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Shays' Rebellion continues in western Massachusetts, where 1,200 desperate and embittered farmers attack the federal arsenal at Springfield January 25 (see 1786). Armed only with pitchforks and barrel staves, they seek weapons to defend themselves against an army advancing from Boston under the leadership of General Benjamin Lincoln, now 54, but militia defending the arsenal suddenly open fire with cannon, killing four of the rebels and wounding 20. General Lincoln arrives in time to chase Daniel Shays' men into neighboring towns, and Thomas Jefferson writes to James Madison January 30, "I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical. Unsuccessful rebellions, indeed, generally establish the rights of the people which have produced them. An observation of this truth should render honest republican governors so mild in their punishment of rebellions as not to discourage them too much. It is a medicine necessary for the sound health of the government." General Lincoln marches his men through a snowstorm and takes the rebels by surprise at Petersham February 3; Shays escapes to Vermont; most of the rebels take advantage of a general amnesty and surrender; Shays himself will be pardoned next year. But although hard-money interests in maritime Boston win out over inflationary-minded farmers Governor Bowdoin loses to John Hancock in the June election.
British general and former military governor of Massachusetts Thomas Gage dies in England April 2 at age 65.
A Constitutional Convention that has been meeting for 6 months at Philadelphia draws up a document whose preamble states, "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general welfare, and insure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our prosperity do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." George Washington has presided over the convention since May 25, citing Shays' Rebellion in Massachusetts as reason for a strong central government, and Virginia delegate James Madison, now 36, has been the driving force behind the creation of the new frame of government. Standing only five feet four and weighing scarcely 100 pounds, Madison saw the weaknesses of the Articles of Confederation while serving in the Continental Congress during the War of Independence. He has studied the governments of European countries past and present, learned of their weaknesses, and determined that the United States must have an effective central authority. Madison's Philadelphia-born Princeton classmate Gunning Bedford, Jr., 40, represents Delaware at the convention and threatens to seek "some foreign ally of more honor and good faith" unless small states receive congressional representation that reflects more than their population. "I do not, gentlemen, trust you," he thunders, but Madison settles differences between proponents of a strong central government and proponents of absolute rights for the separate states. Washington resists efforts to make him king. The Virginia Plan approved by a vote of seven to three in the Convention June 19 calls for a balance of powers between the federal government (borrowing the idea of federalism pioneered by the Iroquois Confederation in 1570) and state governments, and the Constitution signed by 39 delegates from 12 states September 17 safeguards the institution of property from financial disruption and taxpayer rebellions such as those in Massachusetts.
The Constitution establishes a bicameral legislature rather than a parliament, with the lower house to have representation proportionate to population and an upper house with two members from each state (a system based on the "Connecticut Compromise" introduced by Roger Sherman, 66, and Oliver Ellsworth, 42, both of Connecticut); it provides for a chief executive to be elected for limited terms rather than for life. The chief executive may, in fact, be impeached for treason or bribery, and also for "high crimes and misdemeanors," an addendum that Madison initially opposed on grounds that it was too vague but that he has finally accepted. Scottish-born jurist James Wilson, 45, has played a leading role at the Convention, emphasizing the need for a central authority and proposing direct election of a president while at the same time preserving the local rights demanded by the separate states and citizens. Madison has opposed direct election of the chief executive lest it hurt the South, whose free citizenry would be outnumbered, and has backed creation of an Electoral College, whose membership is based on the population of the various states. The Convention adopts a "three-fifths rule" as a compromise to settle differences between Northern and Southern states over the counting of slaves for purposes of representation and taxation (Southern delegates have wanted slaves to be counted along with whites, Northern delegates have opposed their being counted at all). Each slave is to be counted as three-fifths of a free man for both purposes; the rule gives Virginia and the other Southern states a competitive edge (see Twelfth Amendment, 1804). The chief executive may propose legislation but cannot make laws, laws enacted by Congress are subject to review by the Supreme Court, and although the president is the nation's commander in chief he may not declare war; no provision is made for political parties or a standing army.
"Federalist Papers" explaining the new Constitution appear under the name "Publius" in the New YorkIndependent Journal beginning October 27; addressed to the people of New York State, they will run for 7 months. New York lawyer Alexander Hamilton, now 32, writes the first one and will write 50 more; James Wilson, James Madison, and foreign affairs secretary John Jay, now 41, will write 34 papers between them, and their arguments will help give shape to a form of government that represents the world's first true democracy since ancient times (see 1788).
Delaware ratifies the Constitution by unanimous vote of its legislature December 7, becoming the first state of the Union. On December 12 Pennsylvania votes 46 to 23 to ratify the Constitution. New Jersey ratifies the Constitution by unanimous vote December 18.
A Northwest Ordinance adopted by Congress sitting at New York July 13 provides for a government of the Northwest Territory, a frontier area lying west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi, south of the Great Lakes, and embracing much of what later will be Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Congress adopted the Report on Government for Western Territory submitted in 1784 and another in 1785, but this one supersedes its predecessors, and it serves notice on the world that the territory heretofore off limits for development will not only be settled but will eventually become part of the United States: each district is to be governed by a congressionally appointed governor and judges until it has a population of 5,000 adult free males, whereupon it can become a territory and form its own representative legislature. When a territory has a population of 60,000 it may apply for statehood, with at least three states (but no more than five) to be created; no slavery is to be permitted (although slavery already in existence is not abolished), civil liberties are to be guaranteed, education is to be provided, and the Native American population is to be accorded decent treatment.
South Carolina cedes its western lands to the federal government, and the Ohio Company that was established last year signs a contract with the Treasury Board of Congress to buy lands on the Ohio River (see Losantiville, 1788). The company's negotiating agent is Manasseh Cutler, who is credited by many with having written the paragraphs in the Northwest Ordinance that prohibit slavery and encourage public education.
Thomas Paine sails for Europe, where he will remain for the next 15 years agitating for revolution and universal suffrage (see 1791).
Austria goes to war with the Ottoman Empire in a Balkan conflict that will continue until 1791. Field Marshal Gideon von Loudon will be recalled next year to command an Austrian army (see Belgrade, 1789).
Vietnam's Later Le dynasty ends after 360 years as the ruling family is overthrown by the Tay Son brothers, who have led a peasant revolt since 1771 and reunite the country, with Nguyen Hue ruling in the north as the emperor Quang Trung while his brother Nguyen Nhac rules in the south (see 1782). Missionary Pierre-Joseph-Georges Pigneau de Béhaine voyages home to France, persuades Louis XVI to sign a treaty with the Vietnamese prince Nguyen Anh, fails to obtain the armaments and troops needed to reinstate his friend, but returns to India and gains support for Nguyen Anh's cause from French merchants (see Chinese invasion, 1788).
English philanthropist William Wilberforce, 28, begins agitating against slavery in the British colonies (see 1789). Freetown is founded in West Africa as a haven for freed slaves in what will become Sierra Leone; British authorities cut off the slaves' shackles on a block in front of a cottonwood tree that will stand for more than 200 years.
"Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species" by Cambridge University student Thomas Clarkson, 27, is an expanded version of an essay, originally in Latin that won Clarkson a Latin prize.
The Free African Society is founded at Philadelphia by freedman Richard Allen, 27, and other blacks who were pulled off their knees in November at a "white" Methodist church. With Absalom Jones and others, Allen establishes the African Methodist Episcopal Church while working to improve the economic and social conditions of American blacks through the Free African Society.
One out of five families at New York owns at least one slave.
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure," writes Thomas Jefferson in a letter dated November 13.
Explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, reaches the China coast at Macao January 3, having studied the California coast and sailed across the Pacific (see 1786). He proceeds southward, leaves Manila April 9, ventures northward along the Asian coast, and sails through the Sea of Japan to the Tatar Strait separating the mainland from Sakhalin Island. After going through the strait that will bear his name between Sakhalin and the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, he crosses the Sea of Okhotsk and arrives at the Siberian town of Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula, where he puts his journal and maps in the hands of a party that is about to set forth overland for France. La Pérouse and his two ships head for the Navigators' Islands (later Samoa), where the commander of his sister ship Astrolabe is murdered along with 11 of his crew, and from there makes for the Friendly (later Tonga) and Norfolk islands en route to Botany Bay in eastern New Holland (Australia) (see 1788).
Rice riots at Osaka climax years of Japanese peasant unrest. Rice warehouses are broken open May 11, the riots spread throughout the city May 12, by May 18 they have spread to Edo and 30 other cities, and by May 20 nearly every large rice merchant has seen his house destroyed as the rioters break into 8,000 establishments that include not only rice warehouses but also pawnshops, sake breweries, and shops dealing in textiles, dyes, drugs, and oils.
China's rural masses remain richer, better educated, and better fed than French peasants, who are much better off than most other European peasants.
France's working class is ill-paid, the typical working day is 14 to 16 hours, workers are lucky to get 250 days of work per year. The basic food of the people is bread, whose cost consumes 60 percent of the average man's wages (see politics, 1789).
Britain's governor in chief for Quebec initiates talks with three Mississauga tribal chiefs for the purchase of 250,000 acres on the east bank of the Humber River with a view to using the trading post and its environs as the site of a provincial capital. Guy Carleton, 1st Baron Dorchester, will acquire the land next year for £1,700 plus axes, 149 barrels of provisions, blankets, bales of cloth, and other trading goods (see Toronto, 1793).
Rhode Island merchant John Brown of the firm Nicholas Brown & Company takes his ship George Washington to Guangzhou (Canton) via Madeira, Madras, and Pondicherry on a 10-month voyage that inaugurates the firm's China trade (see Empress of China, 1784; human rights, 1764). When she returns to Providence in July 1789 after sailing for 32,000 miles the George Washington will have sold her cargo of anchors, cannon shot, bar iron, sheet copper, ginseng, tar, spermaceti candles, Jamaica and New England rum, and Madeira wine and brandy; her cargo of tea, silks, porcelain, lacquerware, cotton, flannels, and gloves will fetch about $100,000; in the next 6 decades more than 75 such ships will leave Narragansett Bay to participate in the trade (see 1794).
English cotton goods production is 10 times what it was in 1770, and iron production has quadrupled, but cottage industry still prevails with few large power-operated mills. The Industrial Revolution is still in its early stages.
The Hanover bourse opens (see Bremen, 1682; London, 1698); trading on the exchange will continue for more than 210 years (see Valencia, 1830).
Economist Ferdinando Galiani dies at Naples October 30 at age 58, having pioneered the study of value theory.
A steamboat launched on the Delaware River August 22 by Windsor, Connecticut-born inventor John Fitch, 44, is the first of several that Fitch will build in the next few years. A steamboat demonstrated on the Potomac River in December by Maryland inventor James Rumsey, 44, is driven by streams of water forced through the stern by a steam pump. While John Fitch has been unable to obtain financial backing, Rumsey uses his charms to get an endorsement from George Washington and some financing from Benjamin Franklin (see 1791; Symington, 1788).
French physicist-mathematician Jacques (Alexandre César) Charles, 41, launches the first hydrogen ascenscion balloon (see Montgolfiers, 1783; politics [Battle of Fleurus], 1794).
Charles's law is enunciated in its initial steps by physicist Jacques Charles, who states that for every degree Celsius increase in temperature, any gas will expand by a factor of 1/273 to its volume at absolute temperature (O° C.), an idea that he will develop into the law that will bear his name.
Institutes of Physiology (Institutiones Physiolgicae) by German physiologist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, 35, at the University of Göttingen pioneers the study of physical anthropology.
Congregational Church leader Charles Chauncy dies at Boston February 10 at age 82.
Charlestown, Massachusetts-born Unitarian "reader" James Freeman, 28, becomes minister of King's Chapel at Boston (see London, 1774). The chapel was New England's first Episcopal church, but the War of Independence cut off Episcopalians from their ecclesiastical leaders in Britain. Their congregation was split between loyalists and revolutionists, the chapel's minister fled Boston in 1776, Freeman was appointed "reader" 5 years ago for lack of an Episcopalian minister, his friends have encouraged him to lay out his objections to preaching the doctrine of the Trinity, the congregation agreed 2 years ago to amend its liturgy, and King's Chapel becomes the first Unitarian church in the New World.
The University of Pittsburgh has its beginnings in a college founded at Fort Pitt (see 1759; 1816).
Painting: The Death of Socrates by Jacques Louis David; Lady Heathfield by Sir Joshua Reynolds; The Marquise de Pezay and the Marquise de Rougé with her Sons by Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun.
Theater: The Contrast by Boston lawyer-playwright Royall (né William Clark) Tyler, 29, 4/6 at New York's John Street Theater is the first comedy of any real merit by an American and one of the first to introduce the "stage Yankee," a shrewd and realistic rustic who will be a fixture in many plays; Such Things Are by Elizabeth Inchbald at London's Haymarket Theatre; Don Carlos, Infante of Spain (Don Karlos, Infante von Spanien) by Friedrich von Schiller 8/29 at Hamburg's National Theater.
Playwright Vicente García de la Huerta dies at Madrid March 12 at age 53.
Opera: Don Giovanni 10/29 at Prague's National Theater, with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, libretto by Lorenzo da Ponte based on a literary classic about the legendary Spanish lover Don Juan dating to the Middle Ages.
First performances: Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart; Sextet for Strings and horns in F major [A Musical Joke], Ein MusikalischerSpass] by W. A. Mozart.
Christoph Willibald Gluck dies at Vienna November 15 at age 73, the Holy Roman Emperor Josef II appoints Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart imperial composer to succeed Gluck, but he pays him only 800 florins per year whereas Gluck received 2,000.
The first English cricket match to be played at Lord's Cricket Ground pits Essex against Middlesex May 31. Established by Thomas Lord in London's Dorset Square, southwest of Regent's Park, the cricket ground will be moved in 1811 to St. John's Wood Estate and in 1814 to St. John's Wood Road, west of Regent's Park. The Marylebone Cricket Club plays its first match July 30 against the Islington Cricket Club (see 1744; 1788).
Britain begins clearing her prisons, which have become overcrowded with inmates who before the American Revolution would have been transported to the American colonies. The prisoners are placed aboard ships at Plymouth and Portsmouth for transportation to Britain's new Australian penal colony at Botany Bay (see exploration, 1788; Cook, 1770).
The Marine Pavilion at Brighton, Sussex, is completed for the prince regent to neoclassical designs by architect Henry Holland, now 43.
A French government edict intended to encourage agriculture removes the requirement that grain producers take their grain to market. The producers are permitted to sell directly to consumers or even to export their grain by land or sea with no restrictions whatever. French granaries are emptied in consequence, and the country is left unprepared for a bad harvest (see 1788).
English sea captain William Bligh, 33, sails for Tahiti on H.M.S. Bounty to obtain breadfruit plants for planting in the Caribbean islands as a new source of food for British colonists. Having gone to sea as a cabin boy at age 7, Lieutenant Bligh joined the Royal Navy in 1770. As sailing master of Captain Cook's 1772-1775 voyage, he developed an enthusiasm for breadfruit and has persuaded the Admiralty that Artocarpus communis can be a boon to the Caribbean (see 1789; Dampier, 1688).
An automated process for grinding grain and bolting (sifting) flour marks the beginning of automation in U.S. industry (see 1946). Devised by Oliver Evans (see 1780), it requires some capital investment but can be operated by just two men, sharply lowers the cost of milling, and will make white bread widely available in America.
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