Transition from British Colonial America to an Independent, Federal Republic:

 

the Big Picture

The Revolution had been brewing since the end of the French-Indian War in 1763. But a thirst for independence was not universal and was geographically uneven. What passed for an American colonial class structure  over the decade previous to 1776. The first on board were the working and lower classes that resisted taxation and the increased exercise of British regulation. The latter factionalized upper classes, as an vocal and influential element became increasingly frustrated with a British colonial rule that inhibited their autonomy of action and frustrated their personal and business goals, leaving behind those who retained their core loyalty to the Crown and England, and others, who for various reasons were hesitant to get involved even if they felt some level of frustration. The vocal restive element proved to be the vanguard of the revolution, slowing bringing on board–or forcing their moderate comrades–to join with their lower classes allies in a movement that culminated in the demand for independence–and war.

Recognizing the American Revolution, however, as described in textbooks was largely a political movement toward an independent revolutionary American democracy. The political or policy system that resulted from the War of Independence is the main story. The Founding Fathers are those who guided us through this tumultuous period, and set up the world’s first modern democracy, a federal republic that survives today as the world’s oldest government. The policy system is important to our ED history, but both the American Revolution and the Policy Systems that followed were not just political revolutions, but also a social and social and economic movement as well. Frankly, these are at best off to the margins of our general sense of what happened. We may remember our teachers describing the Revolution as a “moderate” revolution–and it was compared to the French Revolution which occurred thirteen years later. The French Revolution was so brutal, immoderate, violent and resulted in a military dictatorship (Napoleon). Ours did not.

America’s moderate political revolution does stand out, but our history of American S&L ED was also profoundly affected by the consequences of the social and economic movements that overlapped with the War of Independence and the subsequent first democratic republic, the Articles of Confederation. This module concentrates on the social movements of the period because it sets us up to better understand the impact of social groups and political culture on our policy systems. Politically, culturally and economically the Thirteen Colonies, in this module the Thirteen States, were a direct descendant of England/Great Britain. Our mother country had itself been through a great deal–including a religious/political war that started sometime after 1600, and did jot culminate until 1689, and a political struggle between a rising middle class, itself fueled by a slowly developing industrial capitalist transformation, and its traditional, land-agricultural based late medieval elite.

North America did not clone that struggle, largely because the context–certainly the geography was vastly (and I include the continental vastness in that terminology) different, but also because immigration and settlement in a far-distant wilderness shook up the late-medieval class configuration. The wilderness and its isolation, subject to chronic international conflict, further compelled political/economic decentralization and invited geographic concentration by clusters of refugees and opportunists–our First Big Sort. We were always a cultural melting pot, even if we were predominately English in these years.

This module begins a theme that will continue over several modules and will persist through the entire of our history. The theme is simple, but it no doubt departs from the consensual perspective of the American Revolution. I take the position there was in fact two revolutions going on: the political one well covered in our education curriculum and the great number of popular histories and a social-economic one which is downplayed, and frankly largely ignored. The outcome of the first political revolution–expressed most coherently in our 1789 Constitution–resulted from the outcome from the social-economic revolution that played out in the shadows of our mist-bound history.

In this module, the battlefield for that second revolution was Philadelphia and Pennsylvania–but it occurred to some degree in each of the Thirteen States. The social-economic clash in a general sense was not a “class” war, sorry Marxists, mostly because the socio-economic classes we think of today resulted from the industrial capitalist revolution that started about 1750 in England. That social-economic revolution had barely hit North America, and was in its relative infancy in Great Britain. So the American 1776 social-economic clash I think is better described as between elites and masses. It was a clash between an older, social-economic system in considerable flux, as it was “disrupted” by a new innovative economic system which was in process of forging its own class structure. It was a clash not only between democracy and traditional royal authority, but a clash that involved a change in society and economy. Economic development logically is the fulcrum of that clash–it cannot escape the clash of economies and cultures that waged underneath the better-known political clash.

The battle I am describing in this module is less the political democratic one, than the clash of economics and ways of life. Why?

It was the victors in the social-economic clash that wrote our 1789 Constitution and set up the core framework of our subsequent policy systems–which still govern us today as amended, BTW. The losers in the social-economic struggle did not surrender or “leave the office”.  They persisted and continued their fight–and are still fighting to the present day. The coalition of these “losers” (would the reader prefer deplorables?) are frequently labeled today as “populists”, but the configuration and substance of that coalition has evolved massively over the next two hundred years. In these early years, however, the reader, I think, will more clearly see the fundamentals that underscore the two-hundred and fifty year evolution of American Populism. We shall also see that from the onset, the American elite was itself deeply fragmented, and that fragmentation did not take long to expose itself. It too is evident from the beginning, and as I shall argue, the history of American S&L ED has been preeminently shaped by its elites–subject to Populist counter-reaction–elite fragmentation will quickly produce two two very different approaches to American ED (Mainstream Capitalist ED or MED and People-Focused Community Development) which will soon be detailed in our modules. We will also see shortly how the elite-mass conflict led to a series of partisan, i.e. mass-political party, configurations that contested federal/state/local policy systems in the Early Republic.

What we can see in this module is the clash between the elites and the masses, and also a sense of the elements of the coalition that jelled in this initial period of our history. We will see in an introductory way how this struggle affected our history of economic development. It did–“bigly”. But to be honest, that will require a bunch of modules to explain, and will consume over seventy years of our American history. The Civil War was the volcano that resulted from the tensions unleashed during this period of American history called the Early Republic. The S&L ED history of the Early Republic is the foundation on which post-Civil War American ED rests–post-1870  builds upon that foundation.

The very initial period of our history happened in that very loose, decentralized confederation of the Thirteen States that signed the Declaration of Independence in July 1776. Little-known, probably for good reason, the Articles of Confederation “governed” (badly) from 1776 to 1789–although they did not formally and legally become the government of the Thirteen States until 1781. They are important to American ED because, I suggest, this period was a kind of political, social, and economic Bunsen Burner, a Laboratory, that produced something akin to a political tribe, the Federalists (our Founding Fathers) whose primary non-political policy concern was arguably economic development. The Populist insurgency described in these next modules reasserted itself after 1800 when the Federalists themselves fragmented, and one element, the Tidewater elite swung over to the Populist Coalition, creating a new political tribe, the Democrat-Republicans, which governed through 1828–when all hell broke loose–but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. That is many, many modules into the future.

 

Who the heck cares about the Articles of Confederation? I Didn’t.

Then I started to research this book and I thought it probably was the best place to start and tell my story.

And when I did I felt like a fool. Nearly everything I thought about the Articles, how I approached why the Articles existed, and what was intended by their creation was just plain wrong. I don’t mean off-kilter; I mean wrong. Worse, the outline of the Articles period threw an entirely new light as to how we entered into a new federal republic in 1789, with a stronger American nation and a redefined federalism that was hammered out and smoothed over by our Constitution. Feeling more embarrassed I discovered that many respectable scholars of American history had long since explained the Articles in terms of how they were viewed, and lived, but they are pushed to the side decades ago. The gap between the past understanding and our current one as taught in textbooks and popular histories is huge–partially because we are very interested in society and economics which are tossed aside in favor of ideology and abstracted political science/economic concepts. So my first task must be to resuscitate my poor version of the past consensus and try to provide the necessary detail fundamental to our understanding of the course of our American S&L ED history.

That detail is also is essential to understanding the fault lines between our major political cultures–and the different regions/states. The latter are ignored outright, and the former smushed into stereotypes. That it clarifies our partisan platforms, and provides context for the 250 years of conflict and competition is another reason why we best start this module with a different understanding of what the first government, the first republic if you will, was. From there we can see why, how, and who led the successful drive to radically change it into the Second American Republic, the one theoretically we have today. We would also recognize this Second American Republic was not fully put in place until after the Civil War, and that the first period of our S&L ED history, the Early Republic, is a transition period, lasting nearly ninety years, from the Articles to a true national government within a federal republic. Let’s clean up the history we learned in school. The Articles of Confederation were formally approved in late 1781–after we achieved victory at Yorktown in the War of Independence. While the Articles served as “big tent” under which the War of Independence was fought, it was at best a precursor to the Articles confederation which really began in 1782.

The Declaration of Independence states clearly enough the essential nature of Articles governance. The Declaration, a missile fired at the British King, tells him that it was sent by Thirteen “Free and Independent States“–a coalition of “countries ruled by their state legislatures, each of which asserted it possessed greater sovereignty than Parliament or the British King. The folk that signed the Declaration signed on behalf of their states, and the state legislatures which had directly or indirectly sent them. The principal “bond” that bound these thirteen states was their shared determination to be free from England and colonial status–and even that varied among the states, and fluctuated during the course of the war. That coalition of “free and independent states” with sovereign state legislatures somehow won the war in 1781–and like the proverbial dog that “caught the car”, they realized they had to drive it. So in 1781, they backed into something resembling a national government.

Except it wasn’t–and it really wasn’t intended to be a national government in the sense we think of it today. It was intended to be, and indeed its name says it was, a “confederation” in which each state was sovereign, but not the national government–which was a creature of the thirteen states. It was a sort of “league of nations”. As we shall see, it was entrusted to (1) coordinate common matters of concern to the thirteen states; (2) attempt to manage their collective foreign policy; and (3) tackle a few sore spots that caused friction among the states, but in the self-interest of the respective states to somehow resolve. Chief among those latter sore spots was how to handle settlement into the interior, across the Appalachians, an area which in 1782 we were awarded sovereignty over by the peace treaty with Great Britain. It might be added that after 1783 expelling the British from our new-found hinterland empire was a major element of our foreign policy, and was compounded by their supply of indigenous Native American tribes with weapons. Chronic war characterized these areas, which was troublesome because settlers from each state were on the move into these territories. We also discovered we were ringed by European powers such as Spain, and France. The Articles were more focused on foreign policy than domestic.

Joseph Ellis in his national best-seller The Quartet describes what happened after the Articles took over in 1782. First of all, to repeat, no one at the time thought of the Articles as a true national government–and he observes few wanted one. For most Americans, particularly those we characterize as masses, “a distant far-away national government would  represent a domestic version of Parliament, too removed from the interests and experiences of the American citizenry to be trusted”. Indeed, if anything had held them together during the ups and downs of the war, was the shared ideological belief that ” any projection of power from London or Whitehall … [was characterized as] arbitrary, imperious and corrupt. And so creating a national government was the last thing on the minds of American revolutionaries since such a distant source of political power embodied all the tyrannical tendencies that patriotic Americans believed they were rebelling against” [1] pp. x-xiii. Joseph j. Ellis, the Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783-1789 (Vintage Book, 2015). In this quote the reader can see how smush-conflating of long-past events and popular opinion can obscure what was going in those years, inhibiting us from discerning key distinctions within elements of society that would prove important in later years.

In the case of Ellis quote the expression “patriotic Americans” conflates the patriotism of the “American citizenry”, the masses, with the patriotism of the “American revolutionaries” in the Continental Congress, the land, finance, and merchant class, or the American elite. The underlying dynamic ignored was the two groupings, elite and masses, did arrive at a shared commitment to political revolution and a war of independence, but they did so for different reasons, and the shared commitment was a last minute affair, arising in June and July of 1776. Up to that point the bias of the American citizenry, at least the urban element, had been moving down the revolution-independence path for at least a decade, while only vanguard elements of the elite were then on board. The bulk of the elites, most of which were increasing dissatisfied with British rule, were still disposed to compromise and negotiation until the bitter end. Robert Morris, for example, still unwilling to send the Declaration of Independence to the King on July 4th, absented himself from voting, but finally signed it a month later. John Dickinson, a very key player  in Philadelphia/ Pennsylvania politics was also conflicted.  The citizenry, however, were ready, and pressed hard for independence.

Say it another way, by mid-1776 we can discern distinctive elite–mass distinctions in the policy debates of the time. These distinctions provide a measure for understanding why the state-sovereign Confederation persisted until 1789, and allow us to see the crystallization of elite opinion into the 1789 “big tent” Federalist tribe. The “birth” of mass or Populist Movement, occurred over an extended period of time, but certainly was on going in mid-May 1776 in Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. Of the two births, the Federalist birth, and the agenda they rode in on, presided over yet another birth, the birth of American ED. Like most births, I suspect, none of these births was pretty, and were accompanied by cries of pain.

the Elite-Mass Distinction Cracks Open the American Colonial Deference Culture

The pre-Revolution Colonial political culture will be discussed in more detail in a later set of modules, but for the moment suffice it to say that culture was dominated by one massive political concept: deference of the masses to the propertied elites. The colonial policy system was restricted to white males who owned property, and property ownership requirements were sizable enough to limit the voting franchise to a very few “wealthy” individuals. This was true with minor exceptions for each of the Thirteen Colonies. The ownership of land was tightly linked to not only voting, but also to being eligible to serve in a colonial governance capacity. Electoral districts were “gerrymandered” in favor or dense urban centers, the county in which they were located, and a few close counties. Hinterland counties were very large, thinly settled, and elected fewer representatives to the legislature. Colonial legislatures were dominated by its urban core, with hinterland delegates often physically unable to participate in policy deliberations in a timely fashion. It literally could take days to get there, and often legislative agendas did not correspond with the demands of a hinterland agricultural economic base. Colonial government, presided over by the King-appointed “governor” was checked in varying degrees by a locally elected, property elite dominated semi-advisory “legislature”.

By 1775 this policy system had persisted for well over a hundred years, its traditions and prerogatives well established, and its elites literally entitled.

It is important to remember that in order to vote in most of eighteen century America you had to be a free, white, male, adult owning property in excess of certain amounts. Even more property was required to run for office. Along with property qualifications for participation came laws passed by eastern legislatures that gave greater representations to the cities, and to counties in which the cities existed, and to nearby eastern counties than to counties in the countryside. Hence the utter dominance of the representative legislatures by rich men and the use of laws to promote the interests of the rich [55] William Hogeland, Founding Finance, pp. 24-5.

Land, then, and the renting, sale, financing, and purchase/trade commercial/agricultural goods and services that flowed from land was the dividing line between elites and masses. The key to all of these activities was the sanctity of the legal contract. Contracts had to be binding on those who entered them, and failure to live up to the terms of the contract, if not resolvable by the parties, had to be enforced if this “system” was to be maintained. It was this policy/economic nexus that stood at the core of England’s first democratic political movement, the Whigs, and was inherited by its opposing successor, the Tory. In this context, contracts between an elite and an average citizen assumed an added dimension; violation of a elite-held contract by an citizen threatened a political and social order. Anomic behavior, especially on a larger scale, like in the good old days when serfs burned the manor houses and the contracts they contained, caused many a sleepless night in elite households. After the French-Indian War ended, anti-colonial reactions by all classes escalated and exploded with Britain’s imposition of the 1765 Stamp Act tax. Outside this very closed elite policy system , reaction such as that in the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party was then described in terms of “mobs”. The anomic behavior of the “mobs”, however, was the only effective way in which the masses could impact policy-making in that colonial deferential political culture: tearing down statutes, burning effigies, and tar-and-feathering were other examples. The masses were being mobilized long before the elites were ready to respond to British regulations and taxes.

The colonial/Articles rule of law in the 1770’s implied biases less appreciated today. By that time land already had been “assembled” and was held by large propertied landowners. Often such huge landowners such as New York’s Livingstons’ owned over a million acres on the Hudson River, and referred to their property as “manors” which were rented out for production.”. About a third to a half of Americans did not own their own land; they were tenants and day laborers. By the 1770’s the elite Whig concept/nexus was deeply in tension with the hopes and motivations of the average citizen in an American policy system. The common path of their advancement meant acquiring property, by founding/leading a business or by establishing a free homestead in an agricultural community, “with hard work and discipline came personal independence, reasonable prosperity, fair representation in government, a role in public service, and in a few short generations possibly even well-deserved wealth and luxury” [56] Hogeland, Founding Finance  (p. 26). No where was this dream seemingly more real than in the open, never mind the Native Americans, western wilderness–and that is where the most recent of the large immigration movements headed. The Scots-Irish had arrived in America starting in the 1750’s, most landing in Philadelphia, their port of entry. That immigration exploded after 1765 when two-thirds of all Scots-Irish entered Pennsylvania.

So the western hinterlands beckoned, but the Scots-Irish were too late. Land “out there” (at least the land with the most potential) had already been, or was in the process of being “assembled” by speculators such as described in our opening module, i.e. land speculators such as George Washington, and even a new Swiss immigrant Albert Gallatin. Even European nobility such as the French noble Talleyrand, in temporary exile in America, acquired Pennsylvania hinterland and founded a town (Bellefonte, today’s county seat of Centre County). Western land speculation, previous to and after the Revolution became the proverbial Investment bubble, and would eventually burst in the late 1790’s, sending America’s richest man, and the second most powerful Federalist to debtor prison. In that speculative land bubble the seeds of a hinterland Populist explosion were sown.

Urban masses in an age of proto-capitalism and industrialization could take advantage of guild-like occupational training and jobs, acquire expertise, display their natural abilities, and rise in their professions. An “artisan” community was emerging. Also Family-owned businesses, often quite small, could be inherited by the children. Elites, in the Roman tradition, often attracted proteges, usually of other lesser elites, but indentured and apprenticed individuals could benefit. America’s incredibly small urban centers, therefore, more densely packed, with all kinds of laborers and proto-artisans, was likely to be the chief source of “rising expectations”. So urban anomic behaviors concerned many of the propertied elite, and they reacted, in one instance by forming an organizations, the Sons of Liberty, that hoped to provide direction, organization, and a measure of control over these rising expectation–and to channel them to ends of hopefully mutual interest. Starting in Boston and spreading throughout the Thirteen Colonies, the Sons of Liberty provided a measure of organization, i.e. control over the anomic masses action. Typically, those who led the Sons were the more propertied elements of the community, elites such as Dr. Joseph Warren and Sam Adams, cousin of John, in Boston. These elites were clearly not typical of the larger body of propertied American elites, although in time many have thought of these elites as actually populist masses–they were not.

In any case, in colony after colony local chapters of the Sons, often called by other names, were formed, incrementally extending their reach into the surrounding hinterland. So long as their leadership was provided directly or indirectly by the elite vanguard, these revolutionary cells became the cutting edge of an American independence movement. When events overtook the limits of leadership and organization, however, and indigenous leadership assumed command, these chapter/cells once mobilization could provide the mass and momentum to quickly overthrow the established colonial government, or its successor. This is exactly what will happen in Philadelphia in 1776. What happened there, described below, was not typical of America’s larger cities. In most instances, the elites and masses coexisted in Sons Chapter decision-making and moderation prevailed. In Philadelphia the perfect storm of immoderation occurred: Scots-Irish, sheer size/density, the presence of the Continental Congress, a larger proto-industrial economic base, British frigates shelling the City, and outside leadership in the persons of Sam and John Adams, resident in Philadelphia as delegates of the Continental Congress and sensing an opportunity to use the local chapters to generate local pressure to bring a conservative Pennsylvania delegation over to their side, and to overthrow the conservative state legislature that supported that position.

National Government: an Elite-Mass Fault Line

The key dynamic underscoring American Populism is the perception of non-membership int eh decision-making nexus affecting oneself, family, neighbors, and self-identified community. That perception can easily overlap and transcend ethnicity, social-economic class, ideology and geography.If so, Populism thus defined is an inherent challenge to established authority, expertise, and above all “order”, whether or not that established nexus is “good”, “evil”, moral or immoral, effective or dysfunctional. Populism mobilized is the ultimate expression of in-group versus out-group which means it contains a great deal of repressed, even if imagined emotion, feelings and other intangibles associated with non-rational behavior. Distance by its nature, whether geographic or sociological fosters and can trigger a mobilized populism. Our tendency to form communities along “big sort” principles can insulate and incubate Populist-like perceptions. It is likely an anonymous social media can play a push and pull dynamic activating isolation and community simultaneously.

As we shall discover, I think Ellis was wrong if he believed a national government was not wanted by the “elite”–most of those who fought the War and became Federalists wanted a serious national government previous to, at least in the course of the war. Washington, as our opening case study I think amply demonstrates, was a nationalist from 1770 or so. That national government would prove to be an important “fault line” between elites and masses–and if the words states rights, mandates, devolution ring any reader bells, it remains so today. America is a FEDERAL Republic for a reason. That alone makes it clear that American ED must distinguish between S&L ED from national or Federal ED. Ours in a decentralized economic development, and has been so from day one. That decentralization of ED policy alone justifies our review of this period of ED history.

There are two basic problems with a decentralized confederation of Thirteen States surrounded by usually semi to outright hostile major European powers: (1) the best way to fend off the latter’s hostile intrusions was to settle the hinterland interior. For this a strong military required manufacturing and access into the interior and population settlement as well. The best way to grow and settle the hinterlands was economic growth. But (2) Thirteen independent States recognized early on to grow meant what is called “interstate commerce”, to form what today might be called a Common Market” and it also involved interstate modes of transportation. Small matters like a common currency and a shared finance, banking and credit system increasingly grew in importance.  All these were essential preconditions to any form of economic development–but as we discovered, the most important ED strategy that was shared by each of the thirteen nations was to devise a method to settle their hinterlands and extend their economy over the Appalachians to the Mississippi River. We will call that shared ED strategy “developmental transportation infrastructure strategy” (DTIS). It turns out that strategy was the trigger that launched the reform movement.

So, from our S&L ED history vantage point, the first five years of our history was the story of how thirteen “independent nations” (1) developed autonomously and independently their own state (and local) ED approach; and (2) increasing came to view the confederation as dysfunctional–and increasingly dangerous vacuum in a hostile world–so that it had to be reformed, empowered, and somehow controlled sufficiently by the component states that the essence of a viable state sovereignty was not crushed.

When the demand arose for Articles reform, the Articles, and the Thirteen Nations, in varying degrees of course, were willing to work together to work this out, subject to protections of course–that’s why were are a federal republic. The reform was not a hostile merger–but it was one in which substantial elements of the state’s citizenry, and especially its population (because the democratic franchise was extremely limited by today’s standards) was wary, and even fearful. That dimension alerts us to the role of political cultures, their uneven distribution across the geographies of the Thirteen Nations, and through the prism of these divergent political cultures, the role of elites and masses. Was this reform to be “bottoms-up” from citizens and residents to elites (as happened in France), or advocated, even compelled by elites or “top-down”. That is what happened (mostly) in the United States.

All this was resolved during the Articles of Confederation–it’s all there in microcosm.