Revolution, Constitution, and the People, 1776-1815

From the British evacuation of Boston in 1776 to their surrender at Yorktown in 1781, armies campaigned in New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and the South, with numerous secondary actions on the coasts and on the frontier. Although the war had started in New England, its center shifted southward as the British increased their forces in an effort to recapture the colonies. Americans were able to win a notable victory in 1777 at Saratoga, New York, when they trapped a British army marching down from Canada and captured over five thousand soldiers. This victory removed the threat of invasion from the north and convinced the French government that American success in the war was possible. France joined the war on the American side and was soon contributing military and naval assistance. Later Spain and then Holland also declared war on Britain, forcing it to confront three of Europe’s most significant powers as well as the American revolutionaries.

French help would prove critical in bringing the fighting to a close. In 1781, George Washington’s Continentals, together with a French army, trapped a British force in the fortress at Yorktown, Virginia. At a crucial juncture, a French fleet evaded a British naval blockade, crossed the Atlantic, and prevented British supply ships from relieving Yorktown. Faced with starvation, the 9,500 British troops surrendered, giving the Americans a decisive victory.

Prior to Yorktown, dramatic military gains had been rare for the Americans. An attempt in late 1775 to invade Canada and capture Quebec ended in disaster. American success often depended less on winning battles than on avoiding losing them—on keeping armies intact, and scoring minor victories when opportunity arose. Regrouping after their withdrawal from Boston, British forces returned in strength in the summer of 1776, capturing Long Island and then New York City, which remained their main base until 1783. Defeated on Long Island, Washington (aided by East River fishermen) escaped with the remains of his army and retreated, eventually crossing the Hudson River into New Jersey. The people of eastern New York and New Jersey included many loyalists, and the British used the area to obtain supplies. By late 1776 they had driven Washington’s army into Pennsylvania. Yet Washington’s men avoided being crushed. After months of dodging defeat, they won small victories at Trenton and Princeton in the winter of 1776–1777, causing the British to withdraw from much of New Jersey. The following summer, however, the British attacked again and, brushing Washington aside, captured Philadelphia, which they held until the following year.

Yet the British found that they could not control New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Though they held New York City, and occupied Philadelphia for a period, they could not conquer the countryside, where the majority of the population lived. Warfare imposed a great burden on the people. As armies moved to and fro, families fled their homes for safer areas. One woman recalled “so much suffering … that it has always been painful for me to dwell upon.” British depredations and the continued presence of an American army in the mid-Atlantic states restrained the further growth of support for the loyalist cause there, and helped keep the region on the revolutionary side.

Accordingly, in the late 1770s, the British embarked on a campaign in the South, aiming to use the support of the many loyalists in the backcountry to help restore royal authority there. They captured Savannah and Charleston, defeated a patriot army at Camden, South Carolina, and went some way to restoring control over Georgia and South Carolina. But British efforts sparked a civil war between patriots and loyalists, whose armed militias fought a grim guerrilla-style struggle across the countryside. In October 1780 at King’s Mountain, North Carolina, patriot fighters won a battle in which almost all the participants on both sides were Americans. The following January a patriot force defeated a British detachment at Cowpens. Resentments ran high. More than one loyalist militia leader, captured by patriots, was seized by vigilantes and murdered. South Carolina’s David Ramsay would remark that few people in his state “did not partake of the general distress.”

The American war effort relied on two distinct kinds of military force. Each province or (after Independence) state raised its own militia from among its citizens, often for short enlistments. Congress raised the Continental Army for longer-term service. In all, about two hundred thousand men served at one time or another.

The militias comprised the majority of soldiers. At first, the kinds of men who had started the fighting in Massachusetts in 1775 filled the militia units. Farmers, artisans, their sons, and apprentices, with a scattering of merchants, lawyers, and clergymen, dropped their work to fight off the invaders of their countryside. Six thousand or so militiamen rallied to help defeat the British at Saratoga. But the early enthusiasm of these units waned. Militiamen became harder to recruit, and they were reluctant to serve for extended periods or far from their homes. In a rural society, particularly outside plantation regions with their enslaved labor, young and able-bodied men were essential for raising crops. As a North Carolinian noted, “a soldier made is a farmer lost,” and without labor available for farming, the country would have starved. Farm labor was scarce, even so. A Connecticut woman recalled that “so many [men] were gone” in the fall of 1776, “that she, her aged Father in Law . . . and such little children as could be had, dug the potatoes and husked the corn.”

The Continental Army and militias began to recruit from more marginal segments of society, the young and the poor. Most Continental soldiers were young men. Jeremiah Greenman of Rhode Island was seventeen when he marched to take part in the siege of Boston in 1775. Without a trade or land to inherit, he decided to enlist in the Continental service. Captured twice and wounded three times, he was an officer by the time he left the army in 1783.

Some men, like Greenman, enlisted voluntarily; some were draftees; others served as paid substitutes for richer men. Some African Americans, such as the Connecticut enslaved person Gad Asher, who was wounded and lost his sight at Bunker Hill, fought in place of their enslavers. Many other enslaved persons, North and South, ran away to enlist, expecting to gain their freedom by fighting. After the British surrender at Saratoga, revolutionary leaders even tried to recruit prisoners of war. Thousands of women, too, traveled with the armies. Many were “on the ration” as cooks, nurses, laundresses, orderlies, or gravediggers. Their work was essential to the war effort. They endured all the hardships of soldiers except that of battle itself. A few women, usually disguised as men, did in fact fight.

Continentals and militia often faced worse conditions than the British soldiers they were confronting, as acute shortages of supplies added to the discomforts and dangers of war. During the winter of 1777–1778, when the British occupied Philadelphia and were well supplied, Washington’s army endured severe privations encamped at Valley Forge only twenty miles away. At Morristown, New Jersey, two winters later, on one-eighth rations and with pay five months in arrears, the army faced even worse conditions. When Jeremiah Greenman’s unit was finally issued clothing, he wrote that it “altered their Condition they being almost naked for nigh two Months.”

Morale almost broke. A private, Joseph Plumb Martin, wrote in 1780 that soldiers cursed themselves for their “imbecility in staying there and starving . . . for an ungrateful people.” At Morristown, two Connecticut regiments “paraded under arms” to demand better conditions, but Pennsylvania troops dispersed them. The next January the Pennsylvanians themselves mutinied; fifteen hundred marched off toward Philadelphia to protest to Congress. Even after Yorktown, the agony continued. The Continental Army remained at Newburgh, New York, for nearly two years awaiting the payment of its wages, and soldiers disbanded with only a token settlement of what they were owed.

Throughout the war Washington knew that his task was to keep the Continental Army together, however much suffering it faced. With the mix of poor whites, enslaved persons, foreigners, and women who composed or supported the army, he achieved this aim. Without them the British would have triumphed. At its largest the Continental Army numbered fewer than twenty thousand. But it was more than a military force: it symbolized the new American nation, and its preservation offered a political guarantee of independence. The state militias also served a vital political role. Particularly in the former middle colonies and the South, where many loyalists entered the action when British armies came nearby, patriot militias often violently restored American authority once the British had gone again.

The endurance of American forces was sufficient to prevent Britain from reconquering its colonies despite its great military and naval strength. As other European nations joined the war against them, the British had to defend other parts of their empire, and guard against a French invasion of England itself. As these pressures mounted, and as serious riots in London in 1780 added the fear of domestic insurrection, the British government lost the will to fight in America. The surrender at Yorktown convinced many British officials that the war was lost, and soon led to peace negotiations.

“In every human Breast,” wrote the African-born Boston slave Phillis Wheatley in 1774, “God has planted a principle which we call love of Freedom. It is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance.” The inspiration of revolution and the confusion of war led thousands of enslaved persons to seek freedom. To some white Americans, including Quakers and evangelicals, some southerners among them, slavery seemed a travesty of the principles for which patriots were fighting. To most enslaved persons, it was an abomination.

Many enslaved persons ran away when opportunity arose. Freedom seekers were often younger men without family ties, but women also fled, some taking children with them. A considerable number of freedom seekers headed for Philadelphia, where antislavery sentiment was becoming prominent.

Some enslaved persons sought liberty by fighting for the British. In 1775, Lord Dunmore, Virginia’s last royal governor, promised freedom to those who rallied to the King, and many—including several of George Washington’s own enslaved persons—escaped to serve in British or loyalist units. A New Jersey enslaved person named Titus became “Colonel Tye,” leader of an irregular Black Brigade that harassed patriots. Between 1779 and 1781 some twelve thousand enslaved persons escaped in South Carolina alone. One was a man called Boston, who ran from a plantation at Tranquil Hill to the British lines around Charleston in 1779.

Several thousand other enslaved persons sought freedom by fighting with the American forces. Seeing “liberty poles and the people all engaged for the support of freedom,” the New England enslaved person Jehu Grant fled his enslaver and enlisted in the Continental Army. A few states, especially Rhode Island, solved their military recruitment problems by promising freedom to enslaved persons who would enlist. But in the South, enslavers opposed recruiting enslaved persons even when military necessity seemed to compel it.

Often enough both British and Americans kept the promises of emancipation made to enslaved persons who enlisted. When the British evacuated New York City in 1783, over three thousand African Americans sailed with them to resettle in Nova Scotia. Boston from South Carolina was among them; he had married another freedom seeker and renamed himself Boston King after his new sovereign. But some promises were broken. Besieged at Yorktown, the British expelled African Americans from the fort, leaving them to the mercy of the Americans camped outside. Recaptured enslaved persons faced violent punishment and the risk of being sold away. George Washington and other planters negotiated the return of their escaped enslaved persons from the British who had harbored them.

The war was not confined to contests over settled regions. Colonists’ desire for frontier land had been one of the underlying sources of antagonism to British policy. Britain’s purpose in establishing the unpopular Proclamation Line of 1763 had been to moderate trans-Appalachian settlement and settler-native conflict (see Chapter 4). When war broke out in 1775, fighting rapidly began in the West, as patriots sought to dislodge British frontier garrisons and seize land to which they had been denied access. Armed settlers and militia pushed into fresh territory, and both British and American combatants did what they had done in previous wars: they sought supporting alliances with Native peoples.

Native peoples, too, pursued familiar strategies, although under new circumstances. With the removal of the French in the early 1760s, Haudenosaunees (Iroquois) had negotiated with the British to protect their lands from colonial incursions, and in the revolutionary war most continued to support Britain as the most likely protector against invasion. A few other nations chose instead to ally with the revolutionaries in the hope that this could spare them from the worst depredations of white settlers. Still others sought to remain neutral, but the toll of conflict and murder drove them to resistance.

Patriots attacked Native peoples' settlements along the frontier, scattering inhabitants, destroying crops, and spreading disease. William Henry Drayton urged South Carolinians to “cut up every Indian cornfield and burn every Indian town and every Indian taken shall be the slave and property of the taker.” Native nations retaliated. In Kentucky, Cherokee warriors resisted an illegal land purchase by attacking settlers, until white counterattacks dispersed them and destroyed their villages. Southern patriot militias attacked Cherokees and Muscogees (Creeks) to prevent them from assisting the British. After enduring for three centuries, the Haudenosaunee Confederacy broke apart. Many followed the Kanien'kehá:ka (Mohawk) leader Thayendanega (Joseph Brant) in supporting the British, but a smaller number allied with the Americans, so that at the battle of Oriskany in 1777 there were Haudenosaunee fighters on both sides. Britain’s Haudenosaunee allies faced repeated attacks. In 1779 patriot troops under General John Sullivan burned forty Haudenosaunee settlements in western New York, destroying crops and driving the population away. Starvation and disease ravaged the refugees.

But patriots attacked even Native allies they wanted to clear from the land. After occupying Kentucky, American forces pressed on into the Ohio country. In 1781 they raided their Delaware and Shawnee allies near Coshocton on the Muskingum River, and the next year attacked a settlement of Moravian converts at Gnadenhütten, killing ninety-six and sending many survivors fleeing to Canada. Such attacks prompted Native nations to form alliances of their own against American incursions as the war drew to a close. The Shawnees and others launched counterattacks and laid the ground for further resistance in subsequent decades.

Even as fighting flared across eastern North America, Americans were forging a republican ideology of revolution. They were trying not just to free themselves from British rule, but also to build a new political order.

Affirming that “all men” were “created equal,” and had “unalienable rights” to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” the Declaration of Independence suggested that proper government rested on universal truths apparent not just to an educated political elite, but to the common sense of all. This was not merely an abstract statement of principle, it was an instrument designed to forge unity across the revolutionary political coalition of farmers, artisans, laborers, enslavers, merchants, and professional men. It indicated that common folk as well as the wealthy and powerful could claim a role in their own self-government. Conflict between elite and popular influences had been evident during the protests of the 1760s and in the period from 1774 to 1776, when the patriot cause was in the hands of extralegal committees (see Chapter 4). These divisions persisted as the new states moved to establish their own permanent governments and constitutions.

Most supporters of the revolution agreed that new American governments should be republican, resting not on the sovereign authority of a monarch, but on “the consent of the governed.” But Americans differed over how democratic their republics should be, and how broadly or directly ordinary people should participate in political affairs.

In Philadelphia’s radical atmosphere early in 1776, Tom Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense sketched a vision of democratic government for the new nation. Confident that people could govern themselves without the artificial distinctions of monarchy or aristocracy, Paine advocated a simple direct democracy. States, and the nation as a whole, would each be governed by an annually elected assembly and headed by a president. Paine’s popularity among the artisans and farmers whom the revolution had aroused ensured that his pamphlet would remain a symbol of this popular democracy. When Jeremiah Greenman’s Rhode Island regiment celebrated the Fourth of July in 1783, its thirteen toasts included “the Congress of 1776 and Common Sense.” Paine’s was the clearest argument that, as another pamphleteer put it, “the people” would make “the best governors.”

The men who came to power in Pennsylvania in 1776 fashioned a state constitution drawing on Paine’s ideas. They created a state legislature with a single chamber, elected annually by all tax-paying adult males, with no property requirements for officeholders. They lodged executive power not in a “governor”—connoting arbitrary, royal power—but in a president and council who served the legislature. Except on “occasions of special necessity,” bills that came before the legislature would be “printed for the consideration of the people” before becoming law. Paine helped inspire patriots who were radical both in their support for independence and in their desire to form a democratic, egalitarian political system. From 1776 to 1790 Pennsylvanians governed themselves on these principles, designed to keep government under the close scrutiny of the people.

Elsewhere, too, people felt exhilarated at the notion of abandoning old ways. Vermont’s Green Mountain Boys spearheaded their own local revolution, declaring independence from New York in 1777 and establishing Vermont as a separate republic. Their constitution, inspired by Pennsylvania’s, set up a direct democracy that continued to operate after Vermont joined the United States in 1791. Georgia also established a single-chamber legislature, while Delaware, New Hampshire, and South Carolina adopted the democratic title “president” for their chief executives. Farmers and tradesmen replaced some wealthy men in the legislatures. Before 1775, only one-sixth of New Hampshire, New Jersey, and New York assemblymen were of modest means; by the 1780s over three-fifths of them were. Even the Virginia legislature was, according to an observer, “composed of men not quite so well dressed, nor so politely educated, nor so highly born as . . . formerly.”

But there were limits to this democratic thrust. Some Americans feared the possibilities of democracy. John Adams of Massachusetts was as keen as Paine for independence, but his vision of government was more conservative. Published in 1776 as a counter to Paine’s Common Sense, Adams’s Thoughts on Government argued that it was impossible to govern without “balanced” institutions that gave elites a voice alongside that of the people. Legislatures should have two chambers, not one, so that the members of the upper house could counter the influence of the citizenry represented in the lower. The issue was social as much as political. Who should rule: the “better sort,” who had long held sway, or the artisans, farmers, and small traders for whom Paine had spoken? Adams was a republican, but he envisaged a republican society based on hierarchy and order.

Virginia, Maryland, New York, and Massachusetts formed governments that were closer to Adams’s conception than to Paine’s. The Virginia gentry adopted a constitution that preserved their political control. Maryland’s planter class, frightened by the revolution’s democratic implications, fashioned a constitution that put as much distance as possible between ordinary people and their rulers. It prescribed stiff property requirements for voting, stiffer ones for holding office, and long intervals between elections. The New York constitution created a state senate intended to represent property, not people, and a strong governor, who was independent of the legislature, not its servant. Massachusetts followed suit.

During the war and its aftermath, the states remained substantially independent of one another. Each sent representatives to the Continental Congress, which oversaw the war’s conduct and constructed a rudimentary government for the new United States. In 1777 Congress put forward a framework for a national government: the Articles of Confederation. Many states accepted this quickly, but others were skeptical of signing away powers to a distant government. There was disagreement on whether western lands should be assigned to the federal government. Only reluctantly did some states with land claims across the Appalachian mountains begin to give them up. As a result, it was 1781 before the Articles went into effect.

The Articles preserved the sovereignty of the states and held a tight rein on federal government. The states’ annually elected delegations to Congress varied in size, but each state had only a single vote. Congress could create executive departments, but these remained under its direct control. To become law, its decisions required the support of a majority of states, but amendments to the Articles had to be unanimous. Above all, Congress had no independent power to levy taxes. For its expenditures—including financing the war—it had to rely on requisitions from the states, which might or might not provide them. To many Americans these provisions gave assurance that no federal government could exercise a tyranny of the sort that they had feared from Britain, and that power would lie with the states and their people. To some, however, the Articles of Confederation seemed weak and ineffectual, and advocates of stronger national government soon challenged them.

In addition to debating how democratic government should be, the revolutionary coalition was also divided over economic problems. Wartime inflation, shortages, property damage, loss of life, and the disruption of farming, trade, and manufacturing created severe difficulties. The war’s end brought depression and glut, as goods that people could not afford went unsold. Production declined sharply. It would be a quarter century before America’s output per head of population regained its pre-revolutionary level. Circumstances trapped many of the poor and middling in conditions that they could do little to influence.

Congress and most state governments had financed their war contributions by printing ever-larger quantities of paper money. The result was the worst inflation America had ever known. Many turned to traditional concepts of social responsibility and justice, arguing that in a good society public interest should come before private gain. If supplies were scarce, they suspected “hoarders” of holding them back for profit. If prices rose, they blamed “speculators.” Crowds, often made up of women, used the rituals of popular price setting to fight wartime inflation. In Fishkill, New York, in August 1776, a group of women formed a committee to confront a prominent merchant who was refusing to sell from his stock of tea. Appointing a “clerk” and a “weigher,” the women measured out the tea, announced that they would pay “the continental price” for it, and then gave the money to the local county committee. By the late 1770s, inflation was so severe that people revived their revolutionary committees. When the price of bread rose in Philadelphia during the winter of 1778–1779, an advocate of crowd action to regulate prices warned merchants and bakers that “Hunger will break through stone walls, and the resentment excited by it may end in your destruction.”

Not everyone, however, favored price regulation by committee. In 1776 the Scottish political economist Adam Smith had published The Wealth of Nations, his famous argument in favor of free markets. By 1779 American critics of regulation, including Tom Paine himself, suggested that free markets could be liberating and need not lead to the rich trampling the poor. The city’s tanners attacked the committee revival and declared that trade ought to be “as free as air, uninterrupted as the tide.” At the height of the crisis in Philadelphia, a militia armed by merchants faced down crowds seeking price controls and broke the power of their movement. Knowing that to get what they wanted they would need to be organized as a political force, Philadelphia merchants and artisans began to gather into a “Republican society” to oppose the state’s radical constitution and promote free trade.

At first advocates of free markets accomplished little, because many states followed policies dictated by popular wishes: issuing paper currency, making it legal tender for the payment of taxes and private debts, and giving debtors relief from lawsuits by their creditors. New York also confiscated the estates of loyalists and redistributed them. Even Maryland’s elite, which virtually monopolized political office, recognized “the wisdom of sacrifice” and gave in to popular demands.

In Massachusetts, however, the advocates of hard currency, free trade, and balanced political institutions held sway, with disastrous results for farmers in the interior who faced heavy debts. It took the state until 1780 to adopt its constitution, and commercial men then dominated the government. They ensured that Massachusetts adopted strict policies on money and debt. Paper currency was not acknowledged as legal tender, and debtors received no protection from their creditors, regardless of whether these were patriots, loyalists, or British.

Upon peace with Britain in 1783, American ports reopened to British commerce, unleashing a burst of consumption as people with money craved goods that had been unavailable during the war. But this boom soon reversed, into a trading slump that lasted for three years. British creditors called in debts from American merchants, who in turn demanded payment from cash poor rural traders and customers. In most states the law would have given debtors some protection, but not in Massachusetts. Here farmers, artisans, and small traders were expected to pay both their debts and their taxes in cash, which they did not have. They saw the public good sacrificed to privilege. As the people of Dracut protested, “Money . . . seems to have . . . hid itself in the secret confines of those who have a greater love to their own Interest than they have to that of their Neighbours.” As in the past, the fear that they would lose their property and be reduced to the status of tenants or hired laborers haunted them. When creditors brought lawsuits and defendants began to crowd the courts and debtors’ prisons, popular fears became real.

People again took traditional steps to relieve their burden, producing an uprising in interior Massachusetts in 1786 that became known as Shays’s Rebellion, after one of its leaders, Daniel Shays, a former captain in the Continental Army. Having formed committees and conventions to oppose the government’s policies, farmers gathered under arms to close the courts and prevent lawsuits being heard. In concert with Boston radicals such as Samuel Adams, they had done the same in 1774 in response to the Coercive Acts. Now they found themselves pitted against some of these same radicals, including Adams, who controlled the state government in alliance with conservative merchants. Adams defended the law and the courts as agents of a constitution adopted by the people and as necessary to preserve commerce.

To disperse the rebels and restore the courts, the Boston government sent General Benjamin Lincoln and a well-organized militia force to the west. When Shays and his armed farmers mounted an ill-coordinated assault on the federal armory at Springfield, local militia scattered them. Lincoln’s army then chased them into the hills and captured many in a surprise attack. Shays and others fled into exile in neighboring states. Four rebel leaders were captured, tried, and condemned to death for treason. The government mounted a theatrical display of judicial terror. At the trial Chief Justice William Cushing berated the rebels for trying “to overturn all government and order, to shake off all restraints, human and divine.” Just as they were about to be hanged, the governor reprieved them in a public show of mercy. These methods worked as intended. Individuals and whole towns begged forgiveness for rebelling. “‘Tis true that I have been a committee-man,” wrote one, but “I am sincerely sorry . . . and hope it will be overlooked and pardoned.”

This defeat at the hands of men who had been their revolutionary allies taught Shaysites and their sympathizers a lesson about the politics of the new republic. The old notion that small communities could defend themselves against outsiders no longer applied when the government itself was theoretically of the people. To overturn policies that they resented, people with common interests would have to organize themselves and formally enter the political arena. Almost immediately Massachusetts farmers did just that. In the 1787 state elections, they unseated the hard-money governor James Bowdoin and replaced him with the popular John Hancock. New men, many from western towns that for years had not bothered to send delegates, flooded into the legislature. Symbolically, at least, the elite made concessions to ordinary peoples’ demands. Never again would the state’s government allow debtors to be hounded with the ruthlessness that had been evident in the mid 1780s.

The revolution raised more questions about equality and human rights than it answered. Prominent among these was slavery. White colonists had proudly borne the status of “freeborn Englishmen” that distinguished them from enslaved persons, and patriots’ chief grievance against Britain was that the Crown seemed bent on reducing them to political slavery. To many of them there was no contradiction between the patriot cause and being an enslaver; having property in other human beings was simply a fact of life. But British and loyalist commentators were quick to condemn American revolutionaries who complained of enslavement but were complicit in slavery itself. For some enslavers, including Washington and Jefferson, slavery was a problem they agonized over, but could not resolve. When Jefferson included in an early draft of the Declaration of Independence a clause condemning the King for conducting the slave trade, other members of Congress struck it out as an embarrassing hypocrisy.

Nevertheless, the Revolution did alter American slavery. In the North, an increasing number of people opposed slavery on principle. The Vermont constitution outlawed it. One New Yorker condemned slavery as “cruelty in the extreme” and “the severest reproach” to the new nation. Notables such as Alexander Hamilton manumitted (released) enslaved persons they had acquired, and helped found organizations such as the New York Manumission Society to promote the abandonment of slavery. In Massachusetts, several enslaved persons brought lawsuits, and the case of Quok Walker struck a heavy blow against slavery. Walker had declared his own freedom in 1781, and then sued his enslaver for wages, and for damages for the assault and imprisonment he had endured when the man recaptured and beat him. Chief Justice Cushing, the judge who would later condemn the Shays rebels, ruled in 1783 that Walker’s enslavement violated the declaration of Massachusetts’ new constitution that “all men are born free and equal.” This effectively abolished slavery in the state. New Hampshire soon followed suit.

However, abolition was embraced only where economic circumstances permitted. Although declining, slavery did remain important in other northern states, and was dismantled only slowly. Starting with Pennsylvania in 1780 and ending with New Jersey in 1804, these states passed abolition laws that bound the children of existing enslaved persons to labor until they were adults. In the resulting “gradual” abolition, New Jersey’s last enslaved person was not freed until 1846, and Pennsylvania’s not until 1847. After the Revolution, the number of enslaved persons throughout the North fell from the fifty thousand who had lived there in 1775; but in 1810 there were still twenty-seven thousand northern enslaved persons working in craft occupations, as laborers, or as domestic servants.

In the upper South, a shift from tobacco to grain cultivation reduced the demand for plantation slave labor, and the number of manumissions rose. In Virginia, about ten thousand enslaved persons obtained freedom in the decade after 1782. Some enslavers freed their enslaved persons on principle, because it violated “the inalienable rights of mankind,” or was “contrary to the command of Christ.” But many enslaved persons had to purchase their freedom with their own earnings or those of relatives. Graham Bell of Petersburg, Virginia, obtained his liberty in 1792, and then spent the next thirteen years working to buy the freedom of another nine enslaved persons. Before independence free Black people were rare, but by 1820 their numbers exceeded two hundred thousand. Where plantation agriculture remained strong, however, freedom was hardest to achieve. In the lower South only four percent of African Americans were free by 1810, compared with ten percent in the upper South.

For women, too, the rhetoric of revolution seemed to raise new possibilities for freedom. A Rhode Island woman declared that “The Women of this State are Animated with the Liveliest Sentiments of Liberty.” Women had been heavily involved in the war effort, had run farms, shops, and businesses when men went to fight or were killed, and had undertaken extra manufacturing work that helped America to achieve a degree of economic autonomy. In protest movements and food riots, women carried forward the campaigns for price regulation that dominated wartime politics. For perhaps the first time, women had formed public organizations, to raise funds for soldiers and similar purposes. “America will not wear chains,” wrote Abigail Adams, “while her daughters are virtuous.”

Revolutionary ideals led some women to question the subordination that their mothers and grandmothers had taken for granted. Elite women discussed politics and called for improved education. In parts of the North the proportion of women who could read and write rose toward the high level already attained by men. A small number of women used more liberal divorce statutes to free themselves from oppressive marriages. In 1788 Abigail Strong of Connecticut noted in her divorce petition that if “even Kings may forfeit . . . the allegiance of their subjects,” husbands could not command unconditional control over their wives.

In practice, however, the Revolution little altered women’s social position. Many regarded women’s proper role in the new republic as raising and educating good republican citizens. Abigail Adams could urge her husband and his colleagues to “remember the ladies” in their political deliberations, but men were not prepared to overturn institutions that served their interests. “We know better,” John Adams replied to his wife, “than to repeal our masculine systems.” Only in one state, New Jersey, did any women achieve political rights. Free, propertied women could vote in local elections there in the 1780s, and a 1790 state election law referred to voters as “he or she.” These rights would soon be abolished, however.

Nevertheless, although the actual opportunities available to them were often restricted, the Revolution encouraged many people—men and women; rich, middling, and poor; Black and white—to think it possible to take greater control of their circumstances. Merchants and some farmers gained greater access to commercial markets. The confiscation of loyalists’ property and the opening of vast new western territories gave more farmers access to land. This vision of taking control further undermined older colonial concepts of deference. In 1788 an elderly New Hampshire congressman complained that now “young and old all mix together, & talk & joke alike so that you cannot discover any distinction made or any respect shewn to one more than to another.” Some Americans saw the possibility of taking control of their societies, even at the risk of conflict with those whose interests differed from their own.

Members of the elite saw too much democracy as dangerous. In 1787, only months after the suppression of Shays’s Rebellion, a group of delegates drawn from the elites of the thirteen states met in a special convention at Philadelphia. Its ostensible purpose was to revise the Articles of Confederation, but it quickly resolved to scrap them altogether and to draw up a new framework for government. The result was the United States Constitution, which sought to put a conservative curb on America’s political development. After special conventions in nine states had ratified it, this Constitution went into effect in 1788, and the remaining four states joined the union within two years. The adoption of the Constitution marked the completion of the political revolution, and took a step away from the Revolution’s most radical possibilities.

Most members of the Philadelphia convention were merchants, lawyers, landholders, or southern planters. They included Robert Morris of Philadelphia, the “financier” of the Revolution, whose land speculations would soon make him America’s richest man; New York’s Alexander Hamilton, who had risen from obscurity to be George Washington’s aide-de-camp, marry into the New York landed elite, and wield influence as a lawyer, essayist, and politician; and James Madison of Virginia, who had already written a private essay on “The Vices of the Political System of the United States,” which outlined many of the changes that the Constitution would make. George Washington himself chaired the convention.

Delegates had been at the Revolution’s center, as army officers, traders and suppliers, members of Congress, or ambassadors. They had experienced the difficulties of organizing the war, been repeatedly embarrassed by America’s inability to deal straightforwardly with foreign nations, and watched states ignore provisions in the peace treaty, such as its promise to end the harassment of loyalists. They had protested in vain when states passed laws that they saw as heedless of the interests of creditors and damaging to the international reputation of American traders, and been horrified at the threat posed by Shays’s Rebellion in the one state that had refused to pass such laws.

The radical democratic possibilities of the Revolution subverted what they considered to be good government. They were republicans, believing that government must rest on the people’s consent, but had little faith that ordinary people could run society well. Most held that government should be conducted by “the best men”—those fitted by birth, education, and sober political principle to govern wisely. Since 1782 Hamilton and others who called themselves “nationalists” had been arguing for a strong central government run by men “whose principles are not of the leveling sort.” In New York, Hamilton had forged an alliance of landlords and merchants to end the political dominance of a coalition of farmers and artisans.

The Constitution that emerged from the Philadelphia convention strengthened national government and the position of propertied elites. However, it also reflected compromises between conflicting elite interests, and between the elite views of government and the popular demands for participation that the revolutionary process had generated.

The convention was seeking a new understanding of republicanism, because in eighteenth-century thinking the American effort to establish republics seemed unhopeful. The examples of classical Greece and Rome suggested that republics could succeed only in special circumstances, when they were small in size and population, bound by a single economic interest, and with virtuous people who would put the common good above private interests. Most republics had, in fact, collapsed or turned into tyrannies. Now Americans were establishing republican governments in large, varied societies that seemed the very opposite of ideal for the purpose. The rebellion in Massachusetts seemed to confirm to the men who met in Philadelphia that republicanism in America might prove another failure.

But some took a new point of departure, which James Madison expressed in the tenth and fifty-first of the Federalist papers that he, Hamilton, and the New Yorker John Jay published in 1788, during the campaign to ratify the Constitution. Instead of a small republic, Madison saw the potential of a large one; instead of a single, virtuous public interest he envisaged the jostling and competing of many private interests. If the arena were large enough, he argued, no single interest would become so powerful as to oppress the others. “Extend the sphere,” he wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority . . . will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens.” This breakthrough in political thought guided the Philadelphia convention to its first solution to the American situation: create a large republic that would dwarf any previous attempt to live without a monarch.

The second solution was to establish a stronger government than had existed under the Articles of Confederation. The Confederation had succeeded in winning the war and negotiating a favorable peace, but it could not pay its debts, enforce the terms of the peace treaty, or resolve disputes between states. Lacking the power to tax, an executive to do its will, or courts to enforce laws and treaties, Federal government relied entirely on the will of the states.

Although many Americans regarded these circumstances as acceptable, even essential, in a republic, the delegates at Philadelphia saw them as weaknesses, and designed the new Constitution to rectify them. They erected a set of balances and compromises that would enable a new federal government to be built on top of the existing social and political institutions in the various states. One compromise was to leave the states themselves intact. Hamilton and Madison would have gladly reduced states to simple administrative units, but the system of “dual federalism” that emerged made both federal and state governments the legal creatures of the people, who were the real sovereign power. Resolving what Madison regarded as the greatest difficulty, that of representation, the convention adopted the proposal that Congress’s single chamber be replaced by two houses: a Senate in which all states would be equally represented, and a House of Representatives in which representation would be based proportionally on population.

But vexing questions remained concerning the relationships between the central government, the separate states, and American society as a whole. These issues arose in several forms at the convention; it resolved, for instance, that entitlement to vote in Federal elections would be governed by the laws of individual states, rather than by nationwide rules. Nothing was more difficult than the differences that emerged between northern and southern states over slavery. Though some southerners, including Washington, had qualms about slavery, most planters did not question its legitimacy or the concept of human property. Still, the fact that enslaved persons were both people and chattels presented unavoidable problems.

Should enslaved persons be counted as part of the southern states’ populations for the purpose of deciding the size of delegations to the House of Representatives? Southern delegates, including Madison, wanted to have it both ways. Enslaved persons would not, of course, be entitled to vote, but counting them into the population would significantly increase southern political influence. Northerners saw through this ploy. Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania pointed out that slavery was just one special interest, and that if it won representation, other special interests should as well. Other delegates agreed. The outcome was a compromise, the first of many between North and South. Enslaved persons would be counted for political representation, but not fully. By the “three-fifths clause” five enslaved persons would count as three free persons.

Other compromises followed. While the convention was sitting, the Continental Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance, containing a clause banning slavery from the western territories north of the Ohio River. But the Constitution embodied two further concessions to southerners: that Congress could not consider a ban on the international slave trade before 1808, and a clause that obliged states to return freedom seekers to their enslavers. Although it did not use the word slavery, the Constitution gave slavery legal standing at a time when many Americans were questioning its legitimacy.

As the Constitution bowed to the requirements of southern planters, it also suited the needs of northern commerce. It created a vast common market, regarding uniform laws and the needs of long-distance trade as more important than local custom or the needs of particular communities. States would be restricted from erecting trade barriers against each others’ goods. In addition to certain powers to tax, Congress would be able to regulate interstate and foreign commerce, establish a uniform bankruptcy law, mint coin, regulate money, “fix the standard of Weights and Measures,” register patents and copyrights, and create a postal service. Each state would be obliged to give “full faith and credit” to court decisions made in other states. States were forbidden to “emit Bills of Credit, make anything but Gold or Silver Coin a Tender in Payment of Debts,” or “pass any . . . Law impairing the obligation of Contracts.” The framers would not allow the problems of the mid 1780s, when many states protected insolvent debtors against their creditors, to recur.

Why don’t American voters directly elect their president and vice president?

The Constitution was written by elites to address their own interests, but it also proved to have popular appeal, largely because it was grounded in the sovereignty of the people. Popular support for the Constitution for it was essential. It would go into effect only when elected conventions in nine states ratified it, so the election of sufficient delegates who favored it was necessary for its success. There was powerful opposition. Two states refused to ratify the Constitution, and in four others the contest was extremely close. State politicians who feared loss of influence joined many popular radicals, who distrusted the schemes of those who had met in Philadelphia, in an effort to prevent ratification. As the Constitution’s advocates started to call themselves “Federalists,” their opponents became known as Anti-Federalists.

The New York Anti-Federalist leader Melancton Smith feared that the Constitution would create a government of “the few and the great,” and exclude “those of the middling class of life” whom the revolution had brought into politics. Farmers in the interior, notably from areas with a history of rural unrest, voiced the strongest opposition. In some states only clever political maneuvering overrode their influence. Pennsylvania leaders called that state’s ratification convention at short notice, preventing the backcountry from organizing its opposition. In the New York convention, Anti-Federalists won a massive majority, but strong support from New York City Federalists, and their threat that the city would secede and ratify the Constitution on its own, persuaded the rest of the state to consent.

Citizens in the major towns, indeed, overwhelmingly supported the Constitution. Working people, especially artisans, saw in strong national government their best chance for regular employment and markets for their products. They had little hand in drafting the Constitution but in Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, as well as in New York, they played a key role in getting it ratified.

In Massachusetts the fight over ratification was critical, for failure to ratify there might defeat the Constitution altogether. When the ratifying convention met in January 1788, the state was still deeply divided after Shays’s Rebellion. Delegates from the Massachusetts interior, aware that the Constitution would threaten the power of community solidarity on which their rebellion had been based, strongly opposed ratification. But Boston artisans wanted the Constitution. Paul Revere presided over a meeting of four hundred of them who gathered to persuade the other delegates to vote in favor of ratification, and the convention did so.

In what a newspaper called “an exhibition to which America has never witnessed an equal,” Boston artisans celebrated the news with a parade in which forty different groups of tradesmen marched. Similar parades were held in other states as they too voted to ratify. The biggest, in Philadelphia on July 4, 1788, included eighty-six units in its line of march, and reflected the coalition of elites and working men that had achieved ratification in Pennsylvania. Elaborate floats carried men and women working at their trades and symbols of what artisans thought the Revolution had achieved. One depicted the “New Roof” or “Grand Federal Edifice” that the Constitution would erect over the states and was followed by members of the city’s construction trades. Another, the Federal Ship Union, with a crew of twenty-five, was followed by pilots, boatbuilders, sailmakers, ship carpenters, ropemakers, merchants, and traders. Beneath the motto “By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand,” blacksmiths beat swords into sickles and plowshares, symbolically demonstrating that the skills of peace had superseded those of war.

Although urban and elite support ratified the Constitution, the margin of victory was narrow. At the Philadelphia convention, George Mason of Virginia had called for a Bill of Rights as a check against the creation of an excessively powerful federal government, but most of the framers had thought it unnecessary and delegates from every state voted against him. In state ratifying conventions, however, Anti-Federalists exerted strong pressure for a Bill of Rights and ratification in five states (including Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia) occurred on the understanding that a Bill of Rights would quickly follow. Federalist leaders acceded to popular demand. Under Madison’s leadership, Congress drafted constitutional amendments suggested by the state conventions. Ten of these, known as the Bill of Rights, were finally ratified and appended to the Constitution late in 1791.

The Bill of Rights addressed issues raised in the 1760s resistance to Britain and in the experience of revolution. The first amendment guaranteed freedom of speech, the press, religion, and assembly. Others guaranteed the right to petition government for redress of grievances, to trial by jury, and to the “due process of law,” and protected citizens from unwarranted searches and seizures or “cruel or unusual” punishments. To establish local militias, and so avoid the need for a standing army, the Second Amendment guaranteed the right to bear arms. These were weak versions of the protections that Anti-Federalists wanted against strong government. In practice the Bill of Rights played little part in American politics for decades to come. It did not settle the perpetual issue of the relationship between federal and state governments. Its provisions, moreover, concerned property as well as people. Indeed, the new constitutional arrangements fulfilled a double-edged purpose. They protected individuals, but they also protected privileges—such as the enslavement of persons—that accompanied wealth.

The adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights did not end the debates about who should rule and who should benefit from the new social and political order. The tension between elite presumptions and popular pressure that had marked the revolutionary struggle continued to shape the politics of the early American republic.

To northern merchants and traders the Constitution was a necessary underpinning for commercial wealth and their own class advantage. For southern planters, it became a bulwark for the perpetuation of slavery. For urban artisans, the powers of the new federal government could encourage their crafts to flourish. Even small farmers, initially opposed to the Constitution, soon learned that the federal system made possible a society in which people could organize around their own common interests.

The first federal administration, with George Washington as president, took office in 1789, assuming that consensus over the Constitution could achieve political unity. Washington had been chosen by acclamation, and despite Madison’s theoretical endorsement of competition between conflicting interests, most Americans still believed that republican government was best secured by political harmony that factional or party divisions would undermine. But congressmen, like most state legislators, were elected by the people, and Senators were appointed by state legislatures. It was inevitable that such choices would come to be contested.

The 1790s saw increasing factional strife. Washington’s own administration was divided between men such as Jefferson and Madison, who were suspicious of strong central power, and those such as Hamilton, who favored it. Differences over commercial policy and foreign affairs became focused on France, and on the French Revolution that had begun in 1789 and moved in an increasingly radical direction until 1794. Hamilton and commercial elites, who continued to identify themselves as Federalists, rejected France’s radical democracy and instead advocated trading agreements with Britain. Jefferson, with support among planters, small farmers, and urban workingmen, stood at the center of a political opposition to the Federalists that had started to organize in “Democratic-Republican” clubs, and advocated alliance with France against Britain. Among the Jeffersonians’ supporters were many who, as Anti-federalists, had once opposed the ratification of the Constitution in the first place.

Although the emerging political parties each drew supporters from across society, Federalists argued for rule by the “best men,” Democratic-Republicans for a more popular democracy. This division produced great drama and paranoia after war broke out between Britain and France in 1793. The United States declared its neutrality in the war, and its merchants and ship owners profited greatly by trading with both sides. But America’s relative military and naval weakness also made it vulnerable to pressure, or even the risk of attack, by one of the European powers. To Federalists in government, the presence of a political opposition seemed a threat to the republic’s continued existence.

Divisions over foreign policy accompanied domestic conflict. The parties divided particularly over financial policy. As secretary of the treasury, Hamilton produced plans to resolve the financial problems that remained from the Revolution and tie the nation’s wealthy elites more tightly to the new political system. The federal government would assume the debts of the states, and would pay its debts at the full face value of the paper notes that had been issued to pay for war supplies or soldiers’ wages. The policy would mean levying federal taxes and import duties. However, Hamilton’s plan was not to pay off the debts. By retaining a national debt, he would encourage those with means to invest in federal bonds and notes on which interest would be paid. The Federalist administration also organized a Bank of the United States to handle the government’s transactions and so help influence the financial system.

Jeffersonians scorned the “large monied interest” that this funding scheme and the Bank of the United States would create, condemning Hamilton’s measures as socially unjust and an excessive extension of federal power. Thousands of revolutionary soldiers who had been paid in paper money or land certificates had been forced by necessity to sell them at heavily discounted prices, often to wealthy speculators. Under Hamilton’s plan the government would pay the speculators the full value of the paper, using the tax revenues collected from ordinary Americans.

Disputes over taxation also provoked protest in rural regions. A federal liquor tax provoked riots by armed farmers in western Pennsylvania who had not forgotten their opposition to ratifying the Constitution. Protesters attacked revenue officers and a crowd of seven thousand set fire to the then-new town of Pittsburgh. In 1794, Washington dispatched an army of fifteen thousand men under Hamilton’s command to hunt down these so-called “Whiskey Rebels,” but they had dispersed and could not be found. Another small uprising in Pennsylvania in 1798, provoked by a direct federal tax on houses and other property, added to a sense of panic in the administration of John Adams, who was elected president in 1796. Federalists so feared opposition that when a naval war broke out with France in that year they used their majority in Congress to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, severely curtailing free political expression. Critics of the government were prosecuted for seditious speech or writings, but their trials mainly exposed the Federalists themselves to ridicule. The republican congressman Matthew Lyon of Vermont, imprisoned for accusing the administration of incompetence, got the satisfaction of being re-elected while he was in jail. The Federalists’ attempts at repression hastened the turning of the political tide against them, and led to a sound defeat in the 1800 elections that secured Jefferson the presidency.

The election of 1800 marked another step in the erosion of social deference that had begun in the 1760s during the protests against British rule. Jefferson saw his election as a victory in the battle between “the advocates of republican and those of kingly government.” Colonists had been subjects of a monarch who sat at the apex of a social hierarchy. Because of the Revolution, working people could see themselves as equal participants in a social order in which they were sovereign. People were increasingly reluctant to view the wealthy or well-born as their social betters, or as entitled to power or influence. No man, declared a Massachusetts farmer, deserves “any degree or spark of . . . a right of dominion, government, and jurisdiction over [an]other.” 

Participating in Fourth of July celebrations every year, farmers, artisans, and other workingmen could mark both their identity as members of a trade and their position as equal citizens of the republic. In New York, patriotic contingents paraded behind the banner of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen. Like similar groups in Boston, Albany, Providence, Portsmouth, Charleston, and Savannah, New York’s General Society was composed mainly of master craftsmen, but sought to promote the common interest of all artisans, and to foster “a general harmony . . . throughout the whole manufacturing interest of the country.” Masters claimed responsibility for the journeymen and apprentices in their workshops who, they assumed, could in time become masters themselves. Artisans and others claimed equal rights with the elites who dominated politics. Fourth of July speakers emphasized civic equality. As a Pennsylvanian put it, “no man has greater claim of special privilege for his hundred thousand dollars than I have for my five dollars.”

Even so, republican theory did not accord full citizenship and access to politics to everyone. It reserved them for those deemed personally “independent,” capable of acting without reliance on others, and whose “disinterestedness” could guarantee the republic against corrupt manipulation. Most states restricted the right to vote to white men with property or taxable income, so the great majority of people—some eighty percent in the 1780s—were excluded from public life. Most poor laboring men could not vote, because lack of property or status as servants disqualified them. Most women and people of color were excluded because of their gender, race, or status as wives or enslaved persons. All were said to be “dependents,” unable to exercise their own judgment. For these groups the revolutionary era raised possibilities of freedom that were only inadequately fulfilled.

Democratic-Republicans’ attacks on Federalist privilege did continue the Revolution’s democratizing tendencies into the nineteenth century. The Jefferson administration abolished federal direct taxes and opened up access to western land. After 1800, many states abolished property qualifications for voting, opening the franchise to all adult white men; by 1830 all but three had done so. Participation in elections soared. But including all white men in politics still meant excluding others. The law of 1807 that abolished New Jersey’s property qualification also abolished the limited voting rights of the state’s women.

For many African Americans, the Revolution produced only limited or temporary hope of liberty. The Constitution represented a major blow to enslaved persons’ and many free Black people's hopes of freedom. It did nothing to interfere with state rules that disenfranchised most free Black people on grounds of color or poverty. The three-fifths clause, the guarantee of property rights, and the fugitive-slave law lent renewed legitimacy to slavery. The protections of the Bill of Rights offered nothing to enslaved persons, who were not regarded as citizens in the first place. Although the Revolution enabled some to emancipate themselves, it also paved the way for economic developments that would enslave many more.

Nevertheless, the revolutionary period provided ideological markers for African Americans and their supporters as they struggled for emancipation. The possibility of revolution, itself a new ingredient, was especially charged by events in St. Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, when enslaved persons rebelled, toppled the French colonial government, seized power, and defended their new republic against repeated efforts to destroy it. The insurrection in St. Domingue struck fear into the hearts of enslavers across the New World, and may have emboldened some American enslaved persons to attempt rebellion. At his trial for plotting insurrection in Richmond, Virginia, in 1800, the slave blacksmith Gabriel was alleged to have declared that “we have as good a right to be free from your oppression, as you had to be free from the tyranny of the King of England.”

A renewed evangelical movement that would become known as the Second Great Awakening emphasized the equal brotherhood of believers. Yet this was tempered by a growing white racism. Churches that, in the late colonial period, had included white and Black members, began in the 1790s to erect racial barriers. Black Methodists in Philadelphia, for example, withdrew from a church they had just helped rebuild in 1792 when the elders insisted that they occupy segregated seating. Such episodes reinforced the efforts of African Americans, both enslaved and free, to organize institutions of their own. In northern towns, freedpeople built families and neighborhoods, made their own styles of dress and deportment, founded their own churches and schools, and formed voluntary associations such as the African Union Society of Newport, Rhode Island, and the Free African Society of Philadelphia.

Even for whites who had the benefits of citizenship, the Revolution’s legacy was mixed. Inequalities of wealth widened during the Revolution, and even the economic revival of the 1790s distributed the benefits of prosperity unevenly. Of Philadelphia’s journeymen shoemakers, only about half were able to set up as masters with shops of their own during the decade; among tailors the proportion was just one in ten. A young woman, Polly Nugent, had been a servant of the city’s wealthy Drinker family before she married a blacksmith. By 1796 her husband was facing hard times, and Polly had to turn to her old employers for financial assistance. Revolution may have unleashed opportunity for many, but it also meant disappointment for others.

Yet creating an independent United States out of a disparate group of British colonies and erecting a federal system of republican governments based on popular sovereignty were in themselves massive changes. The Revolution also altered the balance of power on the North American continent, profoundly affecting the peoples in the territory to the west of the United States, and in the Americas in general. An independent United States had, furthermore, to negotiate its standing as a trading nation and diplomatic entity among the European powers, which continued their struggles with one another and their efforts to exercise influence over the new American republic.

The Revolutionary War and creation of the United States brought more sweeping and permanent change to North America than any previous war. American independence curbed British power on the continent, but did not extinguish it. Now, however, a people with material interest in the remainder of America were rooted in the continent itself, so U.S. influence over the continent would be stronger than that of any previous power.

Spanish lands still girdled North America’s southern and western margins after 1763, from Louisiana to Texas and New Mexico, and Florida would return to Spanish control twenty years later. Political reforms in Spain produced new efforts to regulate its New World colonies; one consequence was the decision in 1768 to occupy present-day California, partly to counter Russian activity on the Pacific coast.

Spanish California, formed by the building of missions as well as military and civil institutions, developed characteristics similar to earlier conquests. California’s Native nations, who lived mainly in small, decentralized groups unused to war, were in a poor position to resist Spanish encroachments. But the invaders’ efforts to extract labor, punishments for infractions, and the sexual violence against Native women sparked retaliation. In 1775 local Paipais attacked and burned the mission at San Diego, killing its priest. Other rebellions followed. Even the Spanish governor declared the condition of Native peoples at the missions to be “worse than that of slaves.” Like previous peoples subject to invasion, California’s Native peoples fell victim to European diseases. The coastal region’s population of about sixty thousand in 1769 had been reduced to thirty-five thousand by 1800. Meanwhile, there had been no great rush of Hispanic settlers to California, with fewer than one thousand in 1790, and about eighteen hundred ten years later.

The uneasy balance between Hispanic and Native American societies in New Mexico, established after the conflicts of the seventeenth century, continued. Florida settlements remained small and interfered little with Native nations in the interior. Altogether, Spanish society in North America’s borderlands still remained marginal to the larger interests of Spain and its empire. This was evident after 1800, when it became known that Spain had secretly traded back to France the territory of Louisiana and its vast land holdings in the Mississippi valley. Control of the great river could have made Louisiana the nucleus of a North American commercial empire, but instead Spain found the region an encumbrance.

The United States soon benefited from Spain’s decision to relinquish Louisiana. France was now in no position to exploit the territory. The revolution in St. Domingue had shaken France’s hold on the Caribbean, and disease had ravaged a large army sent to reconquer the island. The French ruler Napoleon, fighting wars in Europe and the Middle East, no longer had use for Louisiana, and in 1803 he sold the whole territory to the American government for fifteen million dollars. With the Louisiana Purchase, the United States in a single stroke acquired a claim to land from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains, roughly doubling its land area.

External events and internal rebellions soon crippled Spain’s American empire. Many factors fed aspirations for Latin American political independence: long-standing tensions between colonial-born criollos and Spanish-born peninsulares; administrative reforms; tax revolts; warfare; and the example of a successful rebellion in North America. In 1808, Napoleon sent French armies to conquer Spain itself. As the empire’s center tottered, uprisings erupted from Mexico to Argentina, setting off protracted revolutionary struggles between nationalists and royalists. In consequence, most of mainland Spanish America seized independence from Spain in the years around 1820, forming a chain of new post-colonial republics.

North Americans welcomed this advance of republicanism against monarchy. But their intentions were not wholly benign. In 1819, after American settlers and fighters had entered Florida, the United States took advantage of the chaos in the Spanish empire to annex it. When Mexico gained its independence in 1821, assuming control of Spanish territories in California, Texas, and the Southwest, some Americans saw this as another opportunity to gain more land for themselves. Struggles over Mexico’s North American territories would dominate American politics in the 1830s and 1840s.

Meanwhile, between the Appalachians and the Mississippi, the American Revolution had begun to make Native peoples strangers in their own land. Native Americans were largely missing from the new constitutional provisions, state or federal, in the U.S.A. Unlike most Indigenous peoples in Central and South America, who were regarded as subjects of Spain, and then citizens of newly independent republics, Native people in North America were excluded from U.S. citizenship, and their nations treated as separate foreign nations.

The 1783 peace with Britain opened up access to lands across the Appalachians that settlers had been seeking for decades. The American government quickly assumed control of land distribution in the West. Congressional negotiations with states that claimed western land under their original colonial charters led to these claims being surrendered to federal control. In 1785 and 1787 land ordinances laid the basis for the creation of new states and the surveying of land for settlement. Providing for newly settled regions to be admitted to the United States on an equal basis with existing states, the ordinances encouraged white settlement and underlined the exclusion of Native peoples from the new arrangements. The Louisiana Purchase brought yet more territory in line for similar treatment.

The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 stated that Native land should not be taken without consent, but treaties and legal procedures frequently veiled fraud, extortion, and theft. Implicit, too, was a notion that would frame more than a century of western expansion: although individuals and groups of pioneers carried out the settlement process, federal and state governments assisted it.

Wartime destruction, population growth, contempt for Native people and their ways of life, and European concepts of absolute property ownership all meant that Native people were the immediate losers in post-revolutionary America. The alliances and understandings of previous decades collapsed under pressure from a white invasion of the West. Native peoples were either divided and demoralized by this new onslaught, or driven to attempt a concerted resistance.

The Haudenosaunees' location and their wartime alliance with the British both contributed to the fragmentation of their society. War and white settlement shattered their confederation and its strategy for resisting European incursion. Some Kanien'kehá:kas (Mohawks), led by Thayendanegea (Joseph Brant), moved to Canada. Other Haudenosaunees retreated westward to preserve their way of life. Those who remained, largely in upstate New York, exchanged most of their land for guaranteed settlements in reservations. This averted their removal, but did not prevent social collapse. At the end of the 1790s, however, as Onöndowa’ga:’s (Senecas) settled in new reservations, there arose a spiritual revival led by a former warrior, Sganyadai:yo (Handsome Lake), to whom visions had appeared calling for a strict moral reform of Onöndowa’ga:’ (Seneca) society. Preaching the rejection of white notions of individualism, Sganyadai:yo sought to restore Haudenosaunees' communal traditions and persuaded many Native people to give up whiskey, gambling, and other evils associated with whites. Yet he also encouraged accommodation to “American” customs, welcoming Christian missionaries and seeking the transformation of Haudenosaunee hunters into farmers, and female farmers into housewives. He was particularly critical of women who rejected demands to give up their traditional power and authority.

Native people, as they moved further west resisted white settlers more vigorously. American migrants in southern Ohio encountered resistance from Shawnee nations, who forged alliances with one another to block American settlement and turn back U.S. military efforts to dislodge them. In 1791 members of nine nations killed, wounded, or captured nine hundred soldiers out of an American force of fifteen hundred sent against them. But at length Shawnees were outnumbered. In 1794 three thousand U.S. soldiers defeated them at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and by treaty the next year Shawnees ceded most of their land east of the Mississippi. What was left was soon invaded by whites, and Shawnees were driven close to starvation. Officials solemnly advised Shawnees to take up agriculture instead of hunting, and to sell more land for cash.

From Ohio westward the federal government wrested land cessions from nations, often with the help of pliant “government chiefs” whose conduct drove young warriors into rebellion. Among Shawnees, social disintegration, growing dependence on trade with whites, and mounting frustration drove many to alcohol. Again demoralization sparked a spiritual awakening which, spreading from Shawnees to other northwestern nations between 1805 and 1808, galvanized them to resist once more. Inspired by a prophet known as Tenskwatawa (Open Door,) who promised to show his people the entrance to a paradise where spirits could follow the life they were once used to, the movement demanded self-discipline, the renunciation of liquor, and avoidance of goods or techniques acquired from whites. In 1808 Tenskwatawa declared an intention to disconnect Native peoples and and white societies entirely, and to forge the unity among nations that could defend Native peoples’ separation.

Leadership shifted from Tenskwatawa toward his warrior brother Tecumseh. To stop the whites’ invasion of their lands, Tecumseh announced, “all the red men [should] unite in claiming a common and equal right in the land … ; for it never was divided, but belongs to all, for the use of each.” But the northwestern Native peoples' success turned out to require more advanced military technology and greater political unity than were compatible with the traditions they were striving to defend. The United States again threw heavy military force against them. In November 1811, territorial governor William Henry Harrison advanced with a thousand troops on Shawnee headquarters at Prophetstown (later in Indiana). Several hundred warriors attacked Harrison’s encampment on the Tippecanoe River, but were beaten off. The setback weakened Tenskwatawa’s efforts at Native unification. A further defeat in 1813 at the Thames River in Canada caused Tecumseh’s death and ended Shawnees' armed resistance to white settlement.

This collapse paved the way for the cession by the 1830s of most Native land in Ohio, southern Indiana, Michigan, and Illinois. Further south, Cherokees, Muscogees (Creeks), Choctaws, and other nations also used various strategies to avoid being overrun. They, too, mounted armed resistance or voluntarily withdrew westward. However, many Cherokees and others became agriculturalists, turning their societies into miniature republics that claimed equal standing with whites on whites’ own terms. But they still faced defeat and forced removal in the 1830s. Land-hungry settlers and planters brushed them aside with little compunction. Even sympathetic whites came to regard Native cultures as doomed and their decline and removal as inevitable. Native leaders rejected the white view that they were “savages” obstructing “civilization.” A Chickasaw chief, Shullushoma, wrote in 1824 “it has been a great many years since our white brothers came across the big waters and a great many of them has not got civilized yet.”

Americans’ conquest of territory in the West intersected with the commercial competition and international rivalries of the Atlantic and the implications these had for the future development of the United States. Trade, agricultural exports, and the coastal port cities had boomed in the 1790s when the U.S. could trade as a neutral with warring European nations. But the renewal of war between Britain and France after 1803 jeopardized American shipping and seamen, as the combatants each tried to stop neutrals from dealing with the other. Britain seized ships and cargoes that it suspected of trading with France, and when the French followed suit Jefferson tried to put pressure on both sides by declaring an embargo in 1807, preventing trade with either power. For two years, until the embargo was lifted, men and women working in American ports suffered much hardship as ships lay idle and available work diminished.

The resumption of trade during the administration of Jefferson’s successor, his ally James Madison, not only renewed tension with Europe, but provoked fierce political divisions between Americans. American sailors fell foul of the British navy’s practice of searching neutral vessels for alleged deserters and forcibly impressing them into service aboard their warships. Farmers and planters in the South and West were angered by the depressing effect of a British naval blockade on agricultural prices and by Britain’s support for Native peoples hostile to white settlers. Pressure from these groups persuaded Madison to declare war on Britain in 1812, but merchants and traders from New England and the Mid-Atlantic coast vigorously disputed the decision, fearing the destruction of maritime trade. The divisions over the war accentuated regional differences that would shape U.S. society and politics in the decades to come. At an 1814 convention in Hartford, Connecticut, some Federalists proposed that New England should secede from the Union.

Advocates of the war badly underestimated America’s vulnerability to superior British military and naval forces, which staved off an American invasion of Canada and sustained a naval blockade of the East Coast.  Britain mounted an invasion of its own that culminated in the capture and burning of Washington D.C. before its troops were repulsed. The U.S. was rescued largely by the defeat of Napoleon’s armies in Europe and Britain’s desire to end two decades of warfare with peace on all fronts. The U.S. signed a peace treaty at Ghent in 1814, but before word of this arrived in America, an army commanded by General Andrew Jackson, a Tennessee enslaver, crushed a British effort to capture the port of New Orleans. Although Jackson’s force consisted mainly of regular troops and a contingent of French-speaking Black soldiers, the success at New Orleans became celebrated as a symbol of the determination of frontier fighters. It also marked the ability of the United States to sustain its political independence.

Achieving independence and new forms of republican government, the Revolution created fresh arenas in which Americans would seek to realize their aspirations, and also come into conflict with each other. It unleashed a long period of economic expansion, which entailed both the invasion and settlement of the trans-Appalachian West and the growth and development of established rural and urban societies in the seaboard states, processes that were assisted by the renewed growth of Atlantic commerce after 1815 and by the collapse of Spanish influence in North America. But formal political equality for white men did not translate into economic equality. Development would lead to sharper conflict between rich and poor, master and journeyman, planter and small farmer. Barriers of gender and race also became firmer in the early nineteenth century, but the visions of emancipation conjured up by the Revolution continued to shape events.

Above all, different regional patterns established in colonial America continued to influence the development of the United States. Distinctions widened between northern societies based on family and wage labor, and southern societies shaped by slavery. The growth of plantation slavery and its territorial expansion came into conflict with the development of wage labor in the North and the emergence there of an industrial society.