The Glorious Cause: The American Revolution, 1763-1789 (131 page)

The invitation to a meeting went out to the states soon after, and on September 11, 1786, delegates from five states -- New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Virginia -- met at Annapolis, Maryland. Maryland's legislature, theoretically the host, refused to appoint a delegation out of fear apparently that the gathering would undermine an already weak Congress. Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and North Carolina sent delegates who failed to arrive in time. Several states appointed men of great distinction: Alexander Hamilton represented New York, John Dickinson appeared for Delaware, and James Madison came with Edmund Randolph from Virginia. Only the New Jersey delegation carried a commission authorizing them to consider "other important matters" besides the regulation of commerce. New Jersey had broad constitutional revision in mind, and so in fact did Madison and Hamilton. But all saw that the Convention, with only five states present, could do little. That little proved to be a suggestion to all the states that they appoint commissioners to meet in May 1787 "to take into consideration the situation of the United States, to devise such further provisions as shall appear to them necessary to render the constitution of the Federal Government adequate to the exigencies of the Union. . . ."
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This message reached the states almost simultaneously with news of a very different sort: there had been an armed rebellion in central and western Massachusetts. The rebellion, which has been called Shays's Rebellion after Daniel Shays, one of its leaders, was made by farmers, most of them solid, respectable men, many of them veterans who had been driven to desperation by the state's. rigid financial policy. Since the early 1780s the legislature, a body under the thumb of eastern merchants and their cohorts, had funded the Massachusetts debt at close to face value, collected heavy direct taxes while abolishing legal tender currency, and resisted almost all efforts at reforming either the credit

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system or the tax structure. At the climax of this series of policies early in 1786, the legislature increased taxes for the payment of interest on the debt (most of which was owned in eastern Massachusetts) and resolved also to fulfill Congress's requisition. These measures had agitated the western sector for six years, and the last brought an upheaval by the debt-ridden farmers who resorted to violence to prevent the seizure of their property for the payment of debts and taxes they could not meet.
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Massachusetts put the rebellion down in a few months, but it had helped alter the public mood. That mood was not altogether grim, but it disposed men to favor some constitutional revision. Just how much and of what sort remained open when on February 21, 1787, Congress added its uncertain voice to the call for change by approving a resolution in favor of a convention.
The convention would meet in Philadelphia in May 1787.

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An elite began the struggle against Britain in the 1760s, and the people followed. An elite began the movement for constitutional reform. Would the people follow again? Were the people of the 1780s different from those of the prewar and war years? Madison, Washington, and Hamilton, and the others who favored constitutional revision, did not know how to answer these questions. Nor did anyone else. One of the anomalies of the years between the making of peace and the Constitutional Convention was the uncertainty felt by such leaders about the character of the American people.

Much had changed between 1765 and 1787. Although in 1765 the Americans were not one people, they knew they had much in common. By 1787 they recognized what it was. They were a people who valued liberty and representative government. And well before 1787 they had formed a union among themselves. To be sure the central institution of that union lacked strength, but at least the union had survived. Moreover the people had a history, a short but glorious history of struggle and triumph in war. This history set apart the people of the 1780s from those of twenty years earlier. In a sense, of course, it had called them into being as a people.

The Americans in the 1780s still believed that they had been selected by Providence to do great deeds. They had been chosen, and their victory in the war and the achievement of independence demonstrated the worth of their calling. Undoubtedly some held this conviction more deeply than others did. It seems always to have existed in New England, especially among Congregationalists. It was a powerful feeling in Virginia

even among planters who listened to bland sermons in the established church. Elsewhere it flourished among evangelicals and enthusiasts, among many Presbyterians and Baptists, for example. But undoubtedly there were those who did not sense the workings of Providence in America. Yet in the 1780s many of the indifferent felt the stirrings of national pride.

Nationalism, however, did not completely embody all the old values of Americans. In fact the Americans' concern for liberty retained an existence apart from their awareness of themselves as a people. It was much older and it was tied to local institutions -- to the states as much as to the union.

In the 1760s and 1770s the Americans found that they could agree more easily on principles than they could on how to organize for resistance and war.
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But in 1774 they created the Continental Congress and sent delegates to it and to its successor. This body provided the center from which the war could be directed, even though its powers remained undefined until the Articles of Confederation were ratified by the states in March 1781.

Although the states created the Congress, the Congress also created itself by taking the responsibility for leading the states. It established an army; it sent envoys abroad and entered into an alliance with the French; it issued currency and it borrowed money; it requisitioned money from the states. It did all these things and many more without any clear authority except necessity and the tacit approval of the states.

There was much that Congress could not do, however, including collecting taxes and regulating commerce. Nor apparently could it act directly on individuals and institutions within the states. There were delegates to the Congress who claimed coercive powers for it, powers they said which might be used on the citizens of a state. Congress itself made tentative efforts to flex its muscles in the states. In 1776, for example, it advised the states to try to recruit men for the army by holding out the lure of bounties to be paid in grants of land. Maryland refused, and Congress responded by insisting that no state could escape congressional instructions simply by refusing to obey them. This statement brought another protest from Maryland, and Congress backed down. About the same time, Congress considered taking upon itself the responsibility of stamping out loyalist activity in Delaware even though the state had not requested such action.
Congress made other

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motions toward taking charge in the first two years of the war although none produced a shift in power that would have made it dominant over the states. Congressional relations with the states thus remained a gray area early in the war.
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Gray began to give way to light when the states produced constitutions for themselves. These constitutions typically set up a frame of government and defined the powers the state governments were to exercise. They also staked out protections for citizens in bills of rights. Such actions left Congress on unstable and shrinking ground. It had to manage the war and pull together all efforts without the authority that a genuine government enjoyed. Its powers, not exactly clear at any time, threatened to become even murkier as the states acted.

Even before the action of the states, Congress had felt the need to clarify and thereby secure its authority. Two of its members, Benjamin Franklin and Silas Deane, each acting without a commission from Congress, wrote drafts of constitutions in 1775. The next year, as Congress debated about independence, a committee charged to provide a plan of confederation produced a draft which after revision became the Articles of Confederation.

The Congress did not adopt this committee's effort until November 1777. And what it approved differed in important ways from the committee's production of 1776. The committee in turn had revised a draft written by John Dickinson.

To solve the problems of confederation, Dickinson recommended granting major powers to Congress -- and cutting down those of the states. Under his plan, Congress could enter the life of the states in various ways, including the regulation of state coercive powers. For their part, the states should not be permitted to interfere with congressional action. Dickinson apparently persuaded the committee, for it proposed to place most power in the hands of Congress.

Between July 12, 1776, when the committee reported and November 17, 1777, when Congress finally approved the Articles of Confederation, the delegates virtually rejected the committee's report and made drastic changes which firmly tied Congress's hands-and freed those of the states. Not all the changes concerned the relations of the states to Congress. One crucial one which did -- the decision not to give Congress control of western lands -- delayed ratification of the Articles until March 1781.
Maryland wanted Congress to control these lands and refused

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to ratify the Articles. Maryland's intransigence arose not from a desire to strengthen Congress but from an intention to weaken those states with claims on the interior of the United States. When in 1781 Virginia ceded her claims to the West, Maryland ratified and the Articles went into effect.

Article II of the new constitution disabused Congress of its pretensions to supremacy by providing that "Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this Confederation expressly delegated to the United States, in Congress assembled." Under the Articles, Congress continued to control foreign relations, and it alone could make war. But the states, as the constituting power of the Union, clearly retained the upper hand.

By 1783 the public spirit and the structure of government of the Union virtually dictated that Americans would look to the states -- not to Congress -- for direction. By this time, indeed, the states, stimulated by the great purposes of the Revolution, had already done much.

None had contributed more to the Revolution than Virginia. The credit for the state's remarkable performance must be given to an elite, the gentry, an uncommon group which led Virginia into the Revolution and continued to lead afterwards. The gentry drew the support of small Virginia planters early in the century and held it through merit -- not coercion.

The gentry never included more than 5 percent of Virginia's white population in the eighteenth century and within this number, according to historian Jack Greene, lay a core of about forty major families which provided the important leaders of Virginia. If the gentry and its leaders were small in number, they were not exclusive. To be sure the gentry did not welcome just anyone to its ranks -- wealth and talent were the requirements for entrance -- but it remained relatively open in the eighteenth century. The gentry in England and in several colonies, most notably New York, was closed compared with Virginia's.
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