Part 6, The Political History of the United States, 1776-1778
Volume 4, Chapter 44, The Drive for Confederation
The most important political fact of the years after independence was the movement toward a formal confederation by the revolutionary states of America.
The radicals were scarcely enthusiastic about creating any sort of permanent central government,
but their innate distrust of all government, especially large central government,
necessarily removed from checks by the people, was partially neutralized by their overriding desire
to win the Revolutionary War. The myth abounded that formal confederation was necessary to win
in the war, although the war would be virtually won by the time confederation was finally
achieved.
The war was fought and won by the states informally, but effectively united in a continental congress.
Fundamental decisions, such as independence, had to be ratified by every state.
There was no particular need for the formal trappings and permanent investing of a centralized
government, even for victory in war. Ironically, the radicals were reluctantly pulled into
an arrangement which they believed would wither away at the end of the war, and thereby helped
to forge an instrument which would be riveted upon the people only in time of peace, an
instrument that proved to be a halfway house to that arch enemy of the radical cause, the
and the Constitution of the United States.
The conservatives, on the other hand,
suffered from no such hesitation.
Those flexible conservatives who went along reluctantly
with independence rather than becoming outright Tories
saw in a strong new central government
the reconstitution of a powerful state,
a British Imperium without Britain.
Here they hoped would be a strong central state
which they could expect to control, a state which could bring back mercantilism and monopoly
privilege with even greater benefits to themselves.
As Merrill Jensen puts it, the conservatives who had opposed the revolution and who went
along with it only when they saw no alternatives as well as many who were not opposed to independence
wanted supreme political authority placed in a central government which could exercise
a coercive power over the states and their citizens.
They valued the British connection for the very definite advantages it gave the ruling
classes of the colonies.
When faced with the fact of independence, they demanded the creation of a government
which would in some way function as a bulwark of conservative interest, in other words,
as a substitute for the British government.
The radicals, of course, were engaged in fighting a war against centralized government, its
taxation, restrictions and privileges, and were not about to favor establishing an equivalent
at home to what they were fighting to eject from American shores.
And what of the revolutionary radical principle of locating sovereignty in the people themselves
rather than in the legitimate government?
Would not this be an insuperable barrier to the aims of the right?
But here the able conservatives proved shrewd indeed.
They managed to drop quickly the belief in the sovereignty of the crown and demagogically
to incorporate the radical doctrine of popular sovereignty for their own ends.
Indeed, they cynically appeared to be more democratic than the radicals,
for they argued that only a strong national government could really represent all the people.
This contrasted to the radicals' distrust of central power
and their doctrine that the central government should only be a limited federation of sovereign states.
In the name of the people, the conservatives called for the crushing of the powers of the separate states and the aggrandizement of national governmental power.
Thus, for the first time on the American scene, but by no means the last time,
the right found the ability to use the language of popular democracy to befuddle the masses,
to win their allegiance to strong central government, mercantilism and monopoly and away from individual freedom.
The drive for a national state came primarily from the financial oligarchs of the middle states
and especially from Robert Morris and his Pennsylvania satellites and the allied oligarchs of New York.
There were two major reasons for the greater zeal for national aggrandizement by these men than among the conservatives of the South.
First was the former's far shakier rule at home, especially in New York and Pennsylvania.
And second was the greater economic and financial stake in the central government than that among the planters of the South.
For example, Morris and his cohorts had already made millions from the centralized war effort alone.
Until a formal governmental structure should be achieved, the conservatives tried their best to aggrandize the power of the existing Continental Congress at the expense of the citizens of the several states.
Leading in this attempt was James Wilson of Pennsylvania, Robert Morris's ally and chief theoretician.
Scorning the history of Congress, Wilson boldly declared as early as August 1776 that Congress really represented all the American people and was thus superior to the states.
Indeed, the states, declared Wilson, had really been dissolved into one large state.
But though Pennsylvania's Benjamin Franklin, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a centrist shifting steadily rightward, and the now conservative John Adams argued similarly, their repeated efforts at centralization were all unsuccessful.
Thus, in early 1777, Wilson argued that Congress had to oppose a convention of New England states that had met the previous December to discuss plans to prosecute the war.
Adams, Rush and he asserted that an unauthorized meeting would virtually usurp the alleged powers of Congress.
But the radicals fought back powerfully.
Sam Adams acidly pointed out that only tyrants opposed the right of the people to assemble.
And Richard Henry Lee insisted that there was no confederation and therefore there could be no infringement of law.
Congress finally agreed that it had no power to prohibit or punish such regional meetings.
Another fierce struggle about enhancing Congressional power over people came in early 1777.
It was waged over a measure authorizing Congress to empower local officials to arrest deserters without participation by the state governments.
and Governments. Led by James Wilson, Congress at first passed this law, but it was later
forced to rescind.
Just arrived in Congress, one Dr. Thomas Burke of North Carolina, an Irish-born physician,
quickly assumed the leadership of the radical libertarian forces. He charged that this assumption
of power by Congress would thereby endanger the personal liberty of every man in America.
He pointed out that such measures would give Congress a power to act coercively against
the subject of every state and dissolve state institutions.
It would have power unlimited over the lives and liberties of all men in America.
At the same time, Burke and Lee also managed to block an attempt by Wilson and John Adams
to vote on a return of Congress to Philadelphia by vote of individual congressmen rather than
and by States. Another attempt to fuse the states into one common mass, as Adams had
revealingly phrased it. If Congress were thus allowed to change its own rules of voting
by states, Burke declared it would then be bound by no rule at all and only governed
by an arbitrary tyrannical discretion. Burke's threat to withdraw should Congress thus change
The more experience I acquire, the stronger is my conviction that unlimited power cannot be safely trusted to any man or set of men on earth.
No men have undertaken to exercise authority with intentions more generous and disinterested
than the Congress.
How could individuals blessed with peaceable domestic affluence endeavor at increasing
the power with which they are invested when their tenure of it must be exceedingly dangerous
and precarious?
This is a question I believe cannot be answered but by a plain declaration.
The power of all kinds has an irresistible propensity to increase desire for itself.
It gives the passion of ambition, a velocity which increases in its progress, and this
is a passion which grows in proportion as it is gratified.
These and many other considerations make me earnestly wish that the power of Congress
was accurately defined and that there were adequate check provided to prevent any excess.
Even thus, early men so eminent as members of Congress are willing to explain away any
power that stands in the way of their particular purposes.
What may we not expect sometime hence when the seat of power shall become firm by habit
and men will be accustomed to obedience and perhaps forgetful of the original principles which gave rise thereto.
I believe, sir, the root of the evil is deep in human nature.
Its growth may be kept down, but it cannot be entirely extirpated.
Power will sometime or other be abused unless men are well watched
and checked by something they cannot remove when they please.
The main thrust of the conservatives for greater power was not to be through the existing Congress
but through the formal creation of a far stronger one.
In a kind of two-pronged attack, efforts were made in this regard at the same time as the
push was on to centralize power in Congress.
Thus, when Richard Henry Lee in June 1776 introduced a resolution for confederation as a corollary to his resolve for independence, the conservatives were able to obtain overwhelming superiority in the Congressional Committee of 13 to draw up a plan for confederation.
Chairman of the committee was the Arch-Conservative, John Dickinson, who submitted a draft of Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union on July 12.
Dickinson's draft was heavily influenced by a plan of confederation that Franklin had prematurely circulated in the previous year.
A veteran pioneer of the idea of a strong central government over the American colonies, Franklin
now outlined a similar plan with the British Imperium left out.
The crucial consideration was the locating of sovereign power in the National Congress.
Delegates would vote individually and be chosen by population, and Congress would have unchecked
power over war, peace and foreign affairs, and would seize control over the untapped
and promising lands west of the Appalachians.
Moreover, Congress would have all law-making powers necessary to the general welfare.
And that indefinable phrase gave carte blanche to legislative whim.
Franklin provided for permanent executive council, chosen by Congress, but its powers were not to be violable by that body.
Only one vitally important power essential to sovereignty was omitted, the taxing power, against which, after all, the Americans were in direct revolt.
During 1775, the colonies had not yet been ready for independence or for federation,
but now Dickinson drew heavily on Franklin's draft for federation.
Dickinson too provided for the national sovereignty in Congress,
its powers to be sweeping, and for permanent executive council.
But his draft was a bit less permissive than Franklin's.
He set forth specifically the powers that could be wielded by Congress,
not leaving them limitless.
He also provided that each state, as in the existing Congress, have one vote,
thus granting an important concession to the states.
Furthermore, whereas Franklin would have had all matters decided by simple majority vote,
Dickinson conceded that certain fundamental issues, including war, coinage,
and apportionment of revenue, would require the vote of nine states.
Although a concession to radicalism, it was still a far cry from the unanimity that had been needed for independence.
The powers left to the states in the Dickinson draft were negligible.
Treaties specifically overrode state tariffs and the Articles of Confederation overrode state internal police power.
Furthermore, the draft strongly implied that all powers but the overrideable internal police power were granted to Congress, rather than to the states.
Congress would also have the power to settle disputes between states.
The one vital restriction remaining upon Congressional power was that it would not be allowed to levy taxes.
These would be levied by the states, and the revenues supplied by them to Congress.
Three specific clauses of the Dickinson Draft proved to be the focal points of raging controversy within the Congress.
All involved the central problem of the conservative drive for a unitary national state and strong central government.
One struggle was an attack from the right, from those who wanted to restore the Franklin idea of voting by individuals elected proportionately to population rather than by states.
The conservatives were bolstered by the delegates from the large states who, of course, tended to back an amalgam by population in which they would exert far more influence than in equal voting by states.
The attack from the right was led by Franklin, aided by John Adams and Benjamin Rush.
Leading the small state radicals was the Reverend John Witherspoon, president of Princeton College,
who insisted that the confederation should not be a national state, but a federal union of sovereign states.
Finally, after a furious battle, equal voting by states prevailed over the stubborn objection
of the Majority of the Virginia Delegation, John Adams and Arthur Middleton of South Carolina.
If voting in Congress were to be equal by states, how would the expenses of the central
government be apportioned among the states, which would undertake to supply the revenue?
The sensible solution of the Dickinson Draft was to requisition funds according to the
population of each state.
Here again the attack was from the right, specifically from the slave states of the
South wishing to keep their slaves untaxed.
They proposed requisition on the basis of the property value of lands and improvements.
This was a cunning attempt to foist the burden of revenue upon the liberal and relatively
slaveless New England states where land was intensively cultivated and improved and therefore
of a relatively higher value than in the other states.
While the original draft prevailed during 1776, the final vote in late 1777 was a victory
for the southern view.
The unanimous vote against lands and improvements as the basis for calculating revenue, cast
by the four New England states, was overcome by a solid phalanx of five votes from Maryland,
The most bitter of the three controversies around the Dickinson Draft was over its proposal to nationalize all the Western lands, to vest all the lands beyond the boundaries of the thirteen states in the ownership of Congress.
The alternative was to allow them to remain in the hands of Virginia,
which had vague charter claims to all land westward to the Mississippi.
The radicals opposed the Dickinson draft in reaction to the imposed jurisdiction
of a remote central government in which the public had no direct participation.
More important, they realized that the drive for nationalization of the western lands
came from long-associated groups of highly influential land speculators,
whose grandiose claims to western territory had already been spurned by Virginia,
and who counted on the national government to grant them their demands.
If Congress ultimately would not do so, they had nothing to lose.
Many historians have treated this conflict as being between the landless states favoring nationalization
against the landed in favor of keeping their claims, yet two of the six landless, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, showed no interest whatever in nationalization.
It was from Maryland, Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey, home of the key groups of speculators in Western land, from which all the pressure came.
Before the revolution, the land speculators had looked to the British government to establish their monopolistic claims.
Now they turned equally naturally to the Continental Congress.
It is not at all coincidental that John Dickinson hailed from Pennsylvania,
that Franklin, whose plan had envisioned congressional control of the Western lands, was both a Pennsylvanian and a land speculator,
and that the chief defenders of the Land Nationalization Clause in Congress were Samuel Chase of Maryland, a member of the Illinois Wabash Company of Western Land Speculators and James Wilson of Philadelphia, the president of the same company.
The speculators were driven to the Dickinson Draft by Virginia's actions during late June 1776.
The Virginia Convention had formally asserted her jurisdiction to all her grandiose charter claims to Western land.
It had condemned all unauthorized purchases of land from the Indians, and finally, upon petition of the settlers,
it guaranteed to the actual settlers the right to preemption of their land.
This resolution of May 14 was the first legislation in American history to assert the rights of the settler.
It was this Virginia claim and the guarantee to the settlers that led the land speculators to try for nationalization of the western lands.
The Dickinson draft, completed less than a month after Virginia's action, granted to the land speculators more or less all of their goals of nationalization.
Congress was given the sole power to decide state boundaries and to purchase lands beyond these boundaries from the Indians, thus implying the existence of American lands outside the bounds of any state.
It was also specifically given sole and exclusive power to limit the bounds of state claims to Western lands.
The Virginians reacted to the Dickinson Draft with understandable bitterness, after all, one of the grievances against Great Britain had been its meddling and authority over the Western lands.
Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson led the attack, while Samuel Chase and Thomas Johnson of Maryland and James Wilson led the nationalizers.
The Landed States had triumphed.
Lee successfully moved to insert in the articles a clause to the effect,
that no state shall be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States.
For his part, Thomas Jefferson was quite clear that the United States should be deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States.
deprived of territory for the benefit of the United States.
For his part, Thomas Jefferson was quite clear that his resistance to land nationalization
was founded not on the territorial claims of Virginia, but on his deep-seated belief
in justice to the settlers.
As his biographer puts it, in his, Jefferson's, mind, this was not primarily a question of
rivalry between one state and another. His major concern was not for the land, but for
the people who settled on it, and at this time he believed that the interest of the
pioneers could be better safeguarded by states than by Congress, which seemed more susceptible
to the pressure of speculative land companies. He was deeply sympathetic with squatters,
Woodward had little patience with absentee groups who came seeking special favors.
What he most relied on for protection of individuals was local self-government, favoring the early
development of it in Virginia's outlying lands.
But until he could be reassured about the attitudes of Congress toward the small landholders,
he preferred to depend on the states to protect them.
In the drive for land nationalization were three large and international companies of
land speculators, the Indiana Company which claimed an enormous tract south of the Ohio
virtually consisting of what is now West Virginia and the Illinois and Wabash Companies claiming
a still vaster region including much of present day Indiana and Illinois.
All these enormous tracts were in Virginia claimed territory.
Only and prominently involved in the Indiana Company were Robert Morris, the Wharton Brothers,
Philadelphia merchants and financiers, William Trent, brother-in-law of George Krogan, the
Franks and Gratz families, international Jewish merchants based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania
and Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin, his son William and Benjamin's son-in-law Richard
Batch, and the Tory Joseph Galloway. Arch-Conservative and nationalist James Wilson was in the pay
of the Indiana Company and Thomas Wharton was selected by the speculators to distribute
shares of their stock in bribes to members of Congress. The huge Illinois Company grant
included virtually the same crew, Trent, the Franklins, the Whartons, Krogan and Galloway.
Patrick Henry, who later broke angrily with the land speculators, was at the time either
in the pay of the Illinois Company or direct participant in it, and accordingly favored
the nationalization plan.
The Wabash Company claiming nearby lands included the Gratz-Frank's group and the entire top
leadership of the Maryland oligarchy, Samuel Chase, Governor Thomas Johnson, former Governor
by William Pacca, the brother-in-law of Robert Morris, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton.
No wonder that Maryland fought fiercely for nationalizing the Western lands.
In late 1778, after the American forces had wrested the Illinois country from the British,
the Illinois and Wabash companies merged their interests into one powerful force, which would
To then include Silas Deane and Conrad Girard, French Minister to the United States.
At about the same time, 1774-76, Virginia won a successful three-cornered conflict of
its own with settlers and with speculative land companies.
Its most important land struggle involved pioneers who had trekked across the Appalachian
In 1774, Lord Dunmore's Royal Virginia Troops had driven the Shawnee Indians out of the
Kentucky region, Dunmore's War, and settlement across the mountains promptly ensued. At first,
the settlers simply regarded themselves as the extreme western end of Virginia's Finn
in Castle County.
Very quickly the new settlers began to imbibe the very ideas of self-government for occupiers
of new land that the Americans in general were using against Great Britain.
The arguments were clearly applicable to the Kentucky settlers as against the remote government
of Virginia.
Into this potentially explosive situation stepped an ambitious group of land speculators
headed by Judge Richard Henderson of North Carolina.
They formed the Transylvania Company in January 1775 and soon bribed the Cherokee tribe to
come together and cede the company the large land area southwest of the Kentucky River
and north of the Cumberland.
Since the Cherokees, ensconced in the mountains to the south, made no use of this land anyway
and didn't really own it, they were happy to consent to this sale at the Treaty of Sycamore
Shoals in mid-March. To head company operations in the Kentucky lands, Henderson hired the
celebrated frontiersman Daniel Boone, who hacked a trail, the Wilderness Road, westward
across the Cumberland Gap in the mountains. In the next step of his ambitious scheme,
Menon persuaded the fewer than 200 settlers in Kentucky to send 18 delegates to a convention
at Boonesboro on the Kentucky River at the end of May 1775. Demagogically playing on
ideas of independence and self-government, he eloquently proclaimed that all power is
originally in the people and the delegates unanimously decided to establish Transylvania
as an independent colony, free of all Eastern ties.
The Convention established new courts, militia and scales of punishment for the new Transylvania
and established freedom of religion.
Congress was petitioned to recognize the new region as a separate colony.
But Transylvania was not destined to remain an idol for very long.
Henderson quickly began to use its newfound independence to mulk the settlers unmercifully.
He raised the price of land he charged to settlers and imposed quit rents as stiff as
those charged in Virginia.
The unfortunate settlers soon came to regard Henderson's Transylvania scheme as a far
worse threat than Virginia.
Actually, the Kentucky settlers would have preferred to be independent and truly free
of both Transylvania and Virginia. But for remote settlers facing an Indian threat, this
was not a very realistic hope. Led by the citizens of Harrodsburg, the settlers turned
to the idea of reincorporation into Virginia. In a convention held at Harrodsburg on June
6, 1776, the delegates selected the young frontiersman George Rogers Clark and a young
John Attorney, John Gabriel Jones, to be their delegates to apply for representation in the
Virginia Assembly as a new western county.
Their trip to the Virginia governmental seat at Williamsburg was a truly heroic one, for
they ran into the newly erupted Cherokee War.
In early July 1776, the pro-war wing of the Cherokees, led by the fiery young chief Dragan
The New erupted to attack frontier settlements from southern Virginia to northern Georgia.
Their timing was remarkably bad, for the Tory risings in the south, as well as the British
attack upon Charleston, had already been defeated, and the militia of four southern states, especially
of the Carolinas, were able to devote full attention to the Cherokees, spurred on by
By handsome government payments for every Indian scalp, they had brutally and systematically
burned and devastated every inch of Cherokee cultivated land and property by August.
Had the Cherokees waited another year to coordinate with Iroquois attacks or to unite with other
Indians, their war might have been far more successful.
As it was, Dragon Canoe's militant policy proved to be merely adventurous.
In addition, his braves did not always bother to make a distinction between Tory and Whig
settlers and only succeeded in deeply alienating many southern Tories from the British cause
with which the Cherokees were allied.
Finally reaching Williamsburg after their travail, Clark and Jones presented their case
to the Virginia Assembly in early October. There they argued against Henderson, who was
aided by those apathetic to the West Country and by Fincastle County, which stood to lose
its claim to jurisdiction over Kentucky. But Kentucky was backed by Governor Patrick Henry,
George Mason and Thomas Jefferson, who was always an eloquent friend of the settler.
Finally, on December 7, 1776, Virginia voted to grant Kentucky admission as its western-most county.
The Henderson Land clique had been totally foiled.