This entry is a subentry of Revolutionary War (1775 – 83).
The new nation still faced critical unresolved issues even after the peace was signed in the Treaty of Paris in 1783. Some were social and political issues opened in the decade before the war broke out, such as who should vote or what defined the public good, occasionally raising questions for long‐term consideration such as the future of slavery or the place of women in society. Others were problems created by the war itself. Effective control over much of the landmass ceded by Britain had yet to be achieved; acceptance by the nations of the world required diplomacy and a clear articulation of American national interests; economic adjustments had to be made to compensate for lost privileges in the British market; and internal differences of opinion about how best to govern the nation had to be resolved. The American Revolution entered its final phase with both leaders and the people asking themselves what kind of country they wanted and how best to achieve it. The ringing phrases of the Declaration of Independence promised much, but what did they mean?
All of the nations involved in the Revolutionary War—both the allies and the adversaries of the United States—made the postwar adjustment difficult. The British were eager enough to end the war; indeed, British public opinion demanded it. But in surrendering the vast terrain south of the Great Lakes, and west of the Appalachians to the Mississippi River, the British negotiators signed away the very land George III, in his famous Royal Proclamation of 1763, had promised to protect as Indian hunting grounds. Britain's Indian allies, a decided majority of the Indians who chose sides in the Revolutionary War, felt betrayed. When American settlers, unchecked by the United States, began streaming across the Appalachians into the Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee regions even before the war ended, bitter clashes with the Indians ensued. Claiming that they sought only to maintain order on a lawless frontier, the British reneged on their treaty promise and maintained British troops on American soil. They remained at Detroit and other western forts until the mid‐1790s, encouraging the Indians to believe that they would protect them against the American onslaught, and arguing that the trade in skins and furs (to which the British were entitled) required policing.
America's allies were almost as difficult. France and Spain both hoped that the United States would get less than it got: the French were dissatisfied with the privileged position given American fishermen in the North Atlantic cod fishery, while the Spanish resented the American western boundary at the Mississippi. Spain insisted that Americans had no right to navigate the Mississippi River, and tensions persisted between the two nations until 1795, when a compromise was reached. Meanwhile, Spain, behaving like the British in the Northwest, encouraged Indians on the southwest frontier to defy the Americans.
The United States dealt with these issues both militarily and diplomatically. Even though Congress had disbanded the Continental Army, reduced the military establishment to the 1st American Regiment, and sold off the ships of the navy, troops were assigned to the frontier, where they negotiated the first new treaties with the western Indians. For their part, the Indians sought compromise and retention of their land rights and created a confederacy to present a united front. But the contradiction between official American promises and unrestrained settler violence created divisions among the native leaders, and in the end the war hawks on both sides won out. The task of bringing peace to the Northwest forced Congress to increase the size of the army, and, in a series of frontier battles, to resolve the matter by force of arms.
Meanwhile, American diplomats, led by Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, promoted American interests in Europe. Jefferson went to France (where he remained until the early months of the French Revolution), working to preserve the outward friendship of the wartime alliance, while retaining American freedom of action. With Jefferson's help, France became the chief trading partner of the United States. Adams arrived at the Court of St. James in 1785 as the first American official to confront George III on behalf of the new nation. Both Jefferson and Adams disliked European social distinctions and economic disparities, but each also formed strong attachments to which they later clung, and which helped define their subsequent political followings in the United States, especially in the 1790s when Americans responded to the progress of the French Revolution.
The relations of the United States with the rest of the world depended in large measure on American success in adjusting to new economic imperatives. In 1783, a good many Americans hoped to restore their economic links with Britain, and for a few months after the war, trade was reopened and vigorously pursued. But the British ministry soon decided to cut Americans out of the preferential marketplace of the British empire while merchants tightened credit when it became apparent that Americans lacked the cash to pay for British manufactures. Congress struggled with the problems of economic adjustment. From his position as superintendent of finance, Robert Morris tried to reorganize credit in the country by establishing a Bank of North America (BNA) as a private bank with a public mandate to serve the Congress and the nation as a central bank. The first American banks were chartered in several states during the 1780s, although the BNA itself ran into trouble politically and financially and lost its Pennsylvania charter before the decade was out. Alexander Hamilton of New York argued that Morris had taken the right track, and that the United States must solve its economic problems by consolidating the national debt and creating a national bank. Meanwhile, Congress sought most‐favored‐nation treaties with European nations, and individual merchant houses pressed to open new markets that included the Far East.
The problems of economic adjustment created antagonisms among Americans themselves, and contributed substantially to the political and social division eventually expressed in a debate over the constitution. Nationalists who were to become identified as Federalists argued that the central government needed strengthening, and eventually they insisted that only a new constitution could give the United States the energy it needed to attain economic stability and national respectability. Localists who preferred the decentralized structure provided by the Articles of Confederation rejected the notion of complete constitutional revision and became Anti‐Federalists, although most agreed that Congress might need additional powers to tackle the difficult problems of the time.
These were more than superficial disagreements over how best to govern a young republic experiencing short‐term economic problems. The divisions represented fundamental differences of opinion about what the American Revolution was about and what independence was meant to accomplish. The war had created some of the divisions and sharpened others. In many states, local antagonism toward Tories or loyalists persisted; 60,000–80,000 loyalists fled the United States as refugees, and legislatures were divided over whether to let Tories return. Most that had confiscated Tory estates refused compensation. States denied Tory and British creditors the right to collect old debts, despite the article in the peace treaty requiring it and Congress's urging the states to comply. The U.S. Army itself was divided at war's end between an officer class that had sought and won promises of a postwar pension, and men in the ranks who had been paid in depreciated government script and vague promises. When, after the war, the officers organized the Society of Cincinnati to promote their right to a commutation, or lump‐sum payment in lieu of pensions, many Americans, including rank‐and‐file veterans, complained about the emergence of aristocracy in American society. The war had created other tensions not easily dissipated: wartime shortages of provisions, inflation caused by the printing of paper money, and fears about the manipulation of prices by hoarders and forestallers pitted rural against urban dwellers and farmers against merchants. After the war, a short‐lived burst of consumer spending fueled by loose credit arrangements set the stage for bitter social resentments when merchants suddenly contracted credit and called for payment of debts. Many states saw violent demonstrations against debtor courts in 1785–86; Massachusetts faced armed rebellion.
What has been called Shays's Rebellion, an armed protest by farmer‐regulators in western Massachusetts in the fall and winter of 1786–87, was in reality only the most visible sign of a widespread discontent. Forced court closures were common throughout New England; in New Hampshire, protestors for a short time held the legislature hostage; and throughout Massachusetts, farmers complained to the legislature about tax laws, the shortage of money, and the greed of merchants. But only 2,000 or so actually took up arms in the Connecticut River Valley towns of western Massachusetts, and were forcibly suppressed by a hastily recruited government force of about 5,000 under Benjamin Lincoln. Capt. Daniel Shays, a veteran of the Revolutionary War, and other leaders of the uprising, managed to escape into neighboring Vermont, and the rest of the rebels were dispersed. The Massachusetts government eventually provided reprieves or pardons for all, but the experience left Americans divided.
It is too simple to equate the divisions of Shays' Rebellion with Federalist–Anti‐Federalist divisions over the Constitution of 1787, but a good many Americans at the time did so; both sides used divisive rhetoric and identified antagonistic interests. Federalists claimed to be merchants, creditors, and commercial farmers, all sound money people who sought order and stability both in the economy and in the larger society, and portrayed their opponents as poor farmers, debtors, or localists who failed to understand the needs of a nation. Anti‐Federalists saw themselves as honest husbandmen who were up against rapacious merchants and monied holders of public securities. America's urban‐rural split curiously lumped a good many commercial farmers on the urban side of the divide, but also united urban artisans with merchants in the Federalist effort to strengthen the American economy through a revitalized national policy. Even if the divisions were not as precise as contemporaries suggested, the debate over the Constitution shows that there were divisions in American society created or perhaps sharpened by the American Revolution, and in particular by the war. Writing in the famous Federalist Papers, James Madison was to argue that the new Constitution made sense in such a society: it was designed to steer conflicting interests into reasoned debate and compromise.
In practice, not even the new federal Constitution could resolve all of the questions the Revolution had opened. It did, however, provide a democratic framework for resolving such issues in the future, and as Madison envisaged it, it provided a forum for the enormous diversity of condition and opinion that already existed in the United States and was to continue. George Washington's first administration and the statesmen of the First Congress strengthened popular acceptance of the new Constitution, convincing Americans that their diverse views were fairly represented in government and that their rights were adequately protected. The Revolution, however, had also left a legacy of healthy skepticism about government. Americans argued variously that evangelical religion held better answers, that families must protect values, that women had a special role in nurturing “virtuous” citizens, that both public and private education must be expanded, or that the complexities of modern life required an informed citizenry well served by a free press. There was paradox in the new American culture; there was also vibrancy and excitement and enormous optimism.
[See also Civil‐Military Relations; Native American Wars: Wars Between Native Americans and Europeans and Euro‐Americans; Newburgh “Conspiracy” (1783); Society and War.]
Bibliography
- Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1950.
- Wallace Brown, The Good Americans: The Loyalists in the American Revolution, 1969.
- Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword, 1975.
- Paul H. Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789,
25 vols., 1976–98. - Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 1979.
- David P. Szatmary, Shays' Rebellion, 1980.
- Jonathan R. Dull, A Diplomatic History of the American Revolution, 1985.
- Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays, 1993.
- Colin G. Calloway, The American Revolution in Indian Country, 1995
