American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  Then, as the weather turned bitter in the late fall, so did the mood of the combatants. The attitude of the authorities shifted from the implacable to the near-hysterical. Alarmists exaggerated the strength of the Regulators. Rumors flew about that Boston or some other eastern town would be attacked. A respectable Bostonian reported that “We are now in a State of anarchy and confusion bordering on a Civil War.” Boston propagandists spread reports that British agents in Canada were secretly backing the rebels. So the Regulators were now treasonable as well as illegal. The state suspended habeas corpus and raised an army, but lacking public funds had to turn to local “gentlemen” for loans to finance it. An anonymous dissident responded in kind:

  “This is to lett the gentellmen of Boston [know?] that wee Country men will not pay taxes, as the think,” he wrote Governor Bowdoin in a crude, scrawling hand. “But Lett them send the Constabel to us and we’ll nock him down for ofering to come near us. If you Dont lower the taxes we’ll pull down the town house about you ears. It shall not stand long then or else they shall be blood spilt. We country men will not be imposed on. We fought of our Libery as well as you did.…

  Country people and city people had declared for independence a decade before. They had endorsed the ideals of liberty and equality proclaimed in the declaration signed by John Adams and others. But now, it seemed, these ideals were coming to stand for different things to different persons. Fundamental questions had been left unresolved by the Revolution. Who would settle them, and how?

  THE GREAT FEAR

  Through the autumn weeks of 1786, George Washington had been savoring the life that he had hungered to return to years earlier, during the bleak days of Boston, Valley Forge, Germantown. Mornings he came downstairs past the grandfather’s clock at the turning, strode through the long central hall and out the far door, to stand on the great porch and gaze at the Potomac flowing a mile wide below him, and at the soft hills beyond. Later he usually “rid” to the plantations that flanked the mansion, fields called Muddy Hole, Dogue Run, and Ferry, where he closely supervised his white work hands and his slaves—“the People,” he liked to call them—as they planted the fall crops of wheat and rye, “pease” and Irish potatoes. As commanding a figure as ever, with his great erect form and Roman head, he would readily dismount to supervise rearrangement of his plows and harrows breaking up the soil sodden with the heavy rains of that autumn.

  On returning to the mansion he might find a goodly company of neighbors, or of old political and military comrades from distant parts; these he entertained in a manner both friendly and formal. After the years of harrowing struggle with Britain and of earlier bloody combat against Frenchmen and Indians, with the possibility of slave uprisings often in mind, Washington luxuriated in the sense of order that enveloped Mount Vernon, with its formal gardens, greenhouses, deer park, and graceful drives. He took heart also in the political calm that now seemed to have settled on Virginia. Then the news of disturbances to the north came crashing in on this serenity. Washington’s first reaction was of sheer incredulity.

  “For God’s sake tell me what is the cause of all these commotions,” he implored a friend late in October; “do they proceed from licentiousness, British-influence disseminated by the Tories, or real grievances which admit of redress.” If the latter, why were the grievances not dealt with; if the former, why were the disturbances not put down? “Commotions of this sort, like snow-balls, gather strength as they roll, if there is no opposition in the way to divide and crumble them.” Most mortifying of all to the general was the likely reaction in London; the Tories had always said that the Americans could not govern themselves, and how London would scoff at this anarchy.

  Anxiously Washington tried to discern what was actually happening in Massachusetts. Distrusting the vague and conflicting reports in the newspapers, he depended heavily on his old companion-in-arms General Henry Knox, who had been asked by Congress to investigate the disorders. The rebels would annihilate all debts public and private, Knox warned Washington, and pass agrarian laws that would make legal tender of unfunded paper money. “What, gracious God, is man!” Washington cried out to another friend, “that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It is but the other day, that we were shedding our blood to obtain the…Constitutions of our own choice and making; and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them.” He felt that he must be under the illusion of a dream.

  An impudent rebellion, an impotent Congress, a jeering Europe—these were the catalysts for George Washington, and hundreds of others like him, who believed that national independence and personal liberty could flourish only under conditions of unity and order. If government could not check these disorders, Washington wrote James Madison, “what security has a man for life, liberty, or property?” It was obvious that, in the absence of a stronger constitution, “thirteen Sovereignties pulling against each other, and all tugging at the federal head will soon bring ruin on the whole.” No one knew better than the commanding general of the Continental armies the price of division and weakness in Congress, and he had been as little impressed by the nation’s leadership in the years since the war.

  Washington saw one sign of hope, in September, commissioners from five of the middle states had met in Annapolis to discuss vexing restrictions on commerce among them. They had proposed a larger convention to be held in Philadelphia in May of the coming year. But what could such a convention accomplish, given the strange fears and distempers abroad in the land?

  In London, in the fall of 1786, John and Abigail Adams also waited anxiously for news from Massachusetts. As American minister to the Court of St. James’s, Adams presided over a large house in Grosvenor Square near Hyde Park, which Abigail pictured to her relatives back home as rather like Boston Common, only “much larger and more beautified with trees.” Maddening weeks passed without word from home, across the wayward Atlantic; then a fever of excitement took over the house when the butler or a footman brought a tray full of letters to the little room, off the formal drawing room, that Abigail Adams had made into a parlor. Tea and toast would turn cold as the family tore open their letters and drank in family and political news.

  The political news seemed more and more clouded. Not only was Congress as irresolute and slow-moving as ever, but the unrest in Massachusetts appeared to be getting out of hand. What in earlier letters had been termed “disturbances” now were verging on anarchy and civil war. The state authorities seemed helpless to put down the commotion; the legislature dawdled, and the governor, reported Adams’ son John Quincy from Harvard, was called the “Old Lady.” His friends left John Adams in no doubt about the true nature of the rebels. They were violent men who hated persons of substance, especially lawyers. Some were of the most “turbulent and desperate disposition,” moving from town to town to enflame the locals. They would annihilate the courts, and then all law and order. Among the leaders there were no persons of reputation or education. Not one of Adams’ correspondents sympathized with the rebels, or even explained their hardships, except as the result of speculation and prodigality.

  Isolated in London’s winter smoke and fogs, Adams seethed in his frustration. This was his state that was setting such a bad example; it was the state, in fact, of whose constitution he was the main author. But there was something he could do, even in London; he could warn his countrymen of the dangers ahead. “The Sedition in Massachusetts,” Abigail Adams wrote John Quincy at Harvard, “induced your Poppa to give to the World a book” contending that “salutary [?] restraint is the vital Principal of Liberty,” that turbulence could bring only coercion.

  A sense of desperate urgency possessed Adams. He had to rebut the erroneous notions of such men as Tom Paine and the French thinker Turgot; he had to demolish false ideas before his fellow Americans made further decisions about their system of government. Snatching every available minute from his official duties, barring his study door to all but his wife, surrounding himself with t
he works of the greatest philosophers and historians, he scribbled so quickly that his hand turned sore, so fast that his work was disorganized, strewn with errors, packed with badly translated quotations. But it was also a powerful argument that the new institutions in America must be built properly to last thousands of years; that free government, with all its woes, was superior to even the wisest monarchy; that the tendency of republics to turbulence could be curbed by a system of checks and balances within government; and that men were equal in the eyes of God and under the law but manifestly unequal—and always would be—in beauty, virtue, talents, fortune.

  Aware that he himself, with his medium height, balding pate, and pointed features set oddly in a soft and rounded head, hardly met the popular image of the leader, Adams had no doubt that he possessed the wisdom and virtue necessary to the natural aristocracy that republics too must zealously protect.

  In Paris, in the spacious town house that he had rented on the Champs-Elysées, just within the city wall, the American minister, Thomas Jefferson, pondered early reports of the disturbances in Massachusetts. He felt not so much alarmed as mildly embarrassed, for he did not expect independent farmers to disrupt law courts and abolish debts—or so he had explained to European friends.

  Later that fall more portentous reports arrived, and Jefferson hardly knew whether to be more concerned about the alarums or the alarmists. The Adamses in London in particular seemed to want to share their concern with Jefferson. He enjoyed cordial relations with both. He had taken a great fancy to the sprightly and knowledgeable Abigail; he and John had toured English towns and estates earlier that year. Although the Virginian had been more interested in the layout of roads and ponds and in contraptions like an Archimedes’ screw for raising water, and the Bostonian more attracted to places where Englishmen had fought for their rights—Adams had actually dressed down some people in Worcester for neglecting the local “holy Ground” where “liberty was fought for”—the two men had got along famously.

  Still, Jefferson was uneasy at the turn that his correspondence with the Adamses was taking. John had reassured him in November, stating that the Massachusetts Assembly had laid too heavy a tax on the people, but that “all will be well.” But in January, when the Shaysites seemed more threatening, Abigail wrote a letter that troubled him. “Ignorant, wrestless desperadoes, without conscience or principals, have led a deluded multitude to follow their standard, under pretense of grievences which have no existance but in their immaginations. Some of them were crying out for a paper currency, some for an equal distribution of property, some were for annihilating all debts.…Instead of that laudible spirit which you approve, which makes a people watchfull over their Liberties and alert in the defense of them, these mobish insurgents are for sapping the foundation, and distroying the whole fabrick at once.…”Jefferson knew that Abigail was speaking for John as well as herself. Indeed, her views were shared in varying degrees by the most important leaders in America—by Washington, John Jay, Rufus King, Alexander Hamilton, by powerful men in every state.

  Jefferson, almost alone among America’s leadership, rejected this attitude toward insurgency. The spirit of resistance to government was so important that it must always be kept alive. It would often be exercised wrongly, but better wrongly than not exercised at all.

  “I like a little rebellion now and then,” he wrote Abigail Adams late in February 1787. “It is like a storm in the Atmosphere.” Yet he knew that the problem was not this simple. He did not really approve of rebellion, certainly not a long and bloody one; he simply feared repression more. The solution, he felt, lay in better education of the people and in the free exchange of ideas. Unlike Washington, he believed in reading the newspapers, not because the press was all that dependable, but because a free press was vital to liberty. If he had to choose, he said, he would prefer newspapers without a government to a government without newspapers. Still, Jefferson had to recognize that liberty was impossible without order, just as one day he would prefer to run a government without certain newspapers. The problem now was to reconcile liberty—and equality too—with authority. As summer approached, he wondered whether the planned convention in Philadelphia could cope with this problem that had eluded so many previous constitution-makers.

  But he would not yield to the panic over rebellion. Had they not all been revolutionaries? Months later, he was still taking the line he had with the Adamses:

  “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”

  Back in western Massachusetts, in January 1787, people were suffering through the worst snowstorms they could remember. But weather could not stop the insurrection. For months both government men and Regulators had been eyeing the arsenal at Springfield, with its stores of muskets and ammunition. Late in January, Captain Shays led one thousand or more of his men, in open columns by platoons, toward the arsenal. General William Shepard, commanding the “loyal” troops, sent his aide to warn the Regulators to stop. Shays’s response was a loud laugh, followed by an order to his men, “March, God damn you, march!” March they did, their muskets still shouldered, straight into Shepard’s artillery. A single heavy cannonade into the center of Shays’s column left three men dead and another dying, the rest in panic. In a few seconds the rebels were breaking rank and fleeing for their lives.

  What now? The Regulators were not quite done. Those who gathered in friendly Berkshire towns after the long flight west calculated that the mountain fastness to the north and the long ranges stretching south provided natural havens for guerrilla resistance. But they underrated the determination of the government to stamp out the last embers of rebellion. The well-armed militia ranged up and down the county, routing the rebels. Hundreds of insurgents escaped into New York and Vermont, whence they sent raiding parties into Berkshire towns.

  One of these towns was Stockbridge, where people had been divided for months over the insurgency. For hours the rebels roamed through the town, pillaging the houses of prominent citizens and “arresting” their foes on the spot. At the house of Judge Theodore Sedgwick, an old adversary, they could not find the judge but they encountered Elizabeth Freeman, long known as “Mum Bett.” Arming herself with the kitchen shovel, Mum let them search the house but forbade any wanton destruction of property, all the while jeering at their love for the bottle. She had hidden the family silver in a chest in her own room. When a rebel started to open it, she shamed him out of it, according to a local account, with the mocking cry, “Oh, you had better search that, an old nigger’s chest!—the old nigger’s as you call me.”

  Soon the raiders streamed out of town to the south. They had time to free some debtors from jail and celebrate in a tavern. Then the militiamen cornered them in the woods, killing or wounding over thirty of them.

  The uprising was over. Some Regulators felt that they had gambled all and lost all. As it turned out, they had served as a catalyst in one of the decisive transformations in American history. Though their own rebellion had failed, they had succeeded in fomenting powerful insurrections in people’s minds. Rising out of the grass roots of the day—out of the cornfields and pasturelands of an old commonwealth long whipped by religious and political conflict—they had challenged the “system” and had rekindled some burning issues of this revolutionary age:

  When is rebellion justified? Granted that Americans had the right to take up arms against the Crown, which had given them taxation but no representation, were people who felt cheated of their rights justified in a republic in turning to bullets rather than ballots?

  If decisions were indeed to be made by ballots, how would ballots count? By majority rule—by a majority of the voters in an election or of their representatives in a legislature? Or would the minority be granted special rights and powers in order to protect elites against the populace? And under either system would all people—all adult men, women, poor persons, Indians, black people—have an equal voice and
vote?

  If the rebellion had touched people’s basic fears about their safety and security, what price stability and unity? The response of the social and political elites to the rebellion was drastic: build a stronger national government that could cope with domestic unrest and fend off foreign foes. What local and regional rights would be swallowed up in the new Leviathan? Would precious personal liberties be engulfed by the new federal government? Or might they be better protected and enhanced by it?

  If the immediate goal was a wider union, what was the ultimate purpose and justification of this union? Was it essentially for internal harmony and national defense? Humankind had higher needs—for individual liberty and self-expression, for a sense of sharing and fraternity, for the equal rights and liberties proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence. How would such aspirations and expectations be fulfilled?

  To these questions Americans—rebels and elites, common and uncommon—would bring vast experience, a big stock of common sense, a large assortment of misconceptions and prejudices, boundless optimism, and a quality less evident in some of the older nations of Europe: a willingness to experiment. Americans were accustomed to being tested, in their churches, on their farms, out in the wilderness. They were used to trying something, dropping it, and trying something else. They were good at figuring, probing, calculating, reasoning things out. The American people, Alexander Hamilton would soon be writing, must decide “the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force.” Americans were willing to test themselves on this issue.

  Some Americans thought of their country, or at least of their new young republic, as a received design, as a sanctified destiny, as a sacred mission for a selected people. Others saw it as a venture in trial and error, as a gamble, above all as an experiment. Sacred Mission or Grand Experiment—by what yardstick, by what purposes or principles or moral values, would American leadership be measured?