The Articles of Confederation: An Interpretation of the Social-Constitutional History of the American Revolution, 1774-1781

II The Internal Revolution

II The Internal Revolution T HE ARTICLES of Confederation were written by men many of whom rose to leadership as a result of the tempestuous local political battles fought in the years before the Revolution. Most of these new leaders gained power because they voiced the animosities and thus won the support of the discontented - the masses in the towns and the farmers of the backcountry -, who in most of the states won the right to express themselves politically, or were able to force concessions where the conservative element remained in control of the new governments created. When it came to the formation of a common government for all the states, the radicals were guided by experience and by certain political ideas. Experience had taught them to dislike the colonial governing classes and to fear the concentration of wealth and political power. Their political philosophy taught that governments exercising power over wide areas were inherently undemocratic in action. This distrust of the concentration and centralization of unchecked political authority was deepened by the fact that most of the revolutionary leaders were essentially local leaders whom necessity had forced into an international movement for independence but who continued to be guided and controlled by the exigencies of local politics. It is necessary, therefore , to turn to the revolutionary history of the individual colonies for an explanation of the many exceptions one must make to any generalizations regarding the revolutionary movement as a whole and the constitution it produced. ... ... ... Pennsylvania offers the clearest illustration of some of the basic issues upon which the course of the American Revolution turned. In no other colony were the racial-political-economic lines so sharply drawn, nowhere was the ruling class so opposed to change The Internal Revolution 17 or to concession, and nowhere was the political revolution so complete in 1776. As the colony had grown in wealth and population, political control had been retained by the three old counties of Philadelphia , Bucks, and Chester, and the city of Philadelphia. By the middle of the century an oligarchy of Quaker merchants and lawyers was dictating most of the policies of government. Their instrument was the colonial assembly, control of which they retained by denying representation to the ever-growing west. Even when new counties were created, they were made so vast in extent and were allotted so few representatives in the Assembly that the rule of the east was never endangered. In the east itself the masses were prevented from threatening oligarchical rule by suffrage laws which excluded all but a small minority of the population. The right to vote was contingent upon the possession of fifty pounds in personal property or a freehold. Neither was easy to secure, at least in the east. In Philadelphia in 1775 only 335 of 3,452 taxable males had estates large enough to give them the vote.1 Opposition to the oligarchy was centered in the Susquehanna Valley and in the city of Philadelphia. The Susquehanna Valley, peopled largely by Scotch-Irish and Germans, was separated from the east by geography, by economic interest, by race, and by religion . Its natural market was the city of Baltimore, which very early improved roads to attract the trade of its northern neighbors , while the Pennsylvania Assembly refused to build roads or in any way to tie the west to the east.2 Aside from racial and religious animosities, the grievances of the west against the east were very specific. It carried a burden of taxation without adequate representation, which in 177I, when an excise tax on hard liquor was instituted, was opposed in a manner prophetic of the later Whiskey Rebellion. The Presbyterian Scotch-Irish were driven to desperation by the refusal of the Quaker Assembly to aid them in their ever-continuing war with 1 Lincoln, Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania, ch. 3; J. Paul Selsam, The Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 (Philadelphia, 1936), ch. I; McKinley, Suffrage Franchise, pp. 290, note 2, 291-292. 2 Lincoln, Revolutionary Movement in Pennsylvania, ch. 2, "The Influence of German and Irish Immigration," and ch. 4, "The Growth of the Revolution in the West." 18 The Articles of Confederation the Indians. The Proclamation line of 1763, which threatened to dispossess many westerners of lands already settled, was blamed on the Quakers. The pacifism of the Quaker merchants enraged frontiersmen, who suspected them of being moved more by a desire to maintain the...