A Bit of History

The Victory That Nearly Failed

On October 19, 1781, at Yorktown, a British army surrendered. The guns fell silent, but the American Revolution did not end. The British still occupied American cities. The Continental Army remained in the field. The colonies had declared themselves independent, but Britain had not yet accepted the verdict. America had won a battle of arms. It had not yet secured a peace, a nation, or a future.

The struggle moved from the battlefield to the conference table, where Benjamin Franklin was waiting. For years, Franklin had represented America in France. He had won loans, weapons, diplomatic support, and the French alliance without which Yorktown might never have occurred. By 1782, he was perhaps the most admired American in Europe: genial in manner, patient in negotiation, and immovable when the essential interests of his country were at stake.

When Britain began to explore peace, there were suggestions that the colonies might accept generous self-government while remaining within the empire. Franklin refused. Independence was not a term to be negotiated. It was the ground upon which all negotiation began.

John Jay and John Adams joined him. Franklin brought subtlety. Jay brought vigilance. Adams brought relentless determination. Together they obtained terms of astonishing breadth. The preliminary agreement was signed on November 30, 1782. Britain recognized the independence of the United States. The new nation stretched westward to the Mississippi River. American fishermen retained valuable rights in the North Atlantic. Provisions were made for debts, Loyalist property, and the withdrawal of British forces.

On September 3, 1783, the Treaty of Paris was signed. It was a magnificent peace. Thirteen colonies that had challenged the greatest empire of the age were now recognized as free and sovereign states. Franklin and his fellow commissioners had secured not merely independence, but a continental inheritance.

Yet hidden within that triumph was a danger almost as great as the one just overcome. America had won the war. It had almost no government with which to preserve the victory.

The Articles of Confederation had been adopted by Congress in 1777 and finally ratified by all thirteen states in 1781. They were designed during the Revolution, when fear of centralized power remained nearly as strong as fear of Britain. They created a common government while carefully preserving the sovereignty of the states. The result was a union barely able to wage war, strong enough to declare independence, but too weak to govern in peace.

Congress could make war, negotiate treaties, and borrow money. But it could not tax the people. It could not regulate commerce. It could not compel a state to provide revenue. It could make promises abroad but could not ensure that they were kept at home. It possessed the duties of a government without the powers of one.

During the Revolution, common danger had forced the states together. Peace removed the enemy and, with it, much of the discipline of union. The weakness first appeared in the army. The soldiers who had endured hunger, cold, and years without dependable pay feared that Congress would abandon them. At Newburgh in 1783, anger among the officers came close to open resistance. Washington intervened. By the force of his character, he prevented the army from turning against the civil authority.

The republic survived, but it could not escape the lesson: the government could not pay the men who had saved it. The treasury was empty. Public debts mounted. The states ignored congressional requests for money. Britain restricted American trade and retained military posts in the Northwest. Spain challenged American use of the Mississippi. The states taxed one another’s goods, issued competing currencies, and pursued separate interests.

America could speak as one nation. It could act only as thirteen. The war had ended in victory. The peace began disastrously in weakness.

No man saw the danger more clearly than Alexander Hamilton. During the Revolution, Hamilton had watched Washington attempt to fight a national war without a national government. He had seen troops go unpaid, supplies withheld, and military plans frustrated because Congress could request assistance but could not command it. To Hamilton, these were not administrative inconveniences. They were signs of approaching national dissolution.

A country that could not raise revenue could not preserve its credit. A country that could not regulate commerce could not protect its prosperity. A country that could not enforce treaties would not long be trusted. A government that could not command obedience would eventually cease to govern. Others hoped that time might teach the states cooperation. Hamilton feared that time would teach them separation.

The first movement toward reform came not from constitutional theory, but from a dispute over rivers and trade. Virginia and Maryland shared the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. In 1785, commissioners from the two states met at Mount Vernon and reached an agreement concerning navigation and commerce. In doing so, they discovered a larger truth. Rivers did not recognize state boundaries. Trade bound regions together. The policy of one state could injure all the others. The Union was already an economic reality, though it remained a political uncertainty.

Virginia therefore called for a broader meeting at Annapolis in September 1786. Only five states arrived in time to conduct business. The convention seemed to have failed before it began.

Hamilton refused to let it fail. Where others saw an empty room, he saw proof of the disease. The states could not even assemble in sufficient numbers to address the crisis threatening them all. He also understood that commerce was not the whole problem. Trade, taxation, public credit, foreign policy, defense, and the enforcement of law were inseparable. The United States had been given the responsibilities of a nation without the authority required to meet them.

Hamilton drafted the report of the Annapolis Convention and turned failure into summons. The states were called to send delegates to Philadelphia in May 1787 to consider the defects of the federal system and create a government adequate to the needs of the Union. Madison had prepared the intellectual foundations. Washington would lend the movement his immense authority. But Hamilton drove it forward. He gave anxiety a purpose, reform a destination, and the nation a date with decision.

He did not seek a repaired alliance. He sought a government.

Then came the final alarm. In Massachusetts, farmers burdened by debt and taxation closed courts and resisted state authority. Shays’ Rebellion was suppressed, but the Confederation government had shown itself nearly powerless. The danger was no longer merely that America might appear weak abroad. It might disintegrate at home.

Congress at last approved the Philadelphia Convention. When the delegates assembled in May 1787, they carried with them the full weight of the preceding years. They remembered Yorktown. They remembered Franklin securing peace and a continent. They remembered the unpaid army, the empty treasury, the foreign humiliations, the quarrels among the states, the failure at Annapolis, and the rising in Massachusetts.

They had learned a hard truth: victory does not create a nation. A people may defeat an empire and still be conquered by its own divisions. It may win liberty and lack the institutions needed to preserve it. It may proclaim sovereignty abroad while authority dissolves at home.

The Revolution had destroyed British rule. It had not yet created the American republic. Washington had won the war. Franklin had secured the peace. Hamilton had forced the question. The war had decided whether America could become free. Philadelphia would decide whether America could remain so.

The Convention had framed a constitution, but it had not secured a nation. The document left Philadelphia not as law, but as a challenge laid before thirteen jealous states. Local powers resisted surrender. Opponents warned that liberty would be consumed by consolidation. Ratification trembled in doubt. The work of the Convention, achieved through months of argument and compromise, might yet perish in the contest for public opinion. It was then that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay took up the pen—not merely to explain the Constitution, but to save it.