07.III Revolutionary Politics in the States | HOW DID political debate in America change in the years after
1774?
Despite these accomplishments, most Americans focused not on the Confederation government in Philadelphia
but on the governments of their own states. During the revolutionary era, most Americans identified politically and
socially with their local communities rather than with the American nation. People spoke of “these United States,”
emphasizing the plural. The single national community feeling of the Revolution was overwhelmed by persistent
localism. The states were the setting for the most important political struggles of the Confederation period and for
long afterward.
1. The Broadened Base of Politics
The political mobilization that took place in 1774 and 1775 greatly broadened political participation. Mass
meetings in which ordinary people expressed their opinions, voted, and gained political experience were common,
not only in the cities but in small towns and rural communities as well. During these years, a greater proportion of
the population began to participate in elections. Compared with the colonial assemblies, the new state legislatures
included more men from rural and western districts—farmers and artisans as well as lawyers, merchants, and large
landowners. Many delegates to the Massachusetts provincial congress of 1774, for example, were men from small
farming communities who lacked formal education and owned little property.
This transformation was accompanied by a dramatic shift in the political debate. During the colonial period, when
only the upper crust of society had been truly engaged in the political process, the principal argument followed the
lines of the traditional Tory and Whig divide in British politics. The Tory position, argued by royal officials, was that
colonial governments were simply convenient instruments of the king’s prerogative, serving at his pleasure. The
Whig position, adopted by colonial elites who sought to preserve and increase their own power, emphasized the
need for a government balancing the power of a governor, an upper house, and an assembly. As a result of the
Revolution, the Tory position lost all legitimacy and the Whig position was challenged by farmers, artisans, and
ordinary people armed with a new and radical democratic ideology.
One of the first post-Revolution debates focused on the appropriate governmental structure for the new states.
The thinking of democrats was indicated by the title of an anonymously authored New England pamphlet of 1776:
The People the Best Governors. Power, the pamphlet argued, should be vested in a single, popularly elected
assembly. There should be no property qualifications for either voting or holding office. The governor should
simply execute the wishes of the people as voiced by their representatives in the assembly. Judges, too, should be
popularly elected, and their decisions reviewed by the assembly. The people, in the words of this pamphlet, “best
know their wants and necessities, and therefore are best able to govern themselves.” The ideal form of
government, according to democrats, was the community or town meeting, in which the people set their own tax
rates, mustered the local militia, operated their own schools and churches, and regulated the local economy. State
government was necessary only for coordination among communities.
Conservative Americans took up the Whig argument on the need for a balanced government. The “unthinking
many,” wrote a conservative pamphleteer, should be checked by a strong executive and an upper house. Both of
these would be insulated from popular control by property qualifications and long terms in office, the latter
designed to draw forth the wisdom and talent of the country’s wealthiest and most accomplished men. The
greatest danger, according to conservatives, was the possibility of majority tyranny, which might lead to the
violation of property rights and to dictatorship. “We must take mankind as they are,” one conservative wrote, “and
not as we could wish them to be.”
2. The First State Constitutions
Fourteen states—the original thirteen plus Vermont—adopted constitutions between 1776 and 1780. Each of
these documents was shaped by the debate between radicals and conservatives, democrats and Whigs, and
reflected a new political alignment. The constitutions of Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York typified the
political range of the times. Pennsylvania instituted a radical democracy, Maryland created a conservative set of
institutions designed to keep citizens and rulers as far apart as possible, and New York adopted a system
somewhere in the middle.
In Pennsylvania, a majority of the political conservatives had been Loyalists, allowing the democrats to seize power
in 1776. The election of delegates to the constitutional convention was open to every man in the militia, an
arrangement that further strengthened the hand of the democrats. The document this convention adopted clearly
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reflected a democratic agenda. It created a unicameral assembly, elected annually by all free male taxpayers. So
that delegates would be responsive to their constituents, sessions of the assembly were open to the public and
included roll-call votes, which had been rare in colonial assemblies. There was no governor, but rather an elected
executive committee. Judges served at the pleasure of the assembly.
By contrast, the Maryland constitution, adopted the same year, was written by conservative planters who had
been Patriots during the Revolution. It created property requirements for office-holding that left only about 10
percent of Maryland men eligible to serve in the assembly and 7 percent in the senate. A powerful governor,
elected by large property owners, controlled a highly centralized government. Judges and other high executive
officers served for life. These two states, Maryland and Pennsylvania, represented the political extremes. Georgia,
Vermont, and North Carolina followed Pennsylvania’s example; South Carolina’s constitution was much like
Maryland’s.
In New York, the constitutional convention of 1777 included a large democratic faction. But conservatives such as
John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Robert R. Livingston, managing the convention with great skill, helped produce a
document that reflected Whig principles while still appealing to the people. There would be a bicameral
legislature, each house having equal powers. The lower house, or assembly, was democratically elected, but there
were stiff property qualifications for election to the upper house, or senate, and senators represented districts
apportioned by wealth, not population. The governor, also elected by property owners, had the power of veto,
which could be overridden only by a two-thirds vote of both houses. Ultraconservatives wanted a constitution
more like Maryland’s, but Jay argued that “another turn of the winch would have cracked the cord”; conservatives,
in other words, had gotten about as much as they could without alienating the mass of voters. Other states whose
constitutions blended democratic and conservative elements were New Hampshire, New Jersey, and
Massachusetts.
3. Declarations of Rights
One of the most important innovations of the state constitutions was a guarantee of rights patterned on the
Virginia Declaration of Rights of June 1776. Written by George Mason—wealthy planter, democrat, and brilliant
political philosopher—the Virginia declaration set a distinct tone in its very first article: “That all men are by nature
equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, . . . namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with
the means of acquiring and possessing property and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.” The fifteen
articles declared, among other things, that sovereignty resided in the people, that government was the servant of
the people, and that the people had the “right to reform, alter, or abolish” that government. There were
guarantees of due process and trial by jury in criminal prosecutions, and prohibitions of excessive bail and “cruel
and unusual punishments.” Freedom of the press was guaranteed as “one of the great bulwarks of liberty,”
and the people were assured of “the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”
Eight state constitutions included a general declaration of rights similar to the first article of the Virginia
declaration; others incorporated specific guarantees. A number of states proclaimed the right of the people to
engage in free speech and free assembly, to instruct their representatives, and to petition for the redress of
grievances—rights either inadvertently or deliberately omitted from Virginia’s declaration. These declarations
were important precedents for the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the federal Constitution. Indeed,
George Mason of Virginia was a leader of the democrats who insisted that the Constitution stipulate such rights.
4. A Spirit of Reform
The political upheaval of the Revolution raised the possibility of other reforms in American society. The 1776
Constitution of New Jersey, by granting the vote to “all free inhabitants” who met the property requirements,
enfranchised women as well as men. The number of women voters eventually led to male protests and a new state
law explicitly limiting the right to vote to “free white male citizens.”
The New Jersey controversy may have been an anomaly, but women’s participation in the Revolution wrought
subtle but important changes. In 1776, Abigail Adams wrote to her husband John Adams, away at the Continental
Congress, “In the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would
remember the ladies, and be more generous and favourable to them than your ancestors.” In the aftermath of the
Revolution, there was evidence of increasing sympathy in the courts for women’s property rights and fairer
treatment of women’s petitions for divorce. And the postwar years witnessed an increase in opportunities for
women seeking an education. From a strictly legal and political point of view, the Revolution may have done little
to change women’s role in society, but it did seem to help change expectations. Abigail Adams’s request to her
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husband was directed less toward the shape of the new republic than toward the structure of family life. “Do not
put such unlimited powers into the hands of husbands,” she wrote, “for all men would be tyrants if they could.”
She had in mind a new, companionate ideal of marriage that contrasted with older notions of patriarchy. Men and
women ought to be more like partners, less like master and servant. This new ideal took root in America during the
era of the Revolution.
The most steadfast reformer of the day was Thomas Jefferson, who after completing work on the Declaration of
Independence returned to Virginia to take a seat in its House of Delegates. In 1776, he introduced a bill abolishing
the law of entails, which confined inheritance to particular heirs in order that landed property remain undivided.
The majority of the land in Virginia was entailed by the mid-eighteenth century, and Jefferson believed that
“entail” and “primogeniture” (inheritance of all the family property by the firstborn son)—legal customs long in
effect in aristocratic England—had no place in a republican society. Jefferson’s reform of inheritance law passed
and had a dramatic effect. “The old families of Virginia will form connections with low people and sink into the
mass,” wealthy planter John Randolph complained. That was the “inevitable conclusion to which Mr. Jefferson and
his leveling system has brought us.” By 1798, every state had followed Virginia’s lead.
Jefferson’s other notable success was his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom. Indeed, he considered this
document one of his greatest accomplishments. At the beginning of the Revolution, there were established
churches—denominations officially supported and funded by the government—in nine of the thirteen colonies:
Congregationalists in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Connecticut, Anglicans in New York and the South.
Established religion was increasingly opposed in the eighteenth century, in part because of Enlightenment criticism
of the power it had over free and open inquiry, but, more important, because of the growing sectarian diversity
produced by the religious revival of the Great Awakening. Many Anglican clergymen harbored Loyalist sympathies,
and as part of an anti-Loyalist backlash, New York, Maryland, the Carolinas, and Georgia had little difficulty passing
acts that disestablished the Anglican Church. In Virginia, however, many planters viewed Anglicanism as a bulwark
against Baptist and Methodist democratic thinkers, resulting in bitter and protracted opposition to Jefferson’s bill,
and it did not pass until 1786.
New England Congregationalists proved even more resistant to change. Although Massachusetts, New Hampshire,
and Connecticut allowed dissenting churches to receive tax support, they maintained the official relationship
between church and state well into the nineteenth century. Other states, despite disestablishment, retained
certain religious tests in their legal codes. Georgia, the Carolinas, and New Jersey limited office-holding to
Protestants; New York required legislators to renounce allegiance to the pope; and even Pennsylvania, where
religious toleration had a long history, required officials to swear to a belief in the divine inspiration of the Old and
New Testaments.
Jefferson proposed several more reforms of Virginia law, all of which failed to pass. He would have created a
system of public education, revised the penal code to restrict capital punishment to the crimes of murder and
treason, and established the gradual emancipation of slaves by law. On the whole, Jefferson and the Revolutionary
generation were more successful at raising questions than at accomplishing reforms. The problems of penal
reform, public education, and slavery remained for later generations of Americans to resolve.
5. African Americans and the Revolution
For most African Americans there was little to celebrate in the American victory, for it perpetuated the institution
of slavery. Few people were surprised when thousands of black fighters and their families departed with the
Loyalists and the British at the end of the war, settling in the West Indies, Canada, and Africa. Most of these
refugees were fugitive slaves rather than committed Loyalists. In Virginia alone, some 30,000 slaves fled during the
Revolution, including seventeen from George Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation; several were recaptured,
but most left the country with the British.
To many observers, there was an obvious contradiction in waging a war for liberty while continuing to support the
institution of slavery. “How is it,” English critic and essayist Samuel Johnson asked pointedly in 1775, “that we hear
the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of Negroes?” The contradiction was not lost on Washington, who
during the Revolution began worrying over the morality of slavery. He was not alone. Revolutionary idealism, in
combination with a shift away from tobacco farming, weakened the commitment of many planters to the slave
system. After the Revolution, a sizable number of Virginians granted freedom to their slaves, and there was a small
but important movement to encourage gradual emancipation by convincing masters to free their slaves in their
wills. George Washington was one of them, not only freeing several hundred slaves upon his death, but developing
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an elaborate plan for apprenticeship and tenancy for the able-bodied, and lodging and pensions for the aged.
Planters in the Lower South, however, heavily dependent as they were on slave labor, resisted the growing calls for
an end to slavery. Between 1776 and 1786, all the states but South Carolina and Georgia prohibited or heavily
taxed the international slave trade, and this issue became an important point of conflict at the Constitutional
Convention in 1787.
Perhaps the most important result of this development was the growth of the free African American population.
From a few thousand in 1750, their number grew to more than 200,000 by the end of the century. The increase
was most notable in the Upper South. The free black population of Virginia, for example, grew from fewer than
2,000 in 1780 to more than 20,000 in 1800. Largely excluded from the institutions of white Americans, the African
American community now had enough strength to establish schools, churches, and other institutions of its own. At
first, this development was opposed. In Williamsburg, Virginia, for instance, the leader of a black congregation was
seized and whipped when he attempted to gain recognition from the Baptist Association. But by the 1790s, the
Williamsburg African Church had grown to more than 500 members, and the Baptist Association reluctantly
recognized it. In Philadelphia, Reverend Absalom Jones established St. Thomas’s African Episcopal Church. The
incorporation of the word “African” in the names of churches, schools, and mutual benefit societies reflected the
pride African Americans took in their heritage.
In the North, slavery was first abolished in the state constitution of Vermont in 1777, in Massachusetts in 1780,
and New Hampshire in 1784. Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island adopted systems of gradual
emancipation during these years, freeing the children of slaves at birth. By 1804, every northern state had
provided for abolition or gradual emancipation, although as late as 1810, 30,000 African Americans remained
enslaved in the North.
During the era of the Revolution, a small group of African American writers rose to prominence. Benjamin
Banneker, born free in Maryland where he received an education, became one of the most accomplished
mathematicians and astronomers of late eighteenth-century America. In the 1790s, he published a popular
almanac that both white and black Americans consulted. Jupiter Hammon, a New York slave, took up
contemporary issues in his poems and essays, one of the most important of which was his “Address to the Negroes
of the State of New York,” published in 1787. But the most famous African American writer was Phyllis Wheatley,
who came to public attention when her Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral appeared in London in
1773, while she was still a domestic slave in Boston. Kidnapped in Africa as a young girl and converted to
Christianity during the Great Awakening, Wheatley wrote poems combining her piety and a concern for African
Americans. Writing to the Mohegan Indian minister Samuel Occom in 1774, Wheatly penned a line that not only
applied to her own people but to all Americans struggling to be free. “In every human breast God has implanted a
principle, which we call love of freedom; it is impatient of oppression, and pants for deliverance. The same
principle lives in us.”
Conclusion
The Revolution was a tumultuous era, marked by violent conflict between Patriots and Loyalists, masters and
slaves, settlers and Indian peoples. The advocates of independence emerged successful, largely because of their
ability to pull together and to begin to define their national community. But fearful of the power of central
authority, Americans created a relatively weak national government. People identified strongly with their local and
state communities, and these governments became the site for most of the struggles over political direction that
characterized the Revolution and its immediate aftermath. But not all problems, it turned out, could be solved
locally. Within a very few years, the nation would sink into a serious economic depression that sorely tested the
resources of local communities. By the mid-1780s, many American nationalists were paraphrasing Washington’s
question of 1777: “What then is to become of this nation?”
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