Ironically, Christian’s death was an indirect result of the very congressional impotence and insolvency that Henry had sought unsuccessfully to resolve with the vote on the national tax. Without funds, Congress could not raise an army to defend American frontiers. After learning of Christian’s death, Henry sent angry letters to the president of Congress and Virginia’s delegates, demanding that Congress fulfill its obligations to protect American frontiers. Their replies indicated their impotence as they explained that states not exposed to Indian attacks opposed spending money to defend those that were.
Indeed, Congress did not even have money to pay troops for services rendered during the Revolutionary War. After the signing of the peace agreement with Britain in 1783, streams of soldiers had poured into Philadelphia demanding their long overdue back pay and bonuses—and threatening to open fire on the State House where Congress was sitting. With no money to pay the men, Congress fled—first, to Princeton, New Jersey, then Annapolis, and finally to New York. From his home in Mount Vernon, George Washington warned that “unless powers are given to Congress for the general purpose of the Federal Union, we shall soon mold into dust and become contemptible in the eyes of Europe.”20
Washington’s prediction became reality two years later. With their exports subject to each state’s particular duties and trade restrictions, Britain and the rest of Europe simply stopped trading with Americans rather than navigate the complexities of sending goods across multiple state lines. America’s foreign trade dropped 25 percent, farm income 20 percent. The decline gained momentum in 1786, when Spanish authorities fulfilled Lee’s warning to Henry and closed the Mississippi River to American shipping. With no roads across the Appalachians for western farmers to transport grain to eastern markets, the Spanish closure of the Mississippi left them with no outlets for their crops. As creditor suits and tax liens multiplied, foreclosures cost hundreds of farmers their homes, livestock, lands, and tools of their trade. When auction proceeds were too little to cover debts, hysterical wives and terrified children watched helplessly as sheriffs’ deputies dragged farmers off to debtors’ prisons, where they languished indefinitely, unable to earn money to pay their creditors and without the tools to do so even if they won release.
Across the nation, enraged farmers—many of them Revolutionary War veterans—took up their rifles and pitchforks to defend their properties, firing at sheriffs who ventured too near. Reassembling their wartime companies, they attacked debtors’ prisons, courthouses, and county clerk’s offices. A mob of Virginia farmers shouting “Liberty or Death” burned down the county courthouses in King William and New Kent counties, near Richmond. Maryland farmers echoed the battle cries and burned down the Charles County courthouse. New Hampshire farmers marched to the state capital at Exeter, surrounded the legislature, and demanded forgiveness of all debts and the return of all seized properties to former owners. In North Carolina, western farmers seceded, creating their own State of Franklin—later Tennessee—and farmers in southwestern Virginia were poised to follow suit until Patrick Henry rode out to calm them with pledges to fight for reform.
As in the North, state capitals in the South were far removed from constituents in the West, where settlers faced greater dangers and lived on less productive lands but were assessed the same high taxes as eastern farmers. To prevent secession and possible war with hostile new western states, the normally impotent Confederation Congress enacted the most significant legislation—indeed, the only significant legislation—of its short existence: the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, under which Pennsylvania and other states joined Virginia in ceding their western territories north of the Ohio River to the Confederation. Virginia had ceded its lands north and west of the Ohio River in 1781.
The Northwest Ordinance provided for progressively free self-government in the new Northwest Territory until the population grew to 60,000. Congress would then divide the territory into at least three, but not more than five, self-governing states, which would join the Confederation on an equal footing with other states. Most astonishingly, the Ordinance included a bill of rights called “The Articles of Compact,” which guaranteed individual rights to life, property, religious freedom, and education, and prohibited slavery for only the third time in American history. Vermont and Massachusetts had prohibited slavery earlier, in 1777 and 1783, respectively.
Although the Northwest Ordinance removed settlers north of the Ohio River from the tax rolls of America’s thirteen states, it did little to calm tax protesters who remained within the boundaries of those states. With Henry’s protest against British taxes still fresh in their memories, farmers across America sewed his wartime motto, Liberty or Death, on their shirt fronts to protest taxes that produced no visible benefits. None were more outraged than those whose lands lay on or near disputed state lines, where both states tried to tax them. A bitter dispute between Virginia and Maryland over their common boundary along the Potomac River taxed both the patience and pockets of traders, merchants, and farmers—and threatened to explode into outright war. Maryland claimed its boundary lay on the Virginia shoreline, and it taxed Virginia’s river trade along with some planters such as Washington, whose fishery stretched nets into the river to trap herring, shad, and other fish that swam upstream to spawn. Virginia reciprocated, claiming its boundary lay on Maryland’s shoreline and taxing all Maryland trade entering Chesapeake Bay.
“Different states have . . . views that sooner or later must involve the country in all the horrors of civil war,” Secretary of War Henry Knox warned George Washington. “We are entirely destitute of those traits which should stamp us one nation.”21 Richard Henry Lee urged calling a convention “for the sole purpose of revising the Confederation” to permit Congress to act “with more energy, effect and vigor.”22
It was Washington—retired from government at his Mount Vernon plantation—who brought Virginia and Maryland to the negotiating table with a scheme to establish joint jurisdiction over the commercial shipping channel in Chesapeake Bay and the lower Potomac River. He proposed that they join in a project he had conceived to link the Ohio River and Great Lakes with Chesapeake Bay with a system of canals and portage roads connecting the headwaters of the Potomac and James rivers to the Monongahela River, which runs into the Ohio at Pittsburgh. The waterway would generate huge revenues for both states and solve the conflict with Spain over Mississippi River navigation rights by allowing the wealth of the West—furs, ore, timber, and grain—to flow over the Appalachian Mountains to Atlantic ports for transport to Europe and the West Indies. Although Washington, Henry, and members of the Virginia and Maryland legislatures stood to profit handsomely from speculations they had made along the proposed waterway, the entire nation—and especially Henry’s constituents on western farms—would also reap enormous benefits from the increased trade that would come with access to world markets. Washington invited Henry, George Mason, and James Madison, then serving in the Virginia House of Delegates, to join representatives from Maryland at Mount Vernon in March to discuss the project. Henry had to decline because of ill health, but other conferees agreed to a commercial union, with uniform commercial regulations, uniform currency, and pledges to hold annual conferences to review interstate commercial relations. The two states established two private companies, with George Washington as president of both, to build the inland waterway—the Potomac Company and James River Company. Henry and the Virginia Assembly voted to vest George Washington with fifty shares of the first and one hundred shares of the second, which he, in turn, placed in a public trust and later bequeathed to Congress to found a national university. George Washington University was the result.
The United States in 1783.
Maryland’s Assembly not only approved commercial union with Virginia, it invited Delaware to attend the next conference in Annapolis in September 1786. Elated by the goodwill generated at Mount Vernon, Madison asked Virginia’s Assembly to invite all the states to send representatives to the next confer
ence, which was to meet in Annapolis.
By the spring of 1786, America’s economic slump had turned into a deep depression, with imports from Britain dropping an additional 30 percent from the previous year and exports falling 6 percent. Farm revenues had plunged 20 percent and sent tax delinquencies soaring, along with property confiscations for nonpayment of taxes. In western Massachusetts, farmers rebelled when former captain Daniel Shays, a farmer struggling to keep his property, convinced neighbors that legislators in Boston were colluding with judges and lawyers across the state to raise taxes to exorbitantly high levels and foreclose when farmers found it impossible to pay. With that, he shouted what some feared would provoke a second American Revolution: “Close down the courts!”
Echoing his call, farmers marched to courthouses in Cambridge, Concord, Worcester, Northampton, Taunton, and Great Barrington—and shut down the civil courts. Hailed by farmers across the nation, the shutdowns frightened courts into ending foreclosures in Massachusetts. Determined to expand his success, Shays led a force of 500 men to Springfield, where 1,000 more farmers joined him. After shutting down the State Supreme Court, they marched to the federal arsenal, intent on seizing arms, ammunition, and artillery. In Boston, meanwhile, the governor organized a 4,000-man private militia to march against Shays. Before they arrived at Springfield, however, soldiers at the arsenal unleashed a few artillery blasts that fell short of the approaching farmers but amply demonstrated the advantages of cannonballs over pitchforks.
Arriving militiamen chased the farmers to their homes and captured most of their leaders, although Shays fled to safety in what was then the independent republic of Vermont. In defeat, however, Shays’s army scored a resounding victory when farmers across the state went to the polls and voted the governor and three-fourths of the legislature out of office. The new, pro-farmer legislature declared a tax holiday for a year, reduced taxes thereafter, released imprisoned debtors to go back to work, and exempted clothing, household possessions, and tools of trade from seizure in future debt proceedings.
Fears that Shays’s Rebellion would ignite a national uprising spurred Congress to propose revisions in the Articles of Confederation to strengthen the national government’s powers, but one state or another stood firm against every proposal. Later, when delegates from only five states—New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Pennsylvania, and Virginia—showed up for the opening gavel at the Annapolis Convention, they adjourned immediately, calling for a broader convention. Delegates from four other states had been on their way, but the convention had adjourned when they arrived.
With the Confederation disintegrating at an ever-accelerating rate, growing numbers of Revolutionary War leaders joined George Washington in calling for strengthening the national government. Although Patrick Henry originally agreed with Washington, he changed his mind abruptly—and, as it turned out, permanently—because of an incomprehensible misstep by New York’s John Jay, whom Congress had appointed secretary for foreign affairs. After a year of negotiation, Spanish envoy Don Diego de Gardoqui suggested a treaty under which the United States would “forbear” navigation of the Mississippi River for twenty-five years in exchange for Spain’s opening key ports in Spain as European gateways for American trade.
Jay asked Congress to change his instructions to allow him to give up American navigation rights on the Mississippi and Congress agreed. Jay’s changed instructions, however, provoked a chorus of angry protests from irate southerners, whose state borders extended to the Mississippi River (see Map 2, page 176). Henry was even more irate—more so because Jay had violated his original instructions from Congress “not to relinquish or cede . . . to the government of Spain the right of the United States to the free navigation of the river Mississippi. ...”23 Indeed, Congress had ordered him “to stipulate the right of the United States to . . . the free navigation of the Mississippi. ...”24 With the river closed to American navigation, Spanish-licensed river boatmen would be able to impose exorbitant freight rates and make farming in the West so unprofitable that farmers would have to sell their lands to speculators.
Congressmen from northern states with ports on the Atlantic, however, cheered the Jay-Gardoqui agreement, which gave East Coast merchants and shipowners free access to European markets. Congress voted seven (northern states) to five (southern states) in favor of the new instructions for Jay, but short of the nine-state majority needed under the Articles of Confederation to ratify foreign treaties. The vote left southerners and westerners irate at the willingness of northern states to sacrifice the interests of other regions of the Confederation for the right price. Although legally powerless as governor, Henry remained a colossus among patriots—and, as he explained, “I exerted myself . . . to get petitions both to Congress and the Assembly to oppose the scheme.” More than that, Henry’s limited interest in a stronger national government turned as hostile as it had been in 1775, when he called for revolution against the British government in Richmond’s St. John’s Church. “Mr. Henry,” said Federalist John Marshall, “has been heard to say that he would rather part with the Confederation than relinquish the navigation of the Mississippi.”25
Equally irate was Virginia’s young delegate to Congress, James Monroe, the hero of the Battle of Trenton who had replaced Madison in Philadelphia. “The object in the occlusion of the Mississippi,” Monroe vented in a letter to Henry,is to break up so far as this will do it the settlements on western waters, prevent any in future, and to thereby keep the States southward as they now are. . . . In short, it is a system of policy which has for its object the keeping the weight of government and population in this [northeast] quarter, and is pursued by a set of men so flagitious, unprincipled and determined in their pursuits, as to satisfy me beyond a doubt they have extended their views to the dismemberment of the government ...26
Outraged settlers in Kentucky talked of forming a militia to march against the Spanish in New Orleans; others threatened to reassert loyalty to the English king and invite British troops to reclaim the West and guarantee settler access to the Mississippi. “To sell us and make us vassals to the merciless Spaniards,” one Kentuckian raged in the Maryland Journal , “is a grievance not to be born.”
Preparations are now making here . . . to drive the Spaniards from the settlements at the mouth of the Mississippi. In case we are not countenanced and succored by the United States . . . our allegiance will be thrown off, and some other power applied to. Great Britain stands ready, with open arms to receive and support us. They have already offered to open their resources for our supplies. When once reunited to them, farewell—a long farewell to all your boasted greatness.27
The threats of secession in the West emboldened New Englanders to call for establishment of a northern confederacy. “The five states of New England, closely confederated, have nothing to fear,” proclaimed a correspondent in the Boston Independent Chronicle. “Let then our General Assembly immediately recall their delegates from . . . Congress, as being a useless and expensive establishment. Send proposals for instituting a new . . . nation of New England, and leave the rest of the continent to pursue their own imbecile and disjointed plans. ...”28
With the Confederation facing political and economic collapse, delegates had gone to Annapolis to prevent fragile interstate ties from snapping. Without a quorum of states, however, they were impotent even to make recommendations. New York’s Alexander Hamilton proposed a new and more forceful call to convention in Philadelphia, in May 1787, to discuss not only commercial relations, but “to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”29 It was perhaps the last hope for saving the Union.
Chapter 12
Seeds of Discontent
Towards the end of Henry’s second year as governor, he and Dolly hosted the capital’s most joyous receptions since pre-Revolution Williamsburg days: the marriage of his two daughters. Anne married a prominent lawyer, Spencer Roane, while seventeen-year-old Betsey married Philip Aylett
, a handsome, extremely wealthy nineteen-year-old who spent most of his days enjoying his family’s apparently limitless supply of money. A hard-drinking card player, Aylett nonetheless became a devoted husband and father—and an effective legislator in the Virginia House of Delegates. Roane became a distinguished judge, winning appointment to the Virginia Supreme Court and eventually serving as its chief justice.
Henry is said to have given each daughter the same fatherly advice in letters that reflected his own married life. “My Dear Daughter,” he began:You have just entered into that state which is replete with happiness or misery. . . . You are allied to a man of honor, of talents, and of an open, generous disposition. You have, therefore, in your power, all the essential ingredients of happiness. It cannot be marred if you now reflect upon that system of conduct which you ought invariably to pursue.
Asserting that wealth did not produce “matrimonial happiness,” Henry gave his daughters several maxims to “impress upon your mind,” the first of which was “never to attempt to control your husband, by opposition, by displeasure, or any other mark of anger.” Calling “mutual politeness essential to that harmony which should never be once broken . . . between man and wife,” he warned that any differences between husband and wife arethe greatest calamity . . . that are to be most studiously guarded against . . . The love of a husband can only be retained by the high opinion which he entertains of his wife’s goodness of heart, of her amiable disposition, of the sweetness of her temper, of her prudence, of her devotion to him. Let nothing upon any occasion lessen that opinion. Has your husband stayed out longer than you expected? When he returns, receive him as the partner of your heart. Has he disappointed you? Never evince discontent. . . . Does he . . . invite company without informing you of it? . . . Receive them with a pleasing countenance . . . give to your husband and to your company a hearty welcome.
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