A Nation Reborn Amidst Political Strife

In We Have Not a Government, author George William Van Cleve focuses on a period of intense political contention among Americans. Following a profound recession, the Confederation had large war debts, trade restrictions, and an increasing resistance to territory expansion. Nevertheless, a boom in western settlement resulted in sectional divisions and an eventual stalemate government. 

With all of these factors in mind, Van Cleve shows how a country divided became united under a shared vision of America. Included are stories of John Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, and many other key characters in this pivotal aspect of history.

Read on to discover how the Confederation’s failure became the basis for a nation reborn. 

War, Economy, and Society

Philadelphia merchant Robert Morris was one of America’s most prominent and wealthy international businessmen during the revolutionary era. Many of the Revolution’s leaders saw him as an opponent of republican popular government and regarded him with distrust at best. Despite that, his strong financial reputation had led Congress in 1781 unanimously to appoint him as the Confederation’s superintendent of finance. As superintendent, his most important responsibility during the Revolutionary War was to obtain funds to supply and pay America’s army.

In January 1783, Morris faced a problem that threatened to destroy the Confederation. On January 6, the army’s representatives presented a petition to Congress demanding payment of a large amount of money owed to it. Morris had no money to pay the army, and knew that if the troops were not paid, they might revolt. On January 10, he met secretly with a congressional committee. He admitted that he had already written checks for 3.5 million French livres (more than $600,000) that the Confederation did not have. That had been a profound violation of Morris’s strongly held principles, one that threatened to damage severely both his and the Confederation’s credit. Now he felt he had no choice but to take an even more desperate step for which he wanted Congress’s approval. Morris told the committee that despite having no funds, he planned to write additional checks for large sums to pay the army some of what it was owed. He hoped that they might be covered by a new European loan before they came due, but could give no assurances. Seeing no alternative to avoid disaster, the committee approved Morris’s Since taking office in 1781, Morris had been forced to finance the Revolutionary War largely on credit. Now he had been reduced to hoping that the government might obtain more credit, though it already had at least $35 million in war debts.

The Confederation’s growing debt problem was an important sign that the war had inflicted major damage on the United States. It had exacted a large, long-lasting human toll, and caused significant economic damage. In another wholly unexpected series of developments, the war also set in motion a substantial democratization of American government and society, and caused critical political divisions.

THE RAVAGES OF WAR 

The land war had been fought all across America, from the seacoast to the western frontiers. To fight it, America mobilized what one historian regards as the first modern popular army.5 An estimated two hundred thousand Americans, or about one-third of the military-age free male population, served in the Continental army or state militias. The army mixed social classes. Most officers were men of the gentry, including substantial landowners, or of the middling sort. Common soldiers, on the other hand, were often conscripts. They were typically poor, landless young men who often came from recent immigrant groups such as the Irish. Some five thousand African Americans, includingslaves, also served. At least twenty thousand women worked to support the Continental army. Historians estimate that twenty-five to thirty-five thousand American soldiers died in battle and in prison, of disease or of wounds. By way of comparison, that would represent a loss of about three million American lives today.

British troops captured major cities such as Charleston and New York. They burned others, including Norfolk (with American help), New London, Groton, and Falmouth, as well as homes and plantations. A British officer justified the burning of Fairfield, Connecticut, including its churches, as a way to cause “a general Terror and despondency.” British forces captured more than eleven hundred American ships, while American privateers captured more than twenty-three hundred British ships. From 1777 to 1781, roughly one hundred thousand British and American troops lived off of firewood, crops, and livestock that were requisitioned, or in some cases plundered, from farmers around the country. 

The war caused widespread misery. By its end, thousands of families had had their lives permanently disrupted by its harsh realities, including death, disability, rape, separations, flight, and impoverishment. Some families lost more than one member. Mary Jones wrote from South Carolina to her brother in 1785 that she had been forced away from her plantation for two years “by means of the Enemy” and that she had lost two sons. “One was taken prisoner and murdred and other died with his Wounds. . . . I was very much Distresd before I was drove away.” In 1782, John Barnam sought furlough from his Connecticut regiment to help his aged parents with the harvest. He supported his request by saying that his two sisters’ husbands had both apparently died in service.

The Revolutionary War was also a civil war. Popular opinion on the war was split between ardent American patriots, neutralists, and Loyalists to varying degrees in different parts of the country. Friends and families were sometimes divided. Historian Patrick Griffin describes the war in South Carolina in 1780 and 1781, for example, as a series of “skirmishes, raids, and appalling violence and humiliation,” where battles often involved neighbors. Forces on both sides often gave no quarter, relentlessly executing their vanquished opponents.

The war at times descended into utterly lawless torture and murder that made a mockery of the idea that war could ever be civilized. In the West, American vigilantes brutally massacred Native Americans, some of whom were neutrals with no British connection (several tribes did fight with Britain). In reprisal, Native Americans murdered settlers.11 General Henry Knox provided assistance in 1782 to twenty-two American women and children from the Virginia and Pennsylvania frontiers whose husbands and fathers had been murdered, and who had then been taken prisoner. He euphemistically described them as “having experienced horrors unutterable” during captivity, a phrase intended to convey that they had been gravely abused.

Loyalist and British atrocities in certain parts of the country caused enormous, long-lasting bitterness. Hugh Williamson, a doctor and member of Congress, wrote to an acquaintance in England after the war that when he served in the army, “I have seen the Enemy hang up our people in Dozens . . . I have seen them destroy with the Bayonet multitudes of cripled men & men who had surrendered, and have . . . seen them treat hundreds of prisoners in such a manner as to secure their Death.” American diplomat John Jay described the “greater part” of the Tories as “inhuman, barbarous wretches.” Tens of thousands of Loyalists fled America by war’s end. They reportedly removed more than £1.5 million from New York alone as they left.

But the war’s ravages were felt unevenly across the country. As historian Stephen Conway concluded, there were whole areas of the United States that either were lightly touched by war or escaped its ravages completely. Rhode Island, for example, was occupied by British forces for three years, and its shipping was essentially destroyed. In 1774, Newport sent out nearly 140 vessels; in 1782, it sent out “not more than 5 or 6.” Pennsylvania, on the other hand, was unoccupied between mid-1778 and 1783, as was much of the North. Some backcountry areas, such as those in Virginia, were also comparatively insulated. Two Virginia entrepreneurs, John Lewis and John Oliver, in 1779 created a seven-year partnership to run a plantation and a public house to entertain travelers who “resort the Baths for the use of the waters” at Warm Springs in the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the British made their ill-fated invasion of Virginia in 1781, they never got near the resort or most of the state’s western half.

Still other areas suffered severe, comparatively long-lasting damage. A British observer, James Simpson, reported two months after Charleston’s capture that he could only believe so much devastation had occurred so quickly in a previously wealthy area because he had seen it personally. One historian concludes that destruction and impoverishment in South Carolina were so great that the state was “nearly submerged by the British tide.” Perhaps twenty thousand slaves fled masters, mainly from southern plantations. Overall, another historian concludes, the South suffered considerably greater losses than the North, and they came later in the war. In addition to physical infrastructure damage, the war caused a variety of other economic losses. 

During the war, American exports plummeted, reducing incomes significantly, especially in coastal areas. Chesapeake tobacco exports fell roughly 90 percent from prewar levels by the early 1780s, and Carolina rice exports to Britain had dropped 80 percent by then. Philadelphia shipping tonnage dropped more than 90 percent by 1779. Before the war, America’s four largest cities—Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston—had 5.1 percent of the country’s population. In 1790, those cities had less than 3 percent of the population, indicating that their relative prosperity had declined compared to the prewar period.

The war caused other significant economic disruptions. The Confederation issued about $241 million in paper money (the opposite of “specie” or “hard money,” i.e., gold or silver coin). One historian estimates that the amount was larger than the entire American gross domestic product at the time.18 The unintended result of issuing large quantities of paper money at a time of widespread shortages of goods was massive inflation. In Maryland, for example, the price of foodstuffs went up between 1,900 percent and 5,000 percent between 1777 and 1780.19 Samuel Adams paid $2,000 in Boston in 1779 for a suit of clothes. A single horse was sold for $12,000 in 1781 in North Carolina.

Ultimately, the total Confederation paper issue was exchanged for roughly 20 percent of its face value in specie equivalent before becoming worthless. The states also issued more than $200 million in paper money, and by late 1780, most of it was essentially worthless as well. Maryland currency, for example, traded at one hundred Maryland dollars for one Spanish dollar by then. In some cases, despite such depreciation, paper money was required by law to be accepted at its face value, no matter what it was actually worth on the market in specie (i.e., it was made “legal tender”). Merchants complained that wartime paper money and legal-tender laws had had unfair results.

Leading Philadelphia merchant Stephen Collins explained in disgust to a London correspondent after the war that a Pennsylvania estate for which he was the executor had been sharply reduced in value because he had been forced by law to accept paper money worth little in full payment of far larger debts to it. To another British correspondent he wrote that “the War has been a disagreeable and ruinous affair to the trading Interest of this Country, as well from the great Risque, and many captures at Sea, as the destructive Consequences arising from the great and rapid Depreciation, and next kin to a final Destruction of the paper Money, by which many are greatly injur’d, & some totally ruined.” In addition to numerous merchants who suffered losses, several other groups had reason to be unhappy about the war’s costs to them by the time peace arrived.

One important disgruntled group was America’s returning veterans. The Confederation had supported its army poorly during the war. One historian concludes that “soldiers and officers received virtually nothing” in pay in 1781–82. He says that that “relieved” the Confederation of an expense of at least $3.5 million a year, which he thinks was “necessary to maintain solvency in other areas.” Soldiers’ families had to shift for themselves. George Washington described the army to his fellow general, Nathanael Greene, as “composed of Men oftentimes half starved; always in Rags, without pay, and experiencing, at times, every species of distress which human nature is capable of undergoing.” He said that future historians would have trouble believing that an army in that condition could possibly have won the war.

General Greene would undoubtedly have agreed with Washington’s description. He later explained that he had spent $40,000 on clothing for his troops in 1782 because several hundred “had been as naked as they were born . . . for more than four months, and the enemy in force within four hours march of us all.” In 1782, North Carolina’s congressmen had written to Governor Alexander Martin that “never was an army worse paid than they have been and are, to say nothing of their cloathes & rations.” Because they were paid poorly or not at all, many soldiers became involuntary “public creditors” of the states and the Confederation. As we will see, the parsimonious treatment that ordinary soldiers received during and after the war led many of them to become discontented with both the Confederation and their own state governments.

Another unhappy group consisted of farmers who had been unwilling participants in the war. They supplied the American army or militias and were promised repayment, thus also becoming public creditors. Later they often felt that they had received little real compensation. In Virginia, Shenandoah Valley farmers alone supplied at least 232,000 pounds of flour and 566,000 pounds of beef to the government between 1781 and 1783. In exchange, they received state debt certificates that were usually worth only a small fraction of their face value on the market. In 1784, some of these farmers petitioned the Virginia legislature, complaining that they had not been paid for their livestock and crops, which were “our only dependance for the support of ourselves and familys.” Instead, for their goods and personal services they had been given “a Species of paper—Specie which will pay nothing but the Redemption of itself and of consequence No Restitution at all.” Unable for lack of hard money (i.e., actual specie) to pay either “private debts or publick Tax,” they requested that they be able to use the state debts owed to them (i.e., their state debt certificates) to pay both. Not surprisingly, other farmers, such as those in New Jersey, hid their cattle from the army rather than have them exchanged for government debt certificates of far less value. Still others, notably from Connecticut, engaged in traitorous smuggling to sell goods to New York British forces who would pay hard money for them, defying army interdiction efforts.

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