The Genius of America (5 page)

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Then reality set in. Not only was the War of Independence a time “that tried men's souls,” in Paine's memorable phrase; it also tested the faith that sound government could rest on public virtue. And faith in virtue failed.

Americans charged into war and limped home from it, miraculously victorious. To be sure, the war had shown the extraordinary qualities of some Americans. But it had also demonstrated that Americans could be extraordinarily selfish. “Out of a population of 2.5 million people, fewer than 1 percent were willing to join the regular army fighting for their country's independence.” State after state refused, as they could under the Articles of Confederation, to supply clothing, food or money for the troops. So scarce were the resources that one of America's great generals, Nathanael Greene, complained, “A country overflowing with plenty [is] now suffering an army employed for the defense of everything dear and valuable to perish for lack of food.” An enraged Colonel Ebenezer Huntington, who was to become a general and then a member of Congress from Connecticut, wrote to his brother, “I wish I could say I was not born in America . . . The insults which the army has met with from the country beggar all description.”

No one expressed this deprivation more pointedly than Joseph Plumb Martin, Private in the Continental Army. Born in Massachusetts in 1760, he had entered the Connecticut State militia in 1776 at the age of fifteen and fought in the battles of Brooklyn and White Plains. By the end of 1777,America's first national army, the Continental Army, established by the Continental Congress in 1775, was mustering, and Martin, done with his state militia service, enlisted. He would serve until the end of the war. At that time each state government provided for its own state's protection through a state militia. Once the War of Independence broke out, states in effect lent their militias to the national government, the Continental Congress, to fight the war, but under the term of service the states set for them. Throughout his enlistment Martin made notes that he would ultimately convert into an almost philosophical journal, published some fifty years later as
A Narrative of a Revolutionary Soldier: Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of Joseph Plumb Martin
. His remembrance of one Thanksgiving vividly captures the cynicism with which one revolutionary soldier viewed his national government.

While we lay here, there was a Continental thanksgiving ordered by Congress . . . We had nothing to eat for two or three days previous, except what the trees of the fields and forests afforded us. But we must now have what Congress said—a sumptuous thanksgiving . . . Well—to add something extraordinary to our present stock of provisions, our country, ever mindful of its suffering army, opened her sympathizing heart so wide, upon this occasion, as to give us some thing to make the world stare. And what do you think it was, reader—Guess—You cannot guess—I will tell you: it gave each and every man half a gill of rice and a table spoon full of vinegar!! . . .
    The army was now not only starved but naked; the greatest part were not only shirtless and barefoot, but destitute of all other clothing, especially blankets. I procured a small piece of raw cowhide and made myself a pair of moccasins, which kept my feet (while they lasted) from the frozen ground, although, as I well remember, the hard edges so galled my ankles, while on a march, that it was with much difficulty and pain that I could wear them afterwards . . . But hunger, nakedness and sore shins were not the only difficulties we had at that time to encounter; we had hard duty to perform and little or no strength to perform it with . . . However, there was no remedy—no alternative but this or dispersion;—but dispersion, I believe, was not thought of—at least, I did not think of it,—we had engaged in the defense of our injured country . . . and we were determined to persevere as long as such hardships were not altogether intolerable . . . we were now absolutely in danger of perishing . . . in the midst of a plentiful country.

The colonists won the war anyway. Certainly, the perseverance of Private Martin and his fellow soldiers was part of the reason. But so was the inattentive and uncoordinated British leadership and, of course, the intervention of the French, who trapped General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown.

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The wartime deprivations had dramatized the weakness of a national government that rested on the belief that individual citizens and their states would be adequately motivated by public virtue to rally around national goals. Individual states effectively could either block or opt out of any decision of the Continental Congress. And they did. The newly independent states saw themselves more as small, jealously independent nations than as members of a large united one. The war's end in 1781 not only freed the states from England but freed them to pursue their competition with each other. Numerous and growing problems, contained beneath the surface initially by the spirit of 1776 and by the immediacy of the war, erupted. How to protect the frontier men and women, how to settle competing claims to the vast western lands, how to repay the growing revolutionary war debt, how to maintain American access to the Mississippi River. This latter issue almost caused the southern states to withdraw from the union, as it seemed the northern states were willing to cede use of the river to Spain. Additionally, the determination of states to maintain their own paper money and to impose state taxes on the products of other states denied the possibility of a national economy. And the freedom of each state to enter into agreements with foreign nations not only undermined the national economy but reintroduced competing foreign governments into American affairs and threatened America's security.

The weakness of the national government under the Articles of Confederation required urgent repair. The problem was magnified by the weakness of most of the state governments. The framers saw the state governments, tied as they were so tightly to the will of their majorities, as too weak to preserve liberty or order within their own borders or to resist actions that undermined stable society.

Of particular concern was legislation in almost every state that reduced the debt of its farmers and others small entrepreneurs. Legislation in some states even blocked the judicial enforcement of debt, overturned jury verdicts, canceled fines and usurped other judicial functions. The peace treaty with England (the Treaty of Paris) called for the repayment of prewar debts. But Virginia, the state with the largest debts to British merchants, closed its courts to British creditors.

All of this stirred great concern among the framers, who wondered whether they could actually create a coherent country capable of living up to commitments, making treaties with the outside world or even consistent rules for all its citizens. Most of the state governments were too weak and too tied to majority votes to resist the demands for watering down debt. For a country, failure to pay debts because a majority demanded it was a big problem.

But in one state, Massachusetts, the opposite happened. The state refused to resolve the problems of some of its farmers and small merchants, and a rebellion broke out. Its leader, Daniel Shays, was a veteran of the Continental Army. Most Americans today would not know the name Daniel Shays. But to the framers in 1787, he represented their worst fears. The rebellion that came to bear his name shattered any remaining belief that citizens could be called on to set aside their own needs and interests for a larger good. The nation could not be preserved without radical change.

Daniel Shays had been a farm laborer in western Massachusetts when fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord. He rushed to enlist and saw action at Bunker Hill in June of 1775. Articulate and brave, he quickly rose to sergeant, but then waited four long years for promotion to captain. That delay, frustrating as it was to Shays, was only a prelude to further delay in receiving his final pay, after he was mustered out in 1780. He came home to Hampshire County and like many of his fellow farmhands sunk deeper in debt and deeper into bitterness. He seemed to be reaping none of the rewards of the Revolution many of them had helped win.

By January of 1787, Captain Shays, who was thirty-nine years old, found himself at the head of a ragtag force of men who called themselves “regulators” to express their goal of “moderating government” to serve their needs. For some of these men, these needs were real and immediate. A postwar recession and British restrictions on trade with the British West Indies had set off a chain reaction of attempted debt collections by English manufacturers against Massachusetts importers, then by those importers against inland retailers and those retailers against western farmers. The creditors wanted hard money (gold, silver or copper), which was legally required, rather than paper money, produce or property, which, in better times, they had commonly accepted.

The regulators' first response had been to petition the state government for relief from their debt through enactment of legislation requiring debt collectors to take paper money. But their request was rebuffed by the state legislature, which then adjourned. Enraged, the regulators forcefully blocked the operation of a number of courts, which were foreclosing on mortgages, and intimidated store owners throughout western Massachusetts.

The state of Massachusetts attempted to secure help in suppressing the rebellion from the Continental Congress, but in a familiar story most of the other states refused to commit resources. So a state militia under the command of General Benjamin Lincoln was sent west to crush Shays's Rebellion. The regulators had planned to capture the federal arsenal in Springfield, Massachusetts, and use the vast quantity of muskets, powder, shot, and shells to resist General Lincoln's expedition. But a militia force beat them to the armory. The fighting continued for more than a month, before finally the rebellion was crushed.

Shays's Rebellion terrified the framers. James Madison wondered if the outcome for Massachusetts would have been more dire if the rebels had had a stronger leader than Captain Shays. “Who can determine what might have been the issue of her late convulsions, if the malcontents had been headed by a Caesar or by a Cromwell? Who can predict what effect a despotism established in Massachusetts would have upon the liberties of New Hampshire or Rhode Island or Connecticut or New York?” So threatening did the rebellion seem that George Washington wrote to James Monroe declaring that the British seemed correct in their prediction about postwar Americans: “Leave them to themselves, and their government will sure dissolve.”

Action was needed. Nathaniel Gorham, a representative from Massachusetts to the Constitutional Congress, and later its president, is reported to have written to Prince Henry of Prussia inquiring if he would be interested in assuming “regal powers” over America. The prince declined.

George Washington had been wavering on whether to attend the grand, or federal, convention, later called the Constitutional Convention, that Virginia and other states had called for in Philadelphia. The “threat” to the new nation helped convince him to come out of his Mount Vernon retirement. The Continental Congress, which up to that moment had not yet fully warmed to the federal convention, acted quickly after Shays's Rebellion to endorse it.

To the framers in 1787, America was in chaos, disintegrating. The entire country was “groaning under the intolerable burden of . . . accumulated evils,” noted John Quincy Adams in his commencement address at Harvard in 1787. The framers saw in America “mistrust, the breakdown of authority, the increase of debt, the depravity of manners, and the decline of virtue.” These were, as they understood it, the very societal conditions that had historically destroyed efforts at self-government.

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Madison said that the framers had been “mistaken” to believe that the states would support the general government because “sound policy” would make them realize they should. The Articles of Confederation became a symbol for what in retrospect seems evident—a government built on a reliance on public virtue would fail. Indeed, to some Americans, the Revolution itself seemed to have failed.

The framers identified the problem as their misjudgment of what motivates people. “We have probably had too good an opinion of human nature in forming our confederation . . . We must take human nature as we find it. Perfection falls not to the share of mortals,” Washington wrote to John Jay in 1786. By 1787, that “too good opinion” had been replaced by a more realistic one. Utopianism was destroyed by Shays's Rebellion and the general state of chaos throughout the fledgling nation. It fell to one of Washington's most trusted military aides, Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant from the Caribbean, to lay out the new vision of human nature as he, his commander and the other founders had experienced it since 1776.

Back in 1777, Hamilton, echoing Tom Paine, had favored a simple New York legislature, with one house, where the voice of the people could be represented without encumbrances. But the ensuing ten years sharpened his views of people and the kind of government needed to channel their drives. Many of his specific ideas about government, like an elected but life-tenured president, would be too authoritarian for the framers. But his foundational observation about human nature would crystalize the intellectual transformation that had taken Americans from a faith in public virtue in 1776 to something radically different, as Hamilton summarized it, in 1787: “Men love power . . . Give all the power to the many, they will oppress the few. Give all power to the few, they will oppress the many.”

That men loved power and would use it to get their way was not a new observation about human nature. But Americans had thought they could be different. Now, after eleven years of painful experience, they knew they could not be. Public virtue had proved an insufficient guard against the power of self-interest.