Revolution and Constitution, Era of

Revolution and Constitution, Era of. The American Revolution, the first great democratic revolution, differed profoundly from those that followed. It did not originate in bitter discontent with the organization and governance of contemporary society, or in a desire to make the world anew. Rather, it began with a determination to defeat a fundamental change in the traditional order. For Americans, moreover, a sense of a separate national identity, of being a distinct people, was a product of an imperial crisis, not a cause.

Background to Revolution.

In 1763, at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War, the fourth and greatest of the eighteenth‐century wars between the French and British, George III's loyal subjects from New England to the Carolinas were a thriving and rapidly expanding preindustrial people. The region's white population probably enjoyed—and certainly believed that they enjoyed—the highest standard of living in the world. New Englanders, Virginians, Carolinians, and Pennsylvanians had many times displayed a powerful determination to defend their local interests, but always within the standing frame of government—in practice, if not in theory, a working federal system. Every province had a government in which a house of elected representatives enjoyed substantial autonomy over the province's internal affairs. The British empire was essentially cemented by a set of laws, called the Navigation Acts, designed to keep the empire's trade in British (and British colonial) hands. Although this system rendered the colonies subservient in some respects, it offered many benefits as well. To be British in colonial America in 1763 was to enjoy a special relationship with the world's most advanced economy, to be a part of the nation whose ships dominated the Atlantic, whose armies had conquered its western shores, whose free political institutions were the envy of the enlightened world. Indeed, in the glow of the great victory over the French, the colonial pride in being British may never have been higher.

The crisis, then, originated not with a colonial initiative, but in Great Britain. There, some bureaucrats and politicians had long been troubled by London's dangerously loose supervision of its empire. The Seven Years' War, moreover, had left England with a larger empire to govern, entailing new administrative costs, and with a staggering debt. In these circumstances, the ministry of George Grenville considered it entirely reasonable for Parliament to require the thriving colonies, for the first time in their history, to pay a portion of the costs of their own administration and defense. This, together with stricter enforcement of the Navigation Acts, was the declared purpose, first of the American Revenue (or Sugar) Act of 1764, then of the Stamp Act of 1765, against which the colonials rose with a ferocity that threatened civil war.

From the Stamp Act to the Articles of Confederation (1765–1781).

When the colonials rallied to nullify the stamp tax, nobody meant to make a revolution, no identifiable leader espoused American independence. Proclaiming their loyalty to the Crown, they did not dispute Parliament's right to regulate the empire's trade. The British Americans simply demanded, as they conceived it, the rights of all Englishmen—especially the right to be taxed only by representatives elected by themselves, which the members of the House of Commons were not and could not be. If the authority of Parliament had no limits, the colonials asked themselves, how far might its exactions ultimately extend? If the people, through their provincial legislatures, could not preserve their traditional, exclusive control of taxation, how could they defend the other liberties that made colonials Englishmen and free? These were the principles of the British constitution, of natural rights, and of government based on an inviolable social contract proclaimed by English thinkers themselves— John Locke in the seventeenth century and more recently political journalists such as John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. In the end, colonials would fight before conceding that Parliament's sovereignty was absolute, and Englishmen would fight before conceding that it was not. The empire shattered on its inability to solve—or even clearly define—the federal puzzle of a mutually acceptable division of authority between the provinces and the center, a riddle that would trouble the independent Americans for a further dozen years after independence before the Constitution brought a fragile and temporary solution.

The American colonists' profound transformation of outlook did not occur quickly or casually. The nine years that elapsed between the Stamp Act crisis and the clashes at Lexington and Concord, and the fourteen months of warfare that passed before the Americans decided that their objective should be independence and a republican revolution, not a restoration of the eighteenth‐century status quo, testify to the colonists' deep attachment to the empire and the difficulty of achieving concord among thirteen widely different colonies, even as England stubbornly insisted on the central principle of parliamentary rule.

In 1766, facing a colonial boycott of British imports and a threatened civil war, a new ministry headed by the marquis of Rockingham secured the repeal of the Stamp Act, accompanied, however, by a declaration of Parliament's authority to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever. In 1767, its revenue needs still unmet, Parliament passed the Townshend Acts, taxing colonial imports of certain British goods (an “external” rather than an “internal” tax, but one soon perceived as aimed at raising revenue, not regulating trade). Another boycott followed, along with clashes culminating in 1770 in a “massacre” of Boston townsmen rioting against the customs regulations and the troops who had been sent to quell their fractious spirit. Years of mounting crisis, with each British action triggering a more outraged response and every episode of colonial resistance bringing an angrier British reaction, underlay a general conclusion that the Tea Act of 1773 was a conspiracy to tempt the colonies to pay the single Townshend duty not repealed three years before. This vicious cycle prepared the way, too, for the Boston Tea Party, at which the radicals dumped the tea ship Dartmouth's cargo into Boston harbor.

Parliament responded with the Coercive Acts of 1774, closing Boston harbor and altering the charter of Massachusetts Bay. “Intolerable Acts,” colonials called them, seeing in the punishment of Massachusetts (and in the new nonrepresentative government imposed by the Quebec Act of the same year) a fate that might await them all. With a unanimity reminiscent of the Stamp Act protests, several colonies called concurrently for a Continental Congress to prepare a unified response. Meeting in the fall of 1774, Congress resolved to support Massachusetts's defiance of the Coercive Acts and to impose an escalating program of commercial resistance to Parliament's acts: the tested tool of nonimportation of British goods followed by nonexportation to Britain and nonconsumption of British products. A Second Continental Congress, assembled in the spring of 1775, confronted war, the people of Massachusetts having resisted at Lexington and Concord a ministerial order to seize the province's military supplies and arrest the resistance leaders. Only then did growing numbers of colonial leaders move toward the conclusion that their liberties could never be secure under the rule of a corrupt and corrupting Britain, that Americans were different from the British and could not sustain their special way of life without a revolutionary reorganization fully based on elections and popular consent. Common Sense, Thomas Paine's explosive call for independence and a republican revolution, appeared in January 1776.

Six months later, on 7 June 1776, Virginia's Richard Henry Lee (1732–1794) proposed three resolutions in Congress: a declaration of independence, the forging of foreign alliances, and the creation of a permanent American confederation. It took two years to conclude an alliance with France, seven years to win the Revolutionary War, and twelve to frame and ratify a Constitution that solved the federal problem that had wrecked the British empire. As Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence, Congress struggled to devise a plan of intercolonial union. Not until 15 November 1777 did Congress finally forward a plan to the states for their approval, and not until February 1781 were the Articles of Confederation ratified by Maryland, the thirteenth state.

From the Confederation Era to the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

By this point, many in Congress and its executive departments already considered the federal government created by the Articles seriously inadequate, dependent as it was on state actions to enforce its revenue requisitions and most of its other commands. In February 1781, as Maryland approved the Articles, Congress, seeking an independent source of federal funds, requested an amendment authorizing it to levy a 5 percent duty on foreign imports. Rhode Island rejected the proposal. In 1783, Robert Morris, the superintendent of finance, initiated an even more ambitious but equally unsuccessful campaign for a program of independent federal funding. In the end, every such effort to revise the Articles, including attempts to secure a federal authority to regulate the country's trade, fell victim to interstate jealousies or the fact that the Articles could only be amended by unanimous consent. As Congress limped along and a sharp postwar depression set in, thoughts turned increasingly toward extralegal action.

By September 1786, when delegates from six states met at Annapolis, Maryland, to consider better means of regulating interstate and international commerce, crisis loomed. Congress owed huge debts to foreign governments and bankers, to revolutionary soldiers, and to citizens who had lent their money or had had their goods conscripted to finance the war. Congress could not even pay the interest on its domestic debt and was financing its foreign debts only by contracting additional loans. Since Congress also lacked authority to deal with the depression, states were passing separate and conflicting commercial regulations, issuing paper money, and extending moratoria on taxes that dismayed property holders. Every lesser effort at reform having failed, and lacking a quorum even to make authoritative proposals concerning trade, the handful of reformers at Annapolis recommended another convention empowered to consider all the defects of the current constitution. Congress endorsed the recommendation. That autumn, Shays's Rebellion, a tax revolt in Massachusetts, seemed to many a final warning that the union might be on the verge of collapse. This alarming uprising helped ensure a full attendance at the Constitutional Convention that convened at Philadelphia in May 1787—a convention that would draft the Constitution that still endures.
See also Adams, John; Adams, Samuel; Albany Congress; Bill of Rights; Boston Massacre; Colonial Era; Committees of Correspondence; Early Republic, Era of the; Federalism; Franklin, Benjamin; Henry, Patrick; Imperial Wars; Republicanism; Sons of Liberty; Zenger Trial.

Bibliography

Edmund S. Morgan , The Birth of the Republic, 1763–1789, 1956.
James Madison , Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Adrienne Koch, 1966.
Bernard Bailyn , The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1967.
Gordon S. Wood , The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 1969.
Jack P. Greene, ed., Colonies to Nation: A Documentary History of the American Revolution, 1763–1789, 1975.
Jack N. Rakove , The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretive History of the Continental Congress, 1979.
Edward Countryman , The American Revolution, 1985.

Lance Banning