Revolutionary Summer: The Birth of American Independence
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If only in retrospect, it was a preposterously presumptive decision, surely a measure of the free-flowing confidence that accompanied the resounding triumph on the independence question. For the Continental Congress was proposing to draft a new constitution for the former United Colonies, now the United States, and at the same time to define the foreign policy goals of whatever government was created, all this to be accomplished by two committees in a matter of weeks in late July and early August.
The revolutionary fires were obviously burning brightly, warming up “the spirit of ’76” to a fever pitch that defied any prudent assessment of the possible. In fact, the political questions the Continental Congress proposed to resolve so quickly would continue to haunt and befuddle the infant American republic for the next decade and beyond and would not reach resolution until the Constitutional Convention, and even then only tentatively.1
Moreover, these daunting political conversations would occur in the shadow of the looming British invasion at New York, which had been designed, and then artfully organized, to deliver a crushing blow to the American rebellion before it got off the ground, thereby rendering all the deliberations in Philadelphia irrelevant. Given the escalating size of the two armies gathering on the waters and islands of New York, and given the “all-in” mentality of both sides, the apparent nonchalance of the Continental Congress is striking. While the British ministry regarded the military outcome at New York as decisive, the delegates in Philadelphia viewed the political agenda of an independent America as a priority not to be halted or hampered by worries about what would transpire on the battlefields of Long Island and Manhattan.
Part of the overconfidence was rooted in some combination of ignorance and misguided faith in Washington’s ability to best Howe in New York, as he had done in Boston. Except perhaps for Adams, whose role as chair of the Board of War and Ordnance made him privy to more accurate intelligence, most delegates believed that “swarming militia” had enhanced Washington’s army to nearly double the size of Howe’s. “Washington’s numbers are greatly increased, but we do not know them exactly,” Jefferson wrote a Virginia relative. “I imagine he must have from 30 to 35,000 by this time.” In fact he had about half that number, of which 20 percent were sick and “unfit for duty.” Jefferson noted in passing that British ships had demonstrated their ability to navigate past American batteries on the Hudson, but he did not realize the tactical implications of British naval supremacy. “I imagine that General Washington, finding he cannot prevent their going up the river,” he observed with confidence, “will prepare to amuse them wherever they shall go,” not recognizing that without a navy, Washington was tactically incapable of amusing anyone. Even after the full British force, absent the Hessians, had arrived on Staten Island, totaling 25,000 troops, Jefferson was reporting to Virginia correspondents that “the enemy there is not more than 8 or 10,000 strong.”2
By and large, then, the view from Philadelphia was that Washington had the situation well in hand in New York, which he clearly did not, and that the Continental Army had been sufficiently reinforced by militia to possess comfortable numerical superiority over Howe’s army, when in fact the exact opposite was true. One wild rumor had Washington commanding a force of more than 60,000.3
Another optimistic train of thought circulating within the Continental Congress had more far-reaching implications than any rough estimate of Washington’s and Howe’s armies. After returning from a tour of the eastern states, the Massachusetts delegate Elbridge Gerry reported to Adams that, by his reckoning, there were 111,000 militia armed and ready to fight from New Jersey northward, “a force sufficient to repulse the Enemy if he were 40,000 strong at New York and Canada.” Even if Washington suffered a catastrophic defeat, even if his entire army was destroyed or captured in New York, a virtually bottomless supply of men was available to take their place. In response to British pretensions of invincibility based on the supremacy of their army and navy, an American sense of invincibility was now emerging, based on the manpower potential of the American population.4
From the British perspective, a decisive victory in New York, then the union of Howe’s and Burgoyne’s armies along the Hudson, would end the war. From the American perspective, no single defeat would prove decisive until the entire American population had been subjugated, an outcome no imaginable British army could possibly achieve. As Franklin put it: “If the Enemy is beaten, it will probably be decisive for them; for they can hardly produce another Armament for another Campaign. But our growing Country can bear considerable Loses, and recover them, so that a Defeat on our part will not by any means occasion our giving up the Cause.”5
Franklin’s formulation reflected his values as a long-standing student of American demography, whose Observations on the Increase of Mankind (1751) had predicted—accurately, it turned out—that the American population was doubling every twenty to twenty-five years, over twice as fast as the population of Great Britain. In a century or so, Franklin observed with that ever-present twinkle in his eye, the capital of the British Empire would probably have moved to somewhere in Pennsylvania. But the more immediate implication of his demographic perspective—one could see overtones of this idea in Paine’s Common Sense as well—was that the American and British armies were merely the military projections of two different societies and populations. Whatever advantage the British enjoyed as a consequence of their superior army and navy was offset, and would eventually be overcome, by the size and supremacy of America’s exploding population. Whether they knew it or not, the Howe brothers were on a fool’s errand.
But even within the optimistic framework of this emerging American perspective, the outcome at New York remained crucial. A humiliating British defeat would be vastly preferable, because it would mean a short war. A calamitous American defeat obviously would be painful, because it would mean a long war. A hard-earned British victory along Bunker Hill lines—the most likely conclusion, in Washington’s opinion—would mean something in between. Whatever the result, the delegates in Philadelphia believed the American Revolution should continue to move forward politically regardless of the military outcome in New York. For them that meant deciding what a government of the United States should look like, even while the armies squared off.
IN LATE JULY and early August, the Continental Congress put itself into committee-of-the-whole posture in order to debate the recommendations of a large, thirteen-man committee, chaired by John Dickinson, charged with providing the framework for an American government that would replace the Continental Congress. For over a year, the congress had been functioning as a provisional government, with broad emergency powers that were implicitly justified by the dire circumstances of the ongoing if undeclared war and the looming prospects of secession from the British Empire. A more permanent central government was obviously necessary once independence was declared, so on June 12 the congress had appointed delegates from each of the colonies to a committee that would provide the political architecture for that new government, if and when independence was declared. The committee met off and on for a month, then submitted what was called the Dickinson Draft on July 12. No record of the committee’s deliberations exists, because none was kept.6
But some glimpse of the issues at stake is preserved in the correspondence between delegates at the time. Josiah Bartlett of New Hampshire apprised a colleague that the conversations within the committee were edgy: “As it is a very important business, and some difficulties have arisen, I fear it will take some time before it will be finally settled.” Edward Rutledge of South Carolina hinted at the core difficulty, objecting to “the idea of destroying all Provincial Distinctions and making every thing … bend to what they call the good of the whole.” There was obviously a deep disagreement among delegates over how powerful the new central government should be.7
The charge of the committee was to draw up “Articles of Confederation,” suggesting a voluntary alliance of sovereign states. The Continental Congres
s had been created in 1774 as just such a confederation, and the constitutional arguments made against Parliament’s authority had identified the colonial assemblies as the sanctioned voice of popular opinion, thereby locating sovereignty in the respective colonial (soon state) governments.
But over the past fifteen months, the Continental Congress had been functioning as a sovereign national government, adopting emergency powers to raise an army, orchestrate a collective response to British military and political policies, and put a common face on the thirteen separate colonies. This quasi-national status, to be sure, had been achieved pragmatically, on the run, in response to the mounting British challenges currently embodied in all those ships and soldiers commanded by the Howe brothers.
Clearly, a faction within the committee wanted the new American confederation to build on the embryonic union created in the imperial crisis and establish a central government sufficiently empowered to provide the political foundation for an emerging nation rather than a mere clearinghouse for thirteen separate sovereignties that would presumably each go their own way after the war was won.
The Dickinson Draft is difficult to interpret, even to comprehend, because it represents a series of accommodations between delegates with fundamentally different visions of postrevolutionary America. The very term confederation, as mentioned, implied a loose alliance of sovereign states. But then Article 2 referred to former colonies that “unite themselves into one Body politic.” Article 3 seemed to suggest that each state was sovereign over its own internal affairs, reserving “to itself the sole and exclusive regulation and Government of its internal Police,” but then added the qualifying clause “in all Matters that shall not interfere with the Articles of Confederation.”8
The Dickinson Draft placed one unqualified restriction on the congress, namely that it could never impose any taxes or duties on the states. The new congress, in short, could not become an American version of Parliament, a principle that clearly reflected the core grievance of the colonies over the past decade. But Article 19 provided a long list of powers the congress could exercise, most of them related to foreign policy, and taken together they suggested a central government that was a good deal more than the passive plaything of the states.9
No official record of the debate over the Dickinson Draft was kept, but both Adams and Jefferson took notes that were preserved in their private papers. These provide a snapshot of the rivalries swirling among the different states and regions. Such deep disagreements had been suppressed until now in order to sustain a united front against the British ministry and on behalf of a common commitment to that elevated ideal simply called “The Cause.” But if the core meaning of “The Cause” was American independence, once all the former colonies embraced that goal, the different interests of the new states rose to the surface in a dramatic display of conflicting assumptions about the meaning of “the United States” after independence was won. The chorus quite quickly became a cacophony.
There were, in effect, three fundamental disagreements: first, a sectional split between northern and southern states over slavery; second, a division between large and small states over representation; and third, an argument between proponents for a confederation of sovereign states and advocates for a more consolidated national union. All the political and constitutional questions that would bedevil the emerging American republic until the Civil War were thrown onto the agenda for the first time. For five days in late July and early August 1776, the Continental Congress engaged in spirited debates that proved to be a preview of coming attractions in American history.
Although slavery was too explosive an issue to be addressed directly, it was also too embedded in the economy of the southern states to avoid altogether. The forbidden subject came up in the debate over Article 12 in the Dickinson Draft, which proposed that “the expenses for the war and the general welfare shall be defrayed out of a Common Treasury, which shall be supplied by the several colonies in proportion to the Number of Inhabitants of every Age, Sex and Quality, except Indians.” An argument then ensued over how to count “Inhabitants,” which quickly became an argument over slaves: Were they persons or property?10
The southern delegates insisted that slaves were like horses and sheep and therefore should not be counted as “Inhabitants.” Franklin countered that, the last time he looked, slaves did not behave like sheep: “Sheep will never make any insurrections.” This bit of humor was not appreciated by the South Carolina delegation, which then proceeded to issue the ultimate threat: if slaves were defined as persons rather than as property, “there is an End of the Confederation.” Sensing a southern secession movement, Samuel Chase of Maryland urged all delegates to calm down, then proposed that the term “white” be inserted before “inhabitants” in order to appease his southern brethren. But Chase’s proposed amendment only provoked outrage from northern delegates, including Adams, who accused South Carolina of trying to avoid its fair share of the tax burden to finance the war. In a thoroughly sectional vote, Chase’s amendment was defeated.11
Since any resolution of the matter would risk a sectional split at the very moment when a united front against Great Britain was utterly essential, the delegates simply tabled it. It was resolved, if that is the correct term, in 1783, when the Confederation Congress voted to count slaves as three-fifths of a person for purposes of taxation and representation, an awkward compromise that was subsequently adopted at the Constitutional Convention.
The question of representation in the new government generated an equally spirited and divisive debate as the argument over slavery, though the split was not sectional but rather between large and small states. In the Continental Congress, each colony had one vote, no matter how large its population. And Article 18 of the Dickinson Draft recommended a continuation of the one-vote-per-state principle.12
But when the Dickinson Draft came before the full congress, delegates from Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts launched a frontal assault on state-based representation, arguing that population should determine the electoral power of the respective delegations. Franklin was most outspoken on the issue, warning that any new government based on equal representation by state “will never last long,” because the disproportionate political power of the smaller states defied the economic realities. It was, Franklin argued, a simple matter of justice: “Let the smaller Colonies give equal Money and Men, and then have an equal Vote.”13
Advocates for proportional representation also wanted the new confederation to build on the intercolonial alliance against British imperialism forged during the past year. Benjamin Rush of Pennsylvania put it most provocatively: “We are now a new Nation … We are dependent on each other—not totally independent states.” As Rush described it, Americans were now united in common cause as a single people. Only a representative government based on population could reflect this new reality. Thinking as Virginians or Rhode Islanders was passé. The new name for the government, “the United States,” needed to become a singular rather than plural noun.14
Delegates from the smaller states found Rush’s national vision a political nightmare that exchanged the despotic power of Parliament for a domestic version of the same leviathan. Roger Sherman of Connecticut warned that his constituents would never surrender their liberties to some distant government that did not share their values. Coming together to oppose the British invasion was one thing, but Sherman described “the United States” as a plural noun, and any national ethos was a pipe dream that defied state-based loyalties, which were as far as most Americans were prepared to go. Though there was such a thing as “The Cause,” there was no such thing as “We, the people of the United States.”15
Because voting in the Continental Congress remained state-based, Sherman and the other small-state delegates knew that they could carry the day despite opposition by such powerful opponents as Franklin and Adams. And they did.
The latent disagreements about the powers of the new central government rose to
the surface most menacingly in the debate about jurisdiction over the ill-defined western borders of the states. Several states cited colonial charters that placed their western borders at the Mississippi, or even more preposterously in Virginia’s case, at the Pacific. A consensus in the congress held that these extravagant claims were based on charters that had been drafted before anyone realized the size of the North American continent. But there was no consensus on the question of whether the states or the new central government possessed the authority to decide the matter. And the landed states like Virginia and the landless states like Maryland were seriously split over how the matter should be resolved.16
Jefferson was under pressure from his colleagues back in Virginia to resist any encroachment on the Old Dominion’s right to interpret her own charter claims. His main strategy was to defend Virginia’s jurisdiction but assure delegates behind the scenes that “no Virginian intended to go to the South Seas,” which was apparently a reference to the Pacific. Edward Pendleton, overseeing the Virginia Convention in Williamsburg, urged Jefferson to drag out the debate, then noted ominously that “perhaps while you are reading this, nay indeed while I am writing it, it may be decided by the sword at New York whether we shall have any land left to dispose of.”17
In hindsight, the failure to achieve any consensus on the shape and powers of the new American government was eminently predictable. Knowing as we do that enormous political and constitutional controversies over the overlapping questions of sovereignty and slavery would define the history of the emerging American republic for the next eighty-five years, we recognize that the conviction that these problems could be solved rather easily in a few weeks of earnest effort during the summer of 1776 was unrealistic in the extreme. Lacking such hindsight, however, most delegates in the Continental Congress expressed deep disappointment in their failure, coming as it did on the heels of the triumphant vote on American independence.