What follows is the transcript for episode 1. WordPress doesn’t support footnotes automatically, so I’ll have to add those when I have more time. I would expect to see episode 2 live by Monday. Cheers!

Transcript

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to American Legends.

Episode One: What are “These United States”

Part 1: Newburgh

George Washington was a man of means, but he had not always been this way. In fact, Washington’s early life was quite hard by moderns standards. His father, Augustine Washington, died when he was 11, leaving the majority of his wealth and estate to Washington’s older brothers. He then came under the control of a shrewish and domineering woman in the form of his mother, Mary Ball Washington, a woman who would spend the majority of his life belittling his success and becoming a source of public embarrassment. The death of his father still left Washington the recipient of a fortune, although he was far removed from the wealth and power of the upper gentry of Tidewater Virginia. It did, however, cut short his education, a point that gave Washington a permanent stain of inferiority, not just in his own eyes, but also in the eyes of some of the other founding fathers, most of which were classically educated lawyers fluent in multiple languages. Washington therefore entered the ranks of famous Americans who were self-educated savants.

Washington had a brilliant mind and was a consummate reader, and that more than made up for his lack of education. That being said, it’s reported that he had a verbal tick that understated his lack of education. He would occasionally stumble over words, or would execute sentences in slow, drawn out patterns which allowed himself plenty of time to pronounce the words properly. Washington, at this stage in life, began the process of attaching himself to his social betters in order to advance in society, thereby becoming the youngest official surveyor in Virginia at 17. He used his money from this process to buy vast tracts of land. Through the death of his brother Lawrence, Washington not only gained his estate, Mount Vernon, but he also was able to gain Lawrence’s post as adjutant commander of the Virginia militia. It was through this posting that Washington would have his first brush with fame, as he unwittingly started the first world war.

Washington was sent to order the peaceable removal of the French from a spot in the Ohio Valley. It was while on this mission that the first shots in the French and Indian war, the war which spiraled into the Seven Years War, were fired. In his first skirmish, Washington and his Native American allies killed a French Ambassador. Not only did this, and his initial report become famous, but Washington himself was spoke about by kings. He was only 21. After the war, Washington returned to his plantation life and was only drawn out of it by the events that lead to the Revolutionary War. Due to his prior experience, his stellar reputation, and political acumen, Washington was named commander in chief of the American Army and campaigned for eight long years.

On March 15, 1783 George Washington stood before a meeting of his officers and begged them not to destroy the very thing they had been fighting for years to create. He stood at the front of a building called “The Temple.” It was really a large cabin that church services were held in, but was the only place large enough to house the officers of the 7000 man strong army. The army had been lodged there since late 1782, and had served as their winter quarters. These men had gathered to discuss taking the Continental army and marching on Philadelphia, the capitol of the United States of America.

Since his appointment to command the army, he fought in 14 battles and had suffered 4,600 casualties. He had lead these people through winters so bad that thousands froze to death or died from malnutrition. Washington had seen these men suffer and die for “the cause.” The cause was the phrase Washington and his contemporaries used for the American Revolution. More specifically, the cause was the fight for American independence, but as the war began to wind down, the reasons why they fought, and who they fought for, became the most complicated question in American history. What Washington did at Newburgh, and in the years that followed, would define what America, and the United States, meant for years to come.

But this leads to a greater question: 2 years after the Battle of Yorktown, the decisive battle that we see as the last major engagement of the Revolution, how was it that Washington was forced into the position of talking his army back from the bring of mutiny? The answer to this lies in the very definition, at the time, of what everyone seemed to think the Revolution meant.

Part 2: What is the United States

The last paragraph of the Declaration of Independence says,

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”

That was in 1776, when thirteen colonies decided to band together in opposition to the the authority of Great Britain. Sitting in 2017, knowing loosely how the events play out, it’s easy to think that what I call the United States would mean the same thing to the Second Continental Congress. It’s a funny thing, when you look at the original document, and it seems like a small thing, but when it says “the representatives of the united States of America” the word united isn’t capitalized. Throughout the document there are these little clues to what that means. They used the phrase “these States” and “free and independent States.” In that excerpt above it clearly lays out that each colony would have the power to levy war, establish diplomatic ties, and do all the things that a free state does. At the time, the idea of the United States was conceived as a mutual alliance between sovereign states against their mutual oppressor. For instance, during the debates around ratifying the Constitution in 1788, the Patrick Henry said,

“The fate of this question and of America may depend on this: Have they said, “we, the States?” Have they made a proposal of a compact between states? If they had, this would be a confederation: It is otherwise most clearly a consolidated government. The question turns, Sir, on that poor little thing-the expression, “We, the people,” instead of the “States, of America.” I need not take much pains to show that the principles of this system are extremely pernicious, impolitic, and dangerous. Is this a monarchy, like England – a compact between prince and people, with checks on the former to secure the liberty of the latter? Is this a Confederacy, like Holland – an association of a number of independent states, each of which retains its individual sovereignty?” 

To Patrick Henry, and most others, the United States wasn’t a singular nation state, it was a grouping of sovereign nations into a Confederation. At the time, there was not really an “American” identity in the way we think of it. People were “American” because they were born on the North American continent in the same way someone born in France is European, but the United States in 1783 operated much in the same way as the Eurozone operates now. They sort of shared common currency and brokered trade deals with foreign nations as a block of states, but each state was defined by it’s inhabitants regional identity that traced itself back to the earliest days of English colonization. Virginians saw themselves as Virginians first and foremost. The same logic followed for New Yorkers, and South Carolinians. Above that they saw themselves as part of a larger regional block before they ever thought about themselves as American: they were Southerners or New Englanders before they were Americans.

That regional identity was wrapped up in the forgotten founding document in the story of the United States, the Articles of Confederation. The articles began to be drafted shortly before the ratification of the Declaration of Independence and was finally accepted by every state in 1781, some six years later. The document, by the estimation of historians and in comparison to our robust Federal Government today, was toothless. This was partly because of the ad hoc nature of the revolution. For most of the colonial elite, independence wasn’t the goal of the cause until mid-1775, and even then some members tried for reconciliation with the crown, as evidenced by the Olive Branch Petition.

The founders stumbled into independence.

The Revolution started as a tax revolt centered around what proper representation was. The colonials argued that their elected colonial legislatures were proper forms of representation, and in many ways modeled a government shaped by how they understood “the rights of englishmen,” and therefore Parliament, a distant body that could never be held accountable by colonial voters, could not legally tax the colonies. They had over a hundred and fifty years of legal precedent to back that up. Therefore, the Confederation was constructed with this in mind. There would be a congress made up of representatives of the colonies — now states, but that body would not be able to levy taxes on the individual, but the states, as a central government in Philadelphia could not possibly be held accountable by voters in Georgia or Rhode Island, nor could they understand those voters issues.

From it’s inception, the Confederate Congress was not seen as a republican body. Members sent from the states to the congress were called delegates. They were not congressmen, or representatives, or senators, they were delegates. These delegates were also appointed by their state, in whichever way the state chose to, and could remove them or replace them at will. These men were not elected. It was essentially an extension of the old Continental Congress, but whereas the Second Continental Congress was initially composed of the greatest leaders that the colonies had to offer, the Confederate congress was often perceived as a third tier assembly.

The men who had created the United States had moved on. John Dickenson, one of the chief opponents to Independence in 1776, but the man responsible for drafting the Articles, became Governor of Delaware and later Pennsylvania. Thomas Jefferson served for a time as the Governor of Virginia, but upon losing re-election only took up a place in the Confederate congress in 1783 to ’74 because he declined heading to Paris for the Peace Summit to end the war. John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and John Jay were busy trying to negotiate peace with the British in Paris. John Hancock and Samuel Adams alternated as the sitting governors of Massachusetts — the list goes on. The men responsible for leading the colonies to independence became the preeminent leaders of the country, therefore instead of staying in Congress, once the chance arose they returned to their homes. This wasn’t simply a move to return to their businesses and families, it was because the importance of serving their states was far more prestigious, and powerful, than remaining in Congress. Indeed, Washington himself bashed congress by saying, “In a word, the confederation appears to me to be little more than a shadow without the substance.”

Part 3: Road to Newburgh

The road to Newburgh started essentially at the beginning of the Revolution. The haphazard formation of a council to rebuff the British led to a haphazard formation of a “Continental” army. In the movies the Continentals are often portrayed as a regular fighting force on par with British regulars who fight in straight lines and dressed in snappy blue and buff uniforms. If that were the truth, Washington would have been exceedingly happy. Instead the continentals were almost entirely composed of state militiamen serving under one year enlistments, and gradually moving to three year enlistments by the end of the war. Washington tried to instill British military discipline into his army, but often failed to do so outside of his officer corp and personal guards. In time, as the war continued, reforms put in place by Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben turned these one year enlistees into a fighting force at times, however Washington never really had to opportunity to use his men after 1779.

The last major engagement in the Northern Theater happened that year at the Battle of Newtown. This is largely explained away by the increasing activity in the southern theater of the war, which is certainly partially true, but not entirely. The war would have absolutely continued if not for the constant shortages of food, supplies, gunpowder and money after 1779.

The winter of 1779-1780 was so bad that people in the army ate their own shoes and the bark off trees. Private Joseph Plumb said, “We are absolutely, literally starved. I do solemnly declare that I did not put a single morsel of victuals into my mouth for four days and as many nights, except for a little black birch bark which I gnawed off a stick of wood. I saw several men roast their old shoes and eat them, and I was afterward informed by one of the officer’s waiters, that some of the officers killed a favorite little dog that belonged to one of them.” This was due to not only the worst winter on record at the time, but also due to the totally inoperable system of provisioning the army, which was dependent on the states directly delivering supplies to their units. The states disregard for the continental army came from a few different sources, like the enlightenment ideal that standing armies are instruments of tyranny, but also petty economic forces. After the arrival of the French, the British forces no longer had the ability to freely move up and down the coast, and staid effectively bottled up in New York, with the exception of the 8,000 men under General Conwallis in the south. As a result, many in the northern colonies continued as normal, supplying their own local militias instead of Washington’s army, with local farmers and traders actively selling to the British over the Americans. This was due to the total decline of American monetary policy and credit, such as their was one.

You see, at the beginning of the war there was a push to establish a national currency, called the Continental. This was a natural extension of state policy, which had circulated state based paper money for nearly fifty years. Part of the tension leading to the war, was British prohibition of using these state bills to pay for debt owed to British creditors. So once the war started, it only made sense to create a unifying currency that could be used to pay debts, soldiers, and the like. During the war, Congress printed $241 million notes. There were only 2 million colonists. According to Washington in 1781, a wheel barrow full of money could hardly pay for a days worth of supplies he needed to feed the army. The money was devalued so badly that Washington stopped using it to buy land in 1780, because he was afraid of going destitute for using it.

It was in this system that the army stewed. They sat for months on end, with nothing to do, no food to eat, and no money, with their own personal fortunes dwindling by the day. In January 1781, the Pennsylvanian Line infantry mutinied and tried to march on congress for their pay. It was only after General “Mad” Anthony Wayne and Washington’s former aide-du-camp and current Continental Congress President Joseph Reed agreed to furlough some and discharge the other half that the situation was resolved. A second revolt then popped up and was this time put down with the threat of force. In both instances Washington had the ringleaders executed. They were killed by a firing squad of their own men.

Keep in mind, this was while the war was still going. In the midst of the revolts, agents under General Clinton had actually attempted to bribe the Pennsylvania militia to join his forces in exchange for their backpay owed by congress.

Part 4: Newburgh

After the Battle of Yorktown, conditions continued to deteriorate. About the only way for Washington to supply his army was through the personal credit of Robert Morris, the chief financial officer of the United States and Warren Buffett of his day. Robert Morris is actually a fascinating character, and one we shall get to know more fully after Newburgh, but suffice it to say, outside of Washington’s force of will, he is the only reason the army stayed together. His credit and wealth were so good he effectively started the first attempt at a central bank, the Bank of North America, by his own credit. By 1781, he began supplying the army with his own money, but by 1783 the strain was beginning to wear on his own finances.

The one thing Morris did not supply was pay. About the only consistent form of payment during the war was enlistment bounties to men who joined or rejoined the army. Officers, however, were drawn largely from the upper and middle class, and were usually men of means. These men had great estates sometimes, or various small business interests that had dwindled significantly during the revolution, as they had to let their fortunes be guided by someone else during the war. In some cases, officers became destitute. Congress had to oblige requests to leave in 1780 by allowing officers to leave for financial reason. By January 1783, the crisis reached a breaking point. A delegation of officers arrived at congress to enter discussions over the four years of backpay owed to them, in addition to repayments for previous salaries that had been paid in worthless Continentals. One passage from the circular written to congress by the officers reflects how dire the situation had become:

“Our distresses are now brought to a point. We have borne all that men can bear–our property is expended–our private resources are at an end, and our friends are wearied out and disgusted with our incessant applications. We, therefore, most seriously and earnestly beg, that a supply of money may be forwarded to the army as soon as possible. The uneasiness of the soldiers, for want of pay, is great and dangerous; any further experiments on their patience may have fatal effects.”

This passage, sandwiched right in the middle, was a barely veiled threat. Lets be very clear, this was a demand from the United States army for money or else it. That “or else” would be the army launching a coup against the Confederation Congress in Philadelphia if their terms were not met. That article was signed by 13 generals. People in congress were worried, including Washington’s former aid Alexander Hamilton, who now sat in congress as one of New York’s delegates. Washington, as late as March, didn’t believe the army was capable of mass mutiny, even though he had seen his army do this very thing in 1776 during the New York campaign, and again in early 1781. It appears however, that factions within congress, namely Hamilton and Robert Morris, decided to use the threat of mutiny as a way of enticing congress to pass the very first form of taxation, called the impost. We will get into the impost more in a couple of episode’s time, but suffice it to say, it was designed to make the United States solvent. It would generate the income necessary for the US to pay back the mountains of debt owed to France and also to bondholders and the army. These two figured, that with the actual threat of armed force, delegates in congress could be coaxed into action when they otherwise would have done nothing. The only thing that allowed them to use this tactic was their confidence in Washington’s total command of his army and their overwhelming respect for him and his republican virtues.

This, however, did not take into account the scheming of other officers in the army, namely General Horatio Gates. Gates, a former British regular during the French and Indian War, had been one of the chief rivals of Washington these last eight years. He regularly disobeyed Washington’s direct orders, advocated for Washington’s removal as head of the army, stole the glory of the victory at Saratoga from the real hero of the battle (Benedict Arnold), had gloriously fumbled the southern campaign and was crushed in one of the worst American defeats at the Battle of Camden, yet somehow he had survived a board of inquiry. Whereas Washington’s other rivals had totally self destructed, Gates managed to have just enough friends in the army and congress to keep himself from being totally disgraced. Gates was a glory hound, arrogant, and at times dangerously incompetent. It seems that on March 9th a colonel from congress arrived and spread word that congress was going to disband the army without pay. On March 10th a circular began making the rounds calling for an officer’s meeting, presumably with the purpose of discussing mutiny. This inflammatory tract is believed to have been written by Gates’s chief aid-du-camp. Washington immediately postponed the meeting and began to inform congress, and Hamilton in particular, of the ruckus.

On March 15, all 500 of Washington’s officers gathered in the temple. Gates presided over the meeting. No one expected Washington to show, as he regularly chose to ignore these types of gatherings, so once he arrived and stepped to the front of the room, they were stunned. This is the moment where history could have taken a dramatically different direction. I cannot think of another time in history before or after this moment, where the army, after suffering years of deprivation and faced with a weak, ineffectual, and perceivably corrupt government, while having a smart, charismatic, and virtuous leader, did not take up arms against their own government and establish their own regime. This happened in ancient Rome with Sulla and Julius Caesar. This happened a little over 15 years later in France with Napoleon. But more poignantly, this happened in England almost 150 years prior during the English Civil War, when after overthrowing the King, the Puritan army under Oliver Cromwell and Lord Fairfax seized control of Parliament for their own ends. As a personal connection to Washington, his first surrogate father and mentor, William Fairfax, was a direct descendant from that old Lord Thomas Fairfax, and no doubt grew up hearing about the history of that venerable family, who’s forebear was the architect of the King’s defeat. Washington had a choice, to preserve the independence that he had fought so hard for, or seize control of the government itself.

Washington gave the speech of his life. He attacked the unknown author of the circular as no friend of the army, and ridiculed both the idea of taking up arms against the government, and also disbanding without orders. Washington believed that if the army disbanded, it would give the British, who were still many thousand strong just down the road in New York City, free reign over the country and fumble any real peace deal. He then implored them to preserve their patriotic reputation among Europeans. Washington closed his speech with this:

“Let me request you to rely on the plighted faith of your country, and place a full confidence in the purity of the intentions of Congress; that, previous to your dissolution as an army, they will cause all your accounts to be fairly liquidated, as directed in their resolutions which were published to you two days ago; and that they will adopt the most effectual measures in their power to render ample justice to you for your faithful and meritorious services. And let me conjure you, in the name of our common country, as you value your own sacred honor, as you respect the rights of humanity, and as you regard the military and national character of America, to express your utmost horror and detestation of the man, who wishes, under any specious pretences, to overturn the liberties of our country; and who wickedly attempts to open the flood-gates of civil discord, and deluge our rising empire in blood.”

At the end of his speech, he stopped and pulled out a letter from one of his generals who could not be at attendance and struggled to read it. Washington was a well read man, but at age 51, after reading dozens of dispatched and letters over candle light for eight years, his eyesight began to fail. Washington was a man who didn’t show weakness, who didn’t let his anger get the better of him in front of his men, a man who held his opinions in reserve, and bore the same toil and hardship as the rest of his men with grace. He had stood in front of them, displaying his anger, venting his opinions, and now showed his weakness.

Washington reached into his coat, and out came a pair of glasses. He said, “Gentlemen, you will permit me to put on my spectacles, for I have not only grown grey, but almost blind in service to my country.” Men began to openly weep. As the historian Joseph J. Ellis put it, “Several officers began to sob, then came a smattering of applause, then resounding applause, then a standing ovation. All prospects for a military coup died at that moment.” Washington had weathered the storm, kept the army together, and within a month, the Treaty of Paris was signed and British troops withdrew from the eastern seaboard. The only question that remained for Washington, was whether the country that he’d kept on life support would survive the decade.

For the book of the week, I’d like to recommend Ron Chernow’s biography, Washington: A Life. This massive book is a fantastic distillation of Washington’s character and life from his immense written record. It serves as a great social, political, economic, and military history, but more importantly, it resurrects Washington from a plain historical figure into a living an breathing person with his own desires and struggles. I highly recommend it. If you’re like to check it out, click the link in the iTunes listing or go to americanlegendspodcast.com, and look for the Book of the Week link on the banner. I have both the hardback and audiobook, and they were well worth it.

Next week will will discuss what exactly is in the Treaty of Paris, and what they mean for this fledgeling Confederation.

Liked it? Take a second to support James Nelson on Patreon!