck him as deferential confessions of inferiority, a self-defeating tactic that did not accord with his own sense of superiority.
Not the kind of man to suffer fools gladly, he ran his plantation at Mount Vernon imperiously and assiduously, always on the lookout for laziness among his overseers; he was not someone you would want to work for. He had once applied for a commission in the British army and been turned down—imagine the course of American history if the British had accepted him—but he interpreted his rejection not as a measure of his worth but as a statement of British stupidity. Both physically and psychologically, he was a formidable figure, and at forty-three years he was at the peak of his powers.24
When he set out from his beloved Mount Vernon in May 1775 to attend the Continental Congress, he had no way of knowing that he would be appointed commander in chief of the Continental Army. (Or did he? Why else did he wear his military uniform, the only delegate to do so?) What he did know beyond much doubt was that the ten-year constitutional conflict with Great Britain was about to become a war; indeed, it had already started a month earlier at Lexington and Concord. While a majority of delegates in the Continental Congress continued to grope for a political solution to the crisis, Washington knew in his bones that none would be found. He left instructions with his plantation manager to remove his books and his wife, Martha (presumably not in that order), when British frigates came up the Potomac to burn Mount Vernon to the ground. Washington recognized from the start that he was risking everything he held dear by committing to American independence, and this over a year before Jefferson wrote the words that memorialized the patriotic pledge of “our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.”25
And honor, in a way that is difficult for our modern minds to fully appreciate, animated his every thought and feeling. When he accepted the appointment as head of what soon would be called the Continental Army on June 16, 1775, he gave a speech making two points: he did not believe himself qualified for the position; and he would serve without pay. That evening he wrote his brother-in-law in the same vein:
I am now embarked on a tempestuous Ocean from whense, perhaps no friendly harbor is to be found…. It is an honor I wished to avoid…. I can answer but for three things, a firm belief in the justice of our Cause—close attention to the prosecution of it—and the strictest integrity—If these cannot supply the places of Ability and Experience the cause will suffer & more than probably my character along with it, as reputation derives its principal support from success.26
He demonstr
ated the same pattern of postured reticence on two subsequent occasions: when he agreed to chair the Constitutional Convention and when he accepted the office of president. The pattern suggests that he had a problem acknowledging his own ambitions, always insisting that the summons to serve originated outside his own soul. But the decision to head the American army was especially poignant, because he knew that the British army and navy, taken together, was the most formidable military power on the planet, and the prospects for American success were dubious at best. There was no question in his mind about the moral supremacy of the American cause, but he was at the core a rock-ribbed realist who realized that a fervent belief in the worthiness of a cause was no guarantee of its ultimate triumph. He was lashing his life and, even more psychologically important to him, his honor to a vessel that was sailing into uncharted and troubled waters.
From the beginning, then, the war for Washington was an all-or-nothing wager. There were, to be sure, enormous political considerations at stake. He announced from the start that he regarded the Continental Army as subservient to civilian control, as embodied in the Continental Congress. This was done without much pondering, almost breezily, a decision that becomes significant only when one realizes that Julius Caesar, Oliver Cromwell, Napoleon Bonaparte, and Simon Bolívar never managed to make it.
The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 Page 3