The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789

by Joseph J. Ellis

  There were also pressing strategic questions about how to conduct the war. It took him more than a year to gain control over his own aggressive instincts, which nearly proved a fatal liability in the New York campaign. Eventually he realized that a defensive strategy, called a war of posts, was the preferred course, even though it defied every fiber of his being. His seminal strategic insight, which seems obvious in retrospect, was that he did not need to win the war. The British needed to win. He would win by not losing, which in practice meant keeping the Continental Army intact as the institutional embodiment of American independence. After the debacle in New York in 1776, survival became his central mission, more important than besting the British army on the battlefield, where he was often outmaneuvered. (Indeed, no successful American general ever lost so many battles.) His greatest gift was resilience rather than brilliance, which just happened to be the quality of mind and heart that the American cause required.

  All his energies and ambitions, both of which were bottomless, were fully invested in winning, or rather in not losing, the war, so that his iconic demeanor became a kind of personal signature about the inevitability of the eventual outcome. Within the Confederation Congress, then the state legislatures, then below them the county and town governments, there was a veritable cacophony of voices about what American independence, once achieved, would mean. And the further down you went, the more democratically you dove, the more diverse and dissonant the voices became. The only subject on which all those voices could agree was that, whatever the American Revolution meant, Washington epitomized it. He was, as the toasts in his honor put it, “the man who unites all hearts.”27

  Even though his commitment to civilian control of the military never wavered, Washington’s deference to his civilian superiors did not deter him from lecturing them on the inadequacy of the confederation created by the Articles. The vantage point from which he viewed the pathetic powers of the Congress was, of course, distinctive, since he was always asking it for financial support that it was inherently incapable of providing. The disappointing direction of the dialogue became so predictable that Washington came to regard the ongoing conversations as a running joke: “The Army, as usual, is without pay; and a great part of the Soldiery without Shirts, and if one was to hazard for them [Congress] an opinion, it would be that the Army had contracted such a habit of encountering distress and difficulties, and of living without money, that it would be impolitic and injurious to introduce other customs to it.”28

  But he began to use his Circular Letters as occasions to lecture as well as joke. Even before the decisive victory at Yorktown, Washington was thinking about the postwar world. And his major concern was that the same structural problem that blocked support for the army—in effect, a confederation designed to be weak at the center—would have dire, indeed calamitous, consequences after independence. As he put it in a letter to the president of Congress:

  I am decided in my opinion, that if the powers of Congress are not enlarged, and made competent to all general purposes, that the Blood which has been spilt, the expense that has been incurred, and the distress that have been felt, will avail in nothing; and that the band, already too weak, which hold us together, will soon be broken; when anarchy and confusion must prevail.29

  There is no question that Washington wanted the newly independent United States to become a republic in which consensus rather than coercion was the central political value. But he wanted that republic to cohere as a union rather than as a confederation of sovereign states. In his capacity as commander in chief, he could testify that the confederation model nearly lost the war. And if it persisted in its current form, he believed that it would lose the peace.

  In June 1783 he sat down to compose his last Circular Letter to the States. Though a man of action more than words, on this occasion he offered a truly panoramic assessment of why the just-concluded war for independence could also be called the American Revolution, and why the consolidation of its revolutionary energies required a national government capable of orchestrating those energies. It was the most profound political statement he ever wrote.

  In his visionary appraisal, the newly arrived American republic was the beneficiary of two extraordinary pieces of good fortune, the first a function of time and the second of space. On the time side, the United States came into existence during an era “when the rights of mankind were better understood and more clearly defined, than at any former period.” Immanuel Kant had yet to coin the term Enlightenment to describe this chapter in Western history, but even without the convenient vocabulary, Washington clearly grasped the central idea: namely, that the American Revolution had happened at a truly providential moment. It occurred when a treasure trove of human knowledge about society and government had replaced the medieval assumptions—that “gloomy age of Ignorance and Superstition”—and thereby provided Americans with an unprecedented opportunity to construct a society according to political principles that maximized the prospects for personal freedom and happiness more fully than ever before. In effect, European thinkers over the past century had drafted the blueprint for a new political architecture, which was now readily available for Americans to implement. “At this period,” he intoned, “the United States came into existence as a Nation, and if their Citizens should not be completely free and happy, the fault will be intirely their own.”30

  The problem with this prophecy was that its uplifting implications depended on the existence of a nation-state capable of enforcing a comprehensive version of political coherence. A confederation of sovereign states, the kind of league currently configured in the Articles, would not suffice. In that sense, Washington was implicitly arguing that the full potential of the American Revolution could be realized only if and when local, state, and regional alliances, which remained hegemonic, were subsumed within some larger purpose. Given the firmly lodged conviction—it was more a potent impulse than a mere idea—that any distant national government was, by definition, a hostile force, the potential of an American nation remained a utopian dream that few took seriously.

  Washington was one of the few, and his expansive vision, which eventually came to be called Manifest Destiny, was continental in scale.

  The Citizens of America, placed in the most evitable conditions, as the Sole Lords and Proprietors of a vast tract of Continent, comprehending all the various Soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life, are now by the late satisfactory pacification, acknowledged to be possessed of absolute freedom and Independency. They are, from this period, to be considered as Actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.31

  By “the late…pacification,” he was referring to the recently arrived Treaty of Paris (1783), officially ending the war and not so incidentally placing the western border of the United States at the Mississippi. The Americans had not only won their independence from the British Empire; they had also acquired an empire of their own.

  No one quite knew what this enormous tract contained, apart from waves of impenetrable forests and clusters of virulently hostile Indian tribes, who had not been informed that, with a scratch of the pen in Paris, they had just lost the land they had been living on for several centuries. As a young man, Washington had explored and surveyed the eastern rim of this interior region, and as a reward for his service in the French and Indian War, he had been given nearly thirty thousand acres in what was called the Ohio Country. And like several other Virginians, including Thomas Jefferson, he was obsessed with the misguided idea that the Potomac provided the best access to the boundless riches on the far side of the Appalachian range, meaning that the town of Alexandria was destined to become the greatest port in North America.

  More generally, over a century before Frederick Jackson Turner made western expansion the central theme in American history, Washington had realized that the occupation and settlement of the n
ot-so-vacant land to the west would define America’s domestic agenda for generations to come. When he was asked if he wished to do a grand tour of the European capitals—Paris, London, Rome, Vienna—he diplomatically declined, saying he preferred to visit Detroit, New Orleans, and the Floridas. Europe was the past. The American west was the future.32

  And at least as Washington saw it, those western horizons fundamentally changed the chemistry of the political conversation by rendering the local and state perspectives of the current confederation pathetically provincial. To be sure, he was on record as a staunch advocate for a fully empowered federal government throughout the war, and he firmly believed that the failure to create such a government had severely handicapped the war effort, protracting the conflict and suffering unnecessarily. And he made no secret of his conviction that the Articles were a recipe for anarchy in postwar America, destined to dissolve his legacy of American independence into a confused constellation of at best regional sovereignties, vulnerable to the predatory plans of hovering European powers.

  But now the almost inadvertent acquisition of a western empire created a collective interest that all the states shared. Throughout the war, the union of states had been held together, however tentatively, by the common goal of independence. Once that goal was achieved, the state governments were poised to go their separate ways, loosely confederated under the Articles. As Washington saw it, the west replaced the war as the common bond. How to manage this extraordinary asset was obviously the central question facing the next generation of American political leaders, and doing so required one to think nationally rather than locally.33

  Washington was distinctive in his vision of a new nation, held together by a covenant to distribute the proceeds of a common trust that, truth be told, contained the most fertile land and some of the most untapped natural resources on earth. He was predicting that the imperatives of geography, which were apparently limitless, would overwhelm the imperatives of ideology, which were narrowly confined. Though history eventually proved him right, very few American statesmen agreed with him at the time, and the vast majority of American farmers, lacking the vision, were indisposed to look past the wooden fences enclosing their fields.

  They were living in the moment, and that moment after the revolution imposed severe restrictions on the exercise of centralized political power that bore any similarity to the imperial power of the British rulers they had just vanquished. The state-based political architecture of the Articles accurately expressed the constricted convictions of that moment. Washington’s vision was not about the moment but about the future. The great challenge was how to get there. For that would require replacing a political structure that was unequal to the task, a seismic step beyond the imagination of most Americans.

  * * *

  * The tour guides at Mount Vernon say six foot two, but when measured for his casket after death he was listed at six foot three and a half inches.

  Chapter 2

  THE FINANCIER AND THE PRODIGY

  You are sure to be censured by malevolent Criticks and Bug Writers, who will abuse you while you are serving them, and wound your Character in nameless Pamphlets, thereby resembling those little dirty stinking Insects that attack us only in the dark, disturbing our Repose, molesting and wounding us while our Sweat and Blood is contributing to their Subsistence.

  Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris

  JULY 26, 1781

  If anyone harbored the hope that the recently ratified Articles would function as a viable American government, that hope was exposed as an illusion in the first year of its existence. The most glaring problem was attendance.

  At the first session of the Confederation Congress, it was decided that nine states constituted a quorum, with two delegates necessary for a state to qualify as present. But on multiple occasions throughout the spring and summer of 1781, no official business could be done because five or more state delegations were either absent altogether or only partially represented. Part of the problem lay with the state legislatures, which were often slow to select their delegates; part of the problem was that the leading candidates refused to serve, preferring to perform their public duties at the state level. John Witherspoon of New Jersey became the most frequent and vocal critic of this sorry situation, waiting around with nothing to do because his erstwhile colleagues had failed to show up, but the attendance problem accurately reflected the political priorities of the most prominent American leaders. In truth, it would be misleading to say that local and state concerns trumped the national interest, because in most minds no such thing as the national interest even existed.1

  A second source of systemic malfunction was the coordination of foreign policy. All business came before the full Congress, an unwieldy arrangement at best, rendered more maddeningly chaotic because the membership of state delegations kept changing. When Arthur Lee joined the Virginia delegation, for example, his inveterate suspicion of Benjamin Franklin’s ties to the French court—Lee, it soon became clear, was suspicious of everyone, especially non-Virginians—split the Virginia vote on almost every foreign policy issue, essentially negating the largest state’s voice.2

  In the late spring of 1781 word arrived in Philadelphia of some grand European conclave, led by France, Russia, and Austria, that purportedly intended to put an end to the war and impose a peace based on the current status of forces. Diplomats cited the venerable doctrine of uti possidetis, loosely translated as “keep what you currently control,” which at the moment meant the British could claim parts of New York and Virginia as well as the Carolinas and Georgia, where, all in all, there were still twenty-five thousand British troops on the ground. Nothing came of this typically imperious European initiative, and the Confederation Congress ought not be blamed for the communication problem posed by the Atlantic Ocean, but the political reality was that there was no decisive American presence in the foreign policy conversation apart from the peace negotiators in Paris, who, at least officially, took their orders from Congress.3

  A third problem that emerged early was the resolution of the western land disputes, which had been festering for several years. Although the states claiming land in the region west of the Alleghenies had been required to cede their claims to the Confederation Congress upon admission into the union, many of the landed states, most especially Virginia, insisted on their right to determine the borders of their cessions, and also on the revocation of all Indian treaties signed by land companies within the so-called domain. The question at issue was whether the states or the Congress possessed ultimate authority to resolve the disputes.4

  The clearest argument for congressional authority came from John Witherspoon. He observed that Great Britain had acquired the vast tract from the Alleghenies to the Mississippi in 1763 by winning the French and Indian War. Then the United States acquired the same territory by winning the war against Great Britain: “This controversy [the war for independence] was begun and carried on by the united and joint efforts of the thirteen states. By their joint exertions and not by any one State the dominion of Great Britain was broken, and consequently the rights claimed and exercised by the Crown devolved on all, and not any individual state.” This meant that the western lands were a national domain effectively held in trust by the union of states created under the Articles.5

  This argument made logical and legal sense to almost everyone except the Virginians, who were accustomed to thinking of the Old Dominion as an empire of its own, with the Ohio Valley and Kentucky as extensions of “greater Virginia.” Even James Madison, the most nonprovincial member of the Virginia delegation, felt obliged to defend his state’s claim to Kentucky’s borders, though he opposed the threat of the Virginia legislature to revoke its previous cession. (Intriguingly, he wrote to his new friend, Thomas Jefferson, that Virginia’s recalcitrance on the Kentucky question had best end soon, since he presumed that “the present Union will but little survive the present war.”) Although the western lands would eventually prove to
be a treasure trove that helped to create a collective interest among the states, at the outset arguments over its management had just the opposite impact, exposing the fault lines still existing between landed and landless states, and the lack of any common history in thinking nationally rather than as sovereign states.6

  Vermont was hardly a part of the western domain, but arguments over its petition for admission as a state dominated the deliberations of Congress throughout 1781. What was originally called the New Hampshire Grants included land that three states—New York, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts—claimed as their jurisdiction, producing interstate bickering that the Congress could not resolve. Meanwhile, Pierce Butler of South Carolina regarded Vermont’s petition for statehood as a power play by the New England states to enhance their influence in the Congress, a malevolent move by the “Northern Interest” contrary to the “Southern Interest…by which the sectional balance will be quite destroyed.” If the Confederation Congress was intended to function as a political platform where all the states came together to address their common interests, the Vermont question seemed uniquely designed to expose their mutual jealousies and suspicions. Vermont statehood was held hostage to these state and sectional hostilities for the duration of the confederation.7