THE NEW NATION: 1775-1789- AMERICAN REVOLUTION

While Americans struggled to win the independence of the United States, they were also creating new republican institutions of government to replace royal authority. In the process they had to work out the full implications—political, social, and intellectual—of life in a republican nation.

A

New Political Institutions

The collapse of royal authority in America in 1775 did not lead to a breakdown of public order. Instead, the provincial assemblies, local county courts, and town meetings simply added the tasks previously performed by the imperial government to their traditional functions. The transfer of power was given legitimacy by state constitutions, which were written and ratified by the assemblies between 1776 and 1780.

The new constitutions were republican because they derived their legitimacy from the consent of the people—also known as the doctrine of popular sovereignty—and created representative political institutions. However, in structure, the new governments closely resembled those of the colonial period. Most states had an elected governor, a legislature of two houses, and property qualifications for voting.

There were, however, several significant variations. The most democratic of the new constitutions was that of Pennsylvania, ratified in 1776. It bestowed the vote on all adult white taxpayers and, to encourage majority rule, provided for only one house in the legislature and curtailed the powers of the governor. In sharp contrast, the aristocratic constitution of South Carolina imposed high property qualifications for voting and even higher restrictions for officeholding. These political differences reflected the contrasting societies of the two states. Pennsylvania’s democratic institutions resulted from the coming to power, during the revolution, of a coalition of social groups from the middling ranks: independent farmers, established artisans, and Scots-Irish Presbyterians. South Carolina’s elitist government was designed to protect the interests of a relatively small group of rich, slave-owning white planters.

Other constitutional provisions had historical or ideological origins. Some state charters included a bill of individual rights while most of the others had specific clauses that guaranteed traditional English legal rights, such as freedom from arbitrary searches, trial by jury, and protection of property. The documents also reflected Enlightenment values, such as guaranteeing religious toleration.

In some states, such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, the new constitutions were approved only after fierce political battles. In other states, primarily those in the South, the governmental institutions given legitimacy in the new documents excluded the majority of the people—white as well as black—from a role in the political process. But everywhere the new charters were generally accepted, allowing a stable transition to republican government.

B

Toward a New Religious Order

Before 1776 most Americans lived in colonies with established churches. All members of the community were assumed to be members of that church (the Church of England in the South, the Congregational Church in New England) and they were required by law to contribute to the support of the minister. Only Pennsylvania and Rhode Island, founded by Quakers and Baptists respectively, had no established church and allowed religious freedom.

Independence brought significant changes in American religious institutions, particularly in the South. Patriots who were members of the Church of England repudiated their allegiance to the king, the head of that church, and formed the Protestant Episcopal Church of America. Most of the leading planters in Virginia were Episcopalians and, to win support for the war effort from Presbyterians and Baptists, they had the Virginia Convention of 1776 issue a Declaration of Rights that guaranteed religious toleration. Then in 1786 the Virginia legislature passed Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. It declared that all churches had the same legal rights and that no church should receive direct financial support from the state. New York and New Jersey adopted similar legislation.

Even as the Southern and mid-Atlantic states were moving toward a separation of church and state, some citizens wanted to maintain the traditional European system of established churches. They felt that state support for religion would promote morality and respect for authority. These sentiments were particularly strong in New England, where there were close links between state government and the established Congregational Church. There were relatively few members of other religious faiths, and most New England ministers had enthusiastically supported the Patriot cause. For these reasons, Massachusetts and Connecticut maintained an established church until the 1830s. However they allowed Baptists and Methodists to support their own ministers. Thus, following the American Revolution, there was a general movement toward religious freedom.

C

Economic Problems

In many respects the creation of a new political order was much easier than forging a new financial and economic system. During the War of Independence, British warships temporarily destroyed the New England fishing industry and seized many American merchant ships. Both the tobacco and the rice exporting states of the South and the grain-marketing regions of the North suffered from the disruption of Atlantic trade. The port cities had the greatest difficulty. Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Charleston, and Newport were occupied for a time by British troops and suffered drastic declines in population as trade virtually ceased.

Peace did not bring a return to prewar prosperity. The United States was now outside the British Empire and could no longer count on special preferences and subsidies. Angry over unpaid debts, some British merchants refused to handle Chesapeake tobacco exports, cutting American sales. Without a financial subsidy from the British government, South Carolina’s once-lucrative indigo industry nearly vanished. Because of the British Navigation Acts, American-owned ships could no longer trade with the sugar islands in the British West Indies.

The result was a commercial recession that lasted for nearly two decades. In 1790 the value of American exports per capita was only two-thirds of what it had been in 1774. Nevertheless, low-priced British goods flooded into the United States, driving many artisans out of business. Responding to artisan protests, New York, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts imposed tariffs on imported manufactures. The American standard of living declined, increasing the potential for conflict among competing economic groups.

D

Political and Social Conflicts

The process of creating a democratic government during the American Revolution increased the prospect of social conflict. During the colonial era, most political offices had been occupied by wealthy men, and less wealthy Americans deferred to them. However, as early as 1770 Philadelphia workers protested against high-powered men who sought to control the political process with little regard for their involvement. By 1776 the backcountry farmers of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, were instructing their representatives to the state’s constitutional convention to “oppose everything that leans to aristocracy or power in the hands of the rich and chief men exercised to the oppression of the poor.”

At first, influential Patriots refused to cede power to the lower orders. They insisted that voting and officeholding be restricted to propertied white men. Conservative Patriots wanted to deny political rights to men who owned only a little property.

Nevertheless, the American Revolution did undermine the control of the state legislatures by an oligarchy of wealthy planters and merchants. In 1774 fewer than one in five members of the assemblies had been artisans or yeoman farmers. After the war, men from these social groups formed a majority in some Northern legislatures and a powerful minority in the Southern assemblies. Claiming a “right to speak and think for themselves,” artisans formed Mechanics Associations and elected representatives from their own ranks. Yeoman farmers benefited from the increased representation of backcountry regions under the new state constitutions. Overall, the increased political activity of farmers and artisans was significant.

E

Gender Inequalities

The democratic reforms generated by the revolution were not fully extended to women. Women had not taken an active role in politics during the colonial era. However, during the revolution, educated upper-class women entered into political debate in private conversations and, less frequently, in public letters to newspapers. These women did not seek voting rights but some of them asked for a republican legal order that would give women greater individual rights. Under English and American common law, a woman was subject to the legal control of her father until age 21 and to the legal control of her husband upon her marriage. This meant that a married woman could not own property or make legal contracts for herself and was virtually subject to her husband’s will. Despite the pleas of Patriot women, including Abigail Adams, neither Congress nor the state governments took significant steps to enhance the legal rights of their female citizens.

Women continued to be excluded from politics, as well. The state constitutions either restricted suffrage (voting rights) to men or imposed property qualifications for voting that effectively excluded married women. The New Jersey Constitution of 1776 did allow the vote to all free adult inhabitants worth £50, but when widows and unmarried women began to exercise this right after 1800, new legislation in 1807 excluded women from the polls. See also Women’s Rights.

F

The Nature of the Revolution

The republican freedoms won in the war against Great Britain and incorporated into the new state constitutions made the United States a more democratic and a more equal polity. However, the Patriot leaders who led the independence movement did not want a political or a social revolution. The governments they founded did not attempt to alter the existing unequal distribution of wealth or eliminate the barriers of class, race, or gender status. Most of the benefits of political independence went to men who were white and property owners.

Thus, the American uprising against Britain was less a total revolution than a movement for home rule that was led and ultimately controlled by a privileged minority. And yet the American War of Independence shook up the existing society in profound ways. The long war created a huge price inflation that made many people more calculating, forcing some of them to embrace the market economy and others to retreat into subsistence farming. It also caused the departure of thousands of wealthy Loyalists, an event that altered the social structure. Moreover, the Patriot doctrines of republican liberty led to the end of slavery in the North and challenged its legitimacy in the South; prompted the political mobilization of ordinary farmers and artisans; and raised fundamental questions about gender roles.

Beyond these immediate social changes, the upheaval brought a revolution in American political thought. The people of the United States repudiated social hierarchy and hereditary monarchy in favor of individual liberty and representative republican government. Jefferson used Enlightenment natural law principles, such as the right to life and liberty, as the foundation of the Patriots’ doctrine of popular sovereignty. Thus, he argued in the Declaration of Independence in 1776 that “to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” These principles—of individual rights and popular sovereignty—were truly revolutionary and were among the Patriots’ most important legacies to future generations.