So What Did We Need a Constitution for Anyway?

IF AMERICANS have one overriding value – one single paramount principle – it would have to be “Fairness.” Our ideal world is embodied in Kid Rock’s refrain, “You get what you put in, and people get what they deserve!” The more pervasive fairness becomes, the happier we generally become … the more “right” our world seems to be.

Such was not the trend, however, for Americans in 1786. Just five years after Yorktown and three years after the Treaty of Paris, America’s dearly won system of self-government was unraveling. “I told you so!” likely became an often-shared declaration amongst fellow monarchs and tyrants in Europe at the time. In October 1786, recently retired General George Washington wrote close friend and compatriot Henry Knox to share his gloomy outlook: “I am mortified beyond expression when I view the clouds which have spread over the brightest morn that ever dawned upon any country.”  

The Articles of Confederation. Less than a week after approving a Declaration of Independence that proclaimed our ties to a tyrannical and distant central government broken, the Second Continental Congress began creating a league of friendship amongst America’s 13 newly formed “States.” The resulting Articles of Confederation left all sovereign powers with the states, while assigning a single-housed Confederation Congress the duties of orchestrating the war effort and conducting foreign relations. The Articles provided Congress no means of taxation other than requesting contributions from the States, no executive/president to energize and direct things, and it required unanimous consent – 13 out of 13 – before the Articles could be amended.

As it turned out, reality’s challenges were more than the Articles could manage. During the Revolution, America’s factions and interest groups shared a common purpose. But once hostilities ceased, the Articles provided no effective means for arbitrating conflicts between states, religious sects, political groups, creditors & debtors, landowners & wage earners, rich & poor, slaveholders & non-slaveholders, farmers/fishermen & merchants/manufacturers, urban & rural, north & south, etc.

Government’s primary mission is to sort internal conflicts out fairly, while standing on behalf of the whole to secure fair treatment from external states and actors. But with no executive to explain and promote America’s new common interests, no head of state, and no substantive means for sanctioning uncooperative groups – internal or external – the Articles left America powerless against the challenges she faced in 1786. So in February, 1787, Congress asked the States to send delegations to a special convention in May, in Philadelphia’s Independence Hall, for the purpose of “render[ing] the federal Constitution adequate to the exigencies of Government and the Preservation of the Union.”

Rhode Island refused…but the other 12 states abided. I’ll have more on the outcome of their efforts next time…

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The Straws that broke the Confederation’s Back: debt, security, squabbling, and apathy. 

Debt:

• America fought the Revolution mostly on credit (owed $5.9M to France and $2M to Holland). Our first round of repayments was past due, but each time Congress tried to create a 5% tax on imports, one state – one state – would block it (Rhode Island, then New York). Since most of the states were broke too, how were we going to repay them? We certainly couldn’t afford to make them angry.
• Injecting all that borrowed money into the economy during the Revolution inflated commodity prices, leading farmers to take out mortgages in order to expand their output. But prices crashed when the war ended, and mortgage default rates soared.
• Some indebted farmers lost their land (and thus their vote); others got thrown into “debtors’ prison.” In 1786, western Massachusetts farmers led by Daniel Shays forcibly closed three debtors’ courts, and marched to Springfield to raid the state’s armory. Once armed, they vowed to head east and burn Boston…

Homeland Security:

• Congress asked the states for money to quell “Shays’ Rebellion.” Only Virginia stepped forward.
• Massachusetts Governor Bowdin called up his militia. Only 900 men volunteered to fight their neighbors. Shays had a force of thousands.
• Ultimately, a Donald Trump of the 1780’s – land speculator Benjamin Lincoln – rallied his rich Boston friends to field a mercenary army of 4,400 soldiers. They won; but this was clearly no way to secure the homeland…

International Security:

• A spiteful Great Britain:  stayed put in the western posts it had promised to vacate, prohibited its West Indies sugar colonies from trading with the U.S., restricted U.S. imports into Britain, flooded America with cheap British exports, and prohibited the sale of critical machinist tools to U.S. factories…and then effectively said, “What is your leaderless and penniless government gonna do about it?”
• Spain was unfairly regulating trade on the Mississippi River…Indians were challenging western settlers…and pirates were eventually going to discover that our merchant ships were easy pickings.

Squabbling States:

• Virginia wouldn’t share all of the Potomac River with Maryland, so Maryland charged Virginia ships more to use her ports.
• New York and Pennsylvania disputed their border. A Congressional committee recommended a solution…Pennsylvania ignored it.
• New York and New Hampshire argued over the Vermont territory…so in 1781, Ethan Allen announced the formation of the “Free and Independent Republic of Vermont,” and started negotiating a peace treaty with Great Britain…
• With one vote per state, large states wondered how appropriating the title “State” entitled 10,000 people to the same representation as 40,000 people.
• Interstate postal roads? A common currency? Canal-building? – Good luck with that.

Apathetic Governance:  States’ apathy over national issues kept the Confederation Congress from reaching a quorum for 72 straight days in the fall of 1786 – just couldn’t get seven or more state delegations to bother showing up.