Revolutionary War (1775 – 1783): Domestic Course

This entry is a subentry of Revolutionary War (1775 – 1783).

The War of Independence, the Pennsylvania Centinel suggested in 1785, had removed that “great reluctance to innovation, so remarkable in old communities.” The Centinel did not exaggerate. Between 1776 and 1783, American patriots had to organize new governments, raise and supply a substantial army, create a system of public finance, and manufacture goods once imported from Europe. Beyond these sizable tasks, they had to deal with pressing problems: tens of thousands of loyalists ready to fight for their king; 500,000 enslaved Africans and African Americans, who might themselves revolt for liberty; and a farm economy increasingly dependent on the labor of women and youth. The task was formidable; the stakes high. The war might be fought by soldiers and generals, but it would be won or lost by civilians and civic leaders.

Political Innovation and Conflict

Patriot leaders acted swiftly to establish the legitimacy of their rule. On 10 May 1776, Congress urged patriots to suppress royal authority and establish institutions based on popular rule. By the end of 1776, Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania had written new constitutions, and Connecticut and Rhode Island had transformed their colonial charters into republican documents by deleting all references to the king.

The Declaration of Independence stated the republican principle of popular sovereignty, and the Delaware Constitution interpreted that to mean the exercise of political power: “the Right of the People to participate in the Legislature.” But most patriots gave a narrow definition to the political nation, restricting voting and office holding to propertied white men. Conservative patriots were more adamant, denying that popular sovereignty meant rule by men who owned only a little property.

In the heat of revolution, radical patriots embraced a democratic outlook: every citizen who supported the rebellion—property owner or not—had “an equal claim to all privileges, liberties and immunities,” declared an article in the Maryland Gazette. This democratic republicanism received fullest expression in Pennsylvania, where Scots‐Irish farmers, Philadelphia artisans, and Enlightenment‐influenced intellectuals cooperated to create the most democratic institutions of government in America or Europe. The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 abolished property owning as a qualification for political participation, giving all men who paid taxes the right to vote and hold office.

Pennsylvania's radical constitution alarmed leading patriots in other states, who feared that ordinary citizens would use their numerical advantage to levy heavy taxes on the rich. They insisted on constitutions that would keep the “better sort” in power. Thus, the New York Constitution of 1777, written chiefly by John Jay, used property qualifications to exclude one‐half of the white men from voting for the governor and the upper house of the legislature, while the South Carolina Constitution of 1778 restricted membership in the state legislature to the richest 10 percent of the white population.

Nonetheless, the Revolutionary War democratized American politics. The new states constitutions apportioned seats in the legislatures on the basis of population, giving yeomen farmers in western areas more equal representation. Moreover, republican ideology raised the political consciousness of ordinary Americans. During the war, many patriot militiamen claimed the right to elect their officers; subsequently, many veterans, whether or not they had property, demanded the franchise. And when they voted, they chose different sorts of leaders. Before the war, about 85 percent of the assembly were wealthy men; by 1784, however, middling farmers and artisans controlled the lower houses of most northern states and formed a sizable minority in the southern states.

Political innovation also took place on the national level as the Continental Congress devised the first national constitution. The Articles of Confederation, approved by Congress on 15 November 1777, provided for a loose confederation in which “each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence” and all powers and rights not “expressly delegated” to the United States. The Confederation government had the authority to declare war and make peace, to conclude treaties with foreign nations, to borrow and print money, and to requisition funds from the states “for the common defense or general welfare.” The body charged with exercising these powers was the Congress, in which each state had one vote, regardless of its population. Because of disputes among the states over the title to western lands, the articles were not ratified until 1781. Threatened by the army of Gen. Charles Cornwallis, Virginia finally ceded its land claims to Congress in 1781, and Maryland, the final holdout, ratified the articles.

Wartime Finance

Congress's main problem was not land but money. Because opposition to taxes had fueled the independence movement, patriot officials hesitated to impose taxes. To finance the war, the states first borrowed money, in gold or silver or British currency, from wealthy individuals. These funds quickly ran out, so the states created a new paper currency—the dollar—and issued notes with a face value of $260 million, using it to pay soldiers and purchase supplies. Since the new notes were printed in huge quantities and not backed by gold or silver or by tax revenues or mortgages on land, they quickly depreciated. Indeed, North Carolina's paper money came to be worth so little that the state government itself refused to accept it.

The monetary system created by the Continental Congress collapsed as well, despite the efforts of Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who became superintendent of finance in February 1781. To raise domestic loans, Congress borrowed $6 million from France and pledged it as security; wealthy Americans promptly purchased $27 million in Continental loan certificates. Congress also financed the war by printing money—some $191 million to 1779. By that time, so much currency had been printed that it took $42 in Continental bills to buy goods worth $1 in gold or silver. And things got worse, with the ratio increasing to 100 to 1 in 1780 and 146 to 1 in 1781. At that point, not even the most virtuous patriot farmers would sell food to the American army.

The failure of wartime finance nearly doomed the patriot cause. In 1780, Gen. George Washington called urgently for a national system of taxation, warning that otherwise “our cause is lost.” However, unanimous consent was required to amend the articles, and in 1781 Rhode Island rejected Superintendent Morris's proposal for a national tariff, an import duty of 5 percent on foreign goods. Two years later, New York blocked another proposed national tariff.

Consequently the war was financed through inflated currency, a hidden system of taxation that bore particularly hard on the farmers, artisans, and soldiers who received paper money for supplies and military pay. As soon as these men or their families received the currency, it lost purchasing power—literally depreciating in their pockets. Individually, these losses were small, amounting to a tiny “tax” every time an ordinary citizen received a paper dollar, kept it for a week, and then spent it. But collectively these “currency taxes” paid for the struggle for independence.

The Limits of Republican Virtues

Patriots knew that winning the war depended on patriotism, and were at first optimistic that their republican ideology would inspire public virtue and self‐sacrifice. “The word republic,” wrote Thomas Paine, “means the public good, or the good of the whole.” And, continued Philadelphia patriot Benjamin Rush: “Every man in a republic is public property. His time and talents—his youth—his manhood—his old age—nay more, life, all belong to his country.”

But rhetoric could not create an army. Because yeoman farmers and militiamen preferred to serve in local units near their fields and families, few propertied Americans volunteered for service in the enlisted ranks of the Continental army. Consequently, except for the officers, most of its recruits were drawn from the lower ranks of society. For example, most troops commanded by Gen. William Smallwood of Maryland were either poor American‐born youths or older foreign‐born men—British ex‐convicts or former indentured servants. Historians continue to debate motivation for enlistment and continued service—the roles of economic gain (a bonus of $20 cash and the promise of 100 acres), belief in the cause of liberty and republicanism, and psychological commitments to their comrades. Confronted by a reluctant citizenry and a lack of funds, Congress fell far short of its goal of a regular army of 75,000 men; the total Continental force never reached half that number.

As economic hardship brought the war closer to home, civilians also lost their zeal for self‐sacrifice. The British naval blockade nearly eliminated the New England fishing industry and cut off the supply of European manufactured goods to American consumers. Domestic trade and production declined as well. The British occupation of Boston, New York, and Philadelphia put thousands of people out of work; the population of New York City declined from 21,000 in 1774 to less than half that at war's end. In the Chesapeake, the British blockade denied tobacco planters access to European markets, forcing them to turn to the cultivation of wheat, corn, and other foodstuffs. All across the land, ordinary commercial activity slackened as farmers and artisans adapted to a war economy.

The scarcity of imported goods brought a sharp rise in prices and widespread appeals for government regulation. Consumers decried merchants and traders as “enemies, extortioners, and monopolizers.” In 1777, a convention of New England states tried to limit the price of domestic commodities and imported goods to 175 percent of their prewar level. To enforce this directive, the Massachusetts legislature passed an “Act to Prevent Monopoly and Oppression,” but so many farmers and artisans refused to sell at the established prices that consumers had to pay the market price “or submit to starving.”

The upward movement of prices—for grain and meat as well as manufactures—stimulated the economy. Army contractors roamed the countryside, offering farmers high prices for food, horses, and wagon transport. State governments encouraged artisans and entrepreneurs to manufacture military clothing, guns and gunpowder, and other scarce items—and with good results. By the end of the war, artisans in the town of Lynn, Massachusetts, were producing over 50,000 pairs of shoes each year. As Alexander Hamilton noted, the northern countryside had become “a vast scene of household manufacturing.” With financial self‐interest supplementing republican virtue, Americans laid the basis for economic as well as political independence.

Women and the War Effort

Women workers played a large part in the expansion in production, particularly in the cloth industry. When the war cut off imports from Europe, government officials requisitioned clothing directly from the people. In Connecticut, officials called upon the citizens of Hartford to provide 1,000 coats and 1,600 shirts, and assessed smaller towns on a proportionate basis. Soldiers added their own pleas. Capt. Edward Rogers lost “all the shirts except the one on my back,” at the Battle of Long Island and wrote to his wife, “the making of cloath … must go on.”

Patriot women stepped into the breach, increasing production of homespun cloth. One Massachusetts town claimed an annual output of 30,000 yards of cloth, while women in Elizabeth, New Jersey, promised “upwards of 100,000 yards of linnen and woolen cloth.” With their husbands and sons away, many women also assumed the burden of farm production. Some went into the fields themselves, plowing fields or cutting and loading grain. Others supervised hired laborers or slaves, acquiring a taste for decision making in the process. “We have sow’d our oats as you desired,” Sarah Cobb Paine wrote to her absent husband; “had I been master I should have planted it to Corn.”

Some upper‐class women also entered into political debate, filling their letters and diaries (and undoubtedly their conversations) with opinions on public issues. “The men say we have no business [with politics],” Eliza Wilkinson of South Carolina complained in 1783; “they won’t even allow us liberty of thought, and that is all I want.” Other women, such as Abigail Adams, asked men to create a republican legal order to replace the common law rules of coverture that completely subordinated married women to their husbands. And a few women, inspired by revolutionary ideology, repudiated prevailing assumptions of women's inferiority. In 1779, Judith Sargent Murray, daughter of a wealthy New England merchant, wrote “On the Equality of the Sexes. In this essay, Murray systematically compared the intellectual faculties of men and women, arguing that women had a capacity for memory equal to that of men, and more imagination; any inferiority in judgment and reasoning, she argued, was due to lack of training.

A few men paid some attention to women's requests for greater social and legal equality. In Massachusetts, the state's attorney general persuaded a jury that girls had equal rights under the state's constitution and should not be deprived of schooling. Benjamin Rush, in his Thoughts on Female Education (1787), advocated the intellectual training of women, so they would “be an agreeable companion for a sensible man.” Rush likewise praised “republican mothers” who instructed “their sons in the principles of liberty and government.” But most patriots viewed women as inferior and subordinate. Politics remained a male preserve, with most state constitutions explicitly restricting suffrage to men. Because of deeply ingrained cultural assumptions of female inferiority, women entered the new republics as second‐class citizens.

Slavery Weakened

For enslaved African Americans, as for women, war and republicanism brought new opportunities. Taking advantage of the disruptions of war, many blacks fled from their patriot owners and sought freedom behind British lines. Two white neighbors of Richard Henry Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, lost “every slave they had in the world,” as did nearly “all those who were nearly the enemy.” More than 5,000 blacks left Charleston, South Carolina, with the departing British army. Other enslaved African Americans used wartime loyalty to their patriot masters to bargain for their liberty. Under a Manumission Act of 1782, Virginia planters granted freedom to more than 10,000 slaves.

Equally important was the intellectual attack against slavery. In Virginia, a Methodist conference declared slavery “contrary to the Golden Law of God on which hang all the Law and Prophets, and the unalienable Rights of Mankind, as well as every Principle of Revolution.” Such arguments prompted black emancipation in the northern states, where there were relatively few slaves. By 1784, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island had abolished slavery. To protect white property rights, the Pennsylvania Emancipation Act awarded freedom only to slaves born after 1780—and then only after they had served their mothers' masters for twenty‐eight years. Such economic concerns among whites, as well as racial prejudice, prevented emancipation in the South, where slaves accounted for 30 to 60 percent of the population and represented a huge financial investment. But those blacks who had won their freedom during the Revolutionary War began to develop churches, social institutions, and a partly autonomous African American culture.

The Fate of the Loyalists

Even as most free African Americans chose to remain in the land of their birth, tens of thousands of loyalists emigrated to Canada and other British possessions. As early as 1765, many wealthy Americans—and thousands of ordinary colonists—had feared that resistance to Britain would end in mob rule, and the violent activities of the Sons of Liberty seemed to prove the point.

Once war came, it quickly turned into a civil conflict. Patriot committees of safety backed by armed militiamen collected taxes, sent food and clothing to the Continental army, and imposed fines or jail sentences on those who failed to support the patriot cause. “There is no such thing as remaining neutral,” declared the Committee of Safety of Farmington, Connecticut, and mobs of New England patriots beat suspected loyalists or destroyed their property. In the Middle Colonies, the contest between loyalists and patriots was more even. In New Jersey, most New Light members of the Dutch Reformed Church—enthusiastic Protestants—actively supported the American cause, but the more conservative Old Lights became loyalists. As the British and American armies marched back and forth across the state, those with reputations as patriots and loyalists fled from their homes to escape arrest—or worse. Soldiers and partisans looted farms, seeking plunder or revenge. Beginning in 1778, British strategies relied heavily on southern loyalists, mobilizing recent immigrants, such as the Scottish Highlanders in North Carolina, and using them to hold territory won by the British army. Their strategy turned the South into an arena of bitter partisan warfare, with atrocities on both sides.

As the war turned in favor of the patriots, loyalists feared for their lives—especially since more than 55,000 loyalists had fought for the British as regular soldiers or militia. More than 100,000 loyalists emigrated to Canada, the West Indies, or Britain. Those who moved to Canada—where they became known as the United Empire Loyalists—assumed the leadership of the English‐speaking colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Ontario.

Some patriots wanted to confiscate the property of the departed “traitors,” and the passions of war lent urgency to their arguments. When the British army invaded the South, the North Carolina assembly confiscated loyalists' estates outright. Officials in New York also seized loyalists' lands and goods. However, many patriots opposed these seizures as contrary to republican property rights. Consequently, most states seized only a limited amount of property—that owned by notorious loyalists—so that, unlike France after 1789 or Russia after 1917, the revolutionary upheaval did not drastically alter the structure of American society.

Still, the loyalist exodus disrupted the established social order in many states as upwardly mobile patriot merchants climbed to the top of the economic ladder. In Massachusetts, the Lowell, Higginson, Jackson, and Cabot families filled the vacuum created by the departure of the Hutchinsons and Apthorps and their friends. Small‐scale traders in Philadelphia and its environs likewise stepped into vacancies created when loyalist Anglican and neutral/pacifist Quaker mercantile firms collapsed during the war. These changes replaced a conservative economic elite—one that invested primarily in foreign trade and urban real estate—with a group of more entrepreneurial‐minded republican merchants.

In economic life, as in politics, finance, and gender and racial relations, the Revolutionary War was just that: a dramatic disruption of established life that demanded innovation and changed forever the course of American history.

Bibliography

• Willi Paul Adams, The First American Constitutions: Republican Ideology and the Making of the State Constitutions in the Revolutionary Era, 1980.
• Richard Buel, Jr., Dear Liberty: Connecticut's Mobilization for the Revolutionary War, 1980.
• William G. Anderson, The Price of Liberty: The Public Debt of the American Revolution, 1983.
• Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman, eds., Slavery and Freedom in the American Revolution, 1983.
• Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J. Albert, eds., An Uncivil War: The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution, 1985.
• Robert M. Calhoon et al., The Loyalist Perception, 1989.
• Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert, eds., Women in the Age of the American Revolution, 1989.
• Gary B. Nash, Race and Revolution, 1990.
• Alfred F. Young, ed. Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism, 1993.
• Jean Butenhoff Lee, The Price of Nationhood: The American Revolution in Charles County, 1994