THE CEMENT OF INTEREST:
INTERSTATE INTERNAL IMPROVEMENTS,
INTERSTATE COMMERCE, AND THE TRANSITION
FROM THE ARTICLES OF CONFEDERATION TO THE
CONSTITUTION, 1783-1786
by
SCOTT LILLARD
Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements
For the degree Master of Arts
Department of History
Case Western Reserve University
January 2013
2 CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY
SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES
We hereby approve the thesis of
_______Scott Lillard______________________________________________________
candidate for the _____Master of Arts__________________________________degree *.
Committee Chair
________________Peter Shulman_________________
Committee Member
________________John Grabowski________________
Committee Member
_________________Daniel Cohen_________________
Date of Defense
11-16-12________________
*We also certify that written approval has been obtained for any
proprietary material contained therein.
3 Table of Contents
Introduction
Deficiencies of the Articles
7
13
The Twin Terrors
15
Interstate Tariff System
16
Free Trade Ports
20
Two Sides of the Same Coin
24
Burying their Mutual Jealousies-Internal Improvement Negotiations
26
Pennsylvania-Maryland Internal Improvements 1783-84
26
Chronology of the Virginia-Maryland Negotiations
29
Chronology of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware Negotiations
34
Conclusion
45
4 List of Tables
Chronology of the Virginia-Maryland Negotiations
29
Chronology of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware Negotiations
34
5 Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Professor John Grabowski who suggested in a stroke of
brilliance that I make a relatively minor line from later in the paper into the title of the
second half of the thesis. He and the other members of the committee have consistently
helped me turn iron into gold. To Professor Daniel Cohen I offer the praise that I believe
will mean the most to him. He has impressed me with a thoroughness and
professionalism made all the more remarkable by how he affords it equally to all his
students. Professor Peter Shulman I applaud as a kindred spirit. It was a conference paper
of his, that he most generously let me read, which gave me some of the inspiration for
this work. I must also thank Professor John Broich who demonstrated understanding to a
naïve graduate student during his first year.
Having spent time as an archivist myself, I greatly appreciate the patience shown
me by those who helped me to find sources, thanks to Bruce Haas of the Delaware Public
Archives, Ed Richi of the Delaware Historical Society, and Michael McCormick of the
Maryland State Archives. I would also like to thank Professor Emeritus Rob Natelson of
the University of Montana for corresponding with me about the resolution, or lack of
resolution, of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware negotiations.
6 The Cement of Interest, Interstate Internal Improvements, Interstate
Commerce, and the Transition from the Articles of Confederation to the
Constitution, 1783-1786
Abstract
by
SCOTT LILLARD
This thesis shows how commercial issues helped lead to the Constitutional
Convention of 1787. Under the Articles of Confederation (1781-1789), interstate tariffs
impeded domestic commerce and free trade with foreign countries threatened to
undermine America’s economic independence. These two problems suggested a dual
solution: free and equal trade within the U.S. and a national tariff to protect American
industries from foreign competition. When Congress failed to solve these problems,
several states negotiated among themselves. Some states sought to pressure their
neighbors by conditioning approval of interstate internal improvements on the removal of
interstate tariffs. Amid these negotiations, some politicians became convinced that the
ultimate obstacle to unfettered interstate trade was the Confederation’s political structure,
which enshrined state sovereignty. These politicians ultimately succeeded in convening
the Constitutional Convention, forging a more powerful federal government, creating a
nationwide free-trade zone, and convincing the new Congress to enact a national tariff in
1789.
7 In 1887, on the one-hundredth anniversary of the Constitutional Convention,
historian Kate Rowland wrote of the 1785 Mount Vernon conference, a small meeting
between Virginia and Maryland officials over jurisdiction of the Potomac River: “From
the first rude link in a chain one may never surmise what iron or golden division should
remotely follow. From a trade compact between two states to a political union between
thirteen there are wide spaces of no needful logical connection, though the first be
practically the latter’s sponsor and progenitor.”1 Rowland and other historians such as
John Fiske and Richard Morris saw the moment when Virginia and Maryland realized the
benefits of cooperation and the disadvantages of competition as the crucial turning point
in the movement to revise the Articles of Confederation.
Writing a year after Rowland, Fiske himself described the years under the Articles
as America’s “critical period,” and emphasized that the negotiations at Mount Vernon
later proved pivotal in the run-up to the Constitutional Convention.2 In Morris’ Forging
of the Union, written a century after both Fiske and Rowland, Morris reflected: “It all
started on a small scale, a localized conflict between Maryland and Virginia over the
jurisdiction and navigation rights of waters they shared in common.”3 Despite a distance
of over two centuries, that little meeting’s centrality had not faded.
For early-twentieth-century scholars studying the National Road, the key moment
came when Virginia and Maryland realized in 1785 that, to connect their waterway with
the Ohio River, they had to consult Pennsylvania. In 1904 in The Cumberland Road,
historian Archer Hulbert claimed that, though the states were unaware of it, implicit in
the plan for that highway was a plan to “bind distant and half-acquainted states together
1
Kate Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History 11 (1887): 410.
John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History: 1783-1789, 3rd ed. (Boston and New York:
Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 212-216.
3
Richard Morris, The Forging of the Union 1781-1789, (New York: Harper & Row, 1987), 247.
2
8 in bonds of common interest, sympathy, and ambition.”4 In 1902, in the eyes of political
scientist Jeremiah Young, this forerunner to the National Road seemed to be solid cement
on which to lay the union’s foundation since “commercial interest is the strongest bond
for political union.”5
Young’s insight on the National Road reflects the firm conclusion I have come to
concerning the vital role played by interstate internal improvements between 1783 and
1786, during what Fiske termed the critical period. In examining interstate negotiations
surrounding internal improvements, I was initially struck by statements like this one
taken from a November 1785 letter from Pennsylvania President Benjamin Franklin to
Governor William Smallwood of Maryland: “[T]his proposition as far it applies to
Maryland and Pennsylvania is made to rest in all its parts upon the fair and equal ground
of reciprocal advantage.”6 Even eventual anti-federalists like George Mason and Samuel
Chase acted as negotiating commissioners for Virginia and Maryland at the Mount
Vernon conference.7 Later I discovered that negotiations concerning internal
improvements laid the foundation for states to discuss efforts for mutual commercial
advantage, namely, removing discriminatory tariffs and setting fixed currency values.
From these commercial negotiations came proposals to hold the Annapolis Convention,
4
Archer Butler Hulbert, The Cumberland Road, vol. 10 of Historic Highways of America (Cleveland:
Arthur H. Clark Company, 1904), 17.
5
Jeremiah Simeon Young, “A Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road” (PhD diss.,
University of Chicago, 1904).
6
Samuel Hazard ed., Pennsylvania Archives: Selected and Arranged from Original Documents in the
Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Conformably to Acts of the General Assembly,
February 15, 1851 & March 1, 1852. 1st ser., vol. 10, Commencing 1783. (Philadelphia: Joseph
Severns & Co., 1854), 540. 7
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 420-422. Not just Mason, but fellow anti-federalist Samuel
Chase served as a commissioner in negotiations concerning interstate internal improvements.
Chase was a Maryland commissioner at Mount Vernon. He was also appointed to negotiate with
Pennsylvania and Delaware concerning canals between the Chesapeake and Delaware Bays and
along the Susquehanna River. Samuel Hazard ed., Pennsylvania Archives: Selected and Arranged
from Original Documents in the Office of the Secretary of the Commonwealth, Conformably to
Acts of the General Assembly, February 15, 1851 & March 1, 1852. 1st ser., vol. 11. Commencing
1786. (Philadelphia: Joseph Severns & Co., 1855), 60-61.
the little meeting that preceded the Constitutional Convention. In discussing interstate
9 internal improvements, these states made the leap from creating an interstate political
economy to giving Congress the power to protect said political economy.
The reason these states built a framework for interstate commerce from scratch
was because virtually none existed under the Articles. According to Hamilton, certain
states rendered their neighbors “tributary to them by commercial regulations”8 Others
seemed to be crawling back toward dependence on British goods in throwing open their
ports to foreign trade. These two dangers mirror those described by political scientist
David Hendrickson in his book Peace Pact. According to Hendrickson, Americans feared
that with the disintegration of the Confederation would come both war between the states
and foreign intervention.9 Like the political situation during the Confederation, the
economy was held together by little more than the paper the Articles were printed on.
To some contemporaries, even eventual opponents of ratification like Mason,
these problems suggested solutions.10 To prevent the Confederation’s disintegration, the
states first needed to assure free and equal trade between Americans, regardless of their
state. Second, to halt dependence on foreign commerce, states had to enact a national
tariff on foreign goods. Historian Woody Holton puts it succinctly: “Empowering
Congress to bar foreign ships and goods from United States harbors would enable
American diplomats to pry foreign (especially British) ports open to American
8
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist #7,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor,
1961), 63.
9
David Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding, (Lawrence: University
Press of Kansas, 2003), 7.
10
James Madison. “To Thomas Jefferson, December 10, 1783,” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2 of
The Writings of James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 27. Madison noted that
George Mason, who was to become a more prominent anti-federalist, supported the impost
amendment and expressed support for presenting a strong front in trade disputes with Britain.
Woody Holton writes that even many anti-federalists acknowledged the Confederation’s economic
problems. Woody Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the Constitution?,”
Journal of American History 92 (2005): 442.
commerce…By knocking down tariff barriers among the states, the Constitution
10 would create a vast free-trade zone.”11 Under the Articles of Confederation, efforts like
the impost amendment, proposed in Congress in 1783 and rejected by the states in 1786,
tried to do just that but failed.
Yet under the Constitution, the second piece of business Congress passed was
national tariff meant to protect against British goods. Though it ultimately did not work,
as the trade disputes leading up to the war of 1812 proved, the prospect of having the
power to build what might be called a self-sufficient national economy seems to have
motivated the states to abandon the Articles for the Constitution.
Here most scholars argue that the crises of late 1786 and early 1787 motivated the
states, not Congress, to revise the Articles of Confederation. They base their argument
that crises inspired the revision movement on William Grayson’s observation in May
1786 that only “a crisis” would provide the states with a sufficient catalyst to “insure
success to a reformation on proper principles.”12 For example, in The New Nation, Merrill
Jensen tries to explain the founders’ lack of top-down initiative: “One can only hazard the
guess that by the fall of 1786 the men most anxious to create a strong central government
had pinned all their hopes on a constitutional convention entirely apart from Congress.”13
Political scientist Keith Dougherty’s Collective Action Under the Articles of
Confederation, published in 2001, attributes the success of the Constitution after a long
11
Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the Constitution?,” 449. For further sentiments
like this see Morris, The Forging of the Union, 151-152.
12
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, J. C. A. Stagg, editor. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2010. William Grayson to James Madison, May 28, 1786.
13
Merrill Jensen, The New Nation: A History of the United States During the Confederation, 1781-1789
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1950), 420. Jensen denies that the crises in the critical period were
real. He alleged that the federalists used the myth of the crises as rhetoric to force through the
Constitution. In essence he is saying that by mid 1786 their propaganda had not kicked into high
gear yet. In my view, this is irrelevant, because whether the crisis was real or myth, Jensen still
argues that it motivated the states to discard the Articles of Confederation and create the
Constitution.
11 line of failed attempts at reform to a general atmosphere of crisis: “What became new
by 1787 was an increasingly widespread admission that the confederation was deficient
and that the central government needed to be more effective.”14 Even as recently as 2005,
Woody Holton alludes to a “crisis of the 1780s”—both economic and political—“that led
to the Constitution.” 15 There is plenty of evidence to argue that the constitution’s authors
reacted to Shay’s Rebellion, the Jay Treaty, or the post-war depression. 16 But I hope to
augment earlier scholars’ efforts through a different tack. This is not to argue that other
scholars are wrong; any number of factors may have influenced the movement to revise
the Articles of Confederation.
In addition to earlier scholars’ explanation of the Constitution as the final
desperate attempt at reform to avoid disintegration, I see the benefits associated with
interstate internal improvements as having served as a strong positive incentive for states
to cooperate. States assumed that there was a thriving interstate commerce, particularly in
the West, that internal improvements could unlock. For example, George Washington
was so affected by a 1784 western trip that upon his return he immediately pitched a
scheme for a Potomac canal to Virginia governor Benjamin Harrison. Likewise the
Maryland proprietors of the Susquehanna canal predicted their waterway would unlock
untold fortunes. These proved false. Neither of these projects delivered later on, partially
14
Keith L. Dougherty, Collective Action Under the Articles of Confederation, (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001), 130. Dougherty’s work was an excellent aid in finalizing the approach for
this piece. Without his earlier foray into game theory, I would have been lost in the woods. As
such I think of this as an addition not a criticism.
15
Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the Constitution?,” 456.
16
For further works that explain the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution as a
reaction to a crisis or crises see Jon Ferling, A Leap in the Dark (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003). Ferling emphasizes the chanciness of the revision movement in a traditional political
history. Jack Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics: An Interpretative History of the
Continental Congress (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 334.; Gordon S. Wood,
The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill: The University of North
Carolina Press, 1969), 393-465. Wood in a groundbreaking intellectual history suggests that postwar Americans perceived a crisis because they were disappointed that their sacrifices during the
Revolution had not created the political utopia they had hoped for. As reality conflicted with
expectations, Americans began to arrive at the assumptions behind the Constitution.
12 because the new constitution prohibited congress from funding internal improvements.
In a rather cruel irony, the states were unwilling to give up enough of their sovereignty to
actually create what would give them the thriving interstate commerce they craved. But
they did surrender enough to build the political structure they hoped would regulate it.
Thus, the United States ended up scrapping the Articles partly on a mistaken expectation.
Here at least commercial results mattered less than commercial expectations since it was
the dream of a rising American empire not the reality that convinced states to bury their
mutual jealousies and cooperate.
Through internal improvement negotiations, states could correct their neighbors’
behavior in ways they couldn’t through the Articles. For example, one way was that
certain states refused to participate until their neighbors removed discriminatory tariffs
and rewarded them with cooperation when they did. In consequence, states gradually
came to realize that discriminatory commercial policies prevented the forging of bonds of
common interest. But when these commercial policies became obstacles to cooperation
between the states, something else happened. Since the basis for these commercial
policies was the provision in the Articles that “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom,
and independence,” the foundation of the United States as decentralized confederation,
this meant that this provision, the very basis of the contemporary political structure, was
also an obstacle to cooperation.17
From this positive incentive came the founders’ motivation to scrap the Articles
for the Constitution. One of the latter’s possible origins was as an attempt to build a legal
framework safeguarding a new interstate political economy. Starting with the Potomac
canal discussions between Virginia and Maryland, internal improvement negotiations
17
U.S. Articles of Confederation. art. 2.
provided both the carrots and the sticks to forge commercial ties between neighbors.
13 To secure Pennsylvania’s cooperation in building a road from the Potomac River to the
Ohio River, Maryland offered commercial concessions. Delaware agreed to negotiate
with Pennsylvania and Maryland about a canal between Chesapeake Bay and Delaware
Bay only because it saw the negotiations as a chance to get her larger neighbors to
remove discriminatory tariffs. From experiences like this Delaware’s delegate Gunning
Bedford, Jr., gained the courage to declare to the larger commercial states at the
Constitutional Convention; “The language of the people has been that Congress ought to
have the power of collecting an impost, and of coercing the States where it may be
necessary.”18 Through these negotiations, bit-by-bit, these states inched closer to the ideal
of free and equal trade between all Americans, eventually embodied in the Constitution.19
Deficiencies of the Articles
But first, any explanation of the importance of states’ internal improvement
negotiations must be premised on an understanding of how the Articles, by enshrining
state sovereignty, failed to regulate interstate trade. By not creating a uniform system of
commercial regulation, the Articles of Confederation enabled states to enact
discriminatory trade measures against each other.20 As Hamilton put it, by fostering
jealousy and avarice between the states, these measures untied “that sacred knot which
binds the people of America together.”21 For example, North Carolina complained that
18
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, Purchased by Order of Congress; Being His
Correspondence and Reports of Debates During the Congress of the Confederation and his
Reports of Debates in the Federal Convention, ed. Henry D. Gilpin (Washington: Langtree &
O’Sullivan, 1840), 2:1013.
19
U.S. Const. art. I,§ 9, cl. 6. 20
U.S. Articles of Confederation. art. 2.
21
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist #15,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York:
Mentor, 1961), 105.
Virginia and South Carolina commercial policies had, in James Madison’s words,
14 turned the state into “a patient bleeding from both arms.”22 In the Federalist #22,
Alexander Hamilton wrote that these “interfering and unneighborly regulations” by
giving “just cause of umbrage and complaint to others” fought against “the true spirit of
the union.”23 In other words, the Confederation’s lack of a uniform system of commercial
regulation eroded the foundation of what it supposedly enshrined: a federated union
founded upon fraternity and equality.
In the absence of a national tariff, states pursued conflicting free trade or
protective policies that worked to the advantage of foreign rather than domestic
commerce. This regulatory patchwork let European powers exploit the differences in
state laws protecting nascent American industry. For example, when Connecticut allowed
British goods to enter duty-free it negated her New England neighbors’ tariffs on foreign
imports.24 British goods smuggled into other states via Connecticut simultaneously
uprooted domestic industry in New York and rendered useless efforts by other states
through, “separate prohibitions, restrictions, and exclusions to influence the conduct of
that kingdom.”25 In this manner, the Articles’ lack of a federal external tariff jeopardized
the American Revolution’s central goal: self-determination.
These failures, coupled with the unworkable system for funding the
Confederation, brought the wheels of governance grinding to a halt. Under the Articles of
22
James Madison. “Origin of the Constitutional Convention,” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2 of
The Writings of James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 395.
23
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist #22,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York:
Mentor, 1961), 144. For general scholarship on interstate tariffs see Morris, The Forging of the
Union, 149-151.
24
Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 145.; E. Wilder Spaulding, New York in the Critical
Period, 1783-1789, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1932), 157. Spaulding’s source is the
papers of New York governor George Clinton.
25
Hamilton, “Federalist #22,”, 144.
Confederation, the federal government requisitioned funds from the states.26 This
15 method of funding utterly failed. As Madison recorded on the eve of the Constitutional
Convention, “Not a single State complies with the requisitions, several pass over them in
silence, and some positively reject them.”27 Each state tried to be a “free rider,” getting
the benefit of national government without paying the price of governance, thus causing
the whole edifice to tremble.
The Twin Terrors
As introduced by the previous section, during its brief existence two distinct but
related problems haunted the Confederation. On the one hand, interstate tariffs threatened
to divide the union into state economies. On the other, free trade with foreign countries
undermined the young union’s efforts to achieve self-determination. This follows
political scientist David Hendrickson’s observation in Peace Pact that federalists used the
dual nightmares of multiple warring American confederations and interference by foreign
powers to muster support for the Constitution.28 Arguments for greater central control of
trade followed similar lines. Like the prospect of two or three bickering continental
polities, embargoes or interstate tariffs threatened to deprive the union of its greatest tool
for insuring mutual affection between citizens of different states, interstate commerce.
Simultaneously, the threat of a flood of British goods after the peace harkened back to the
state of dependence suffered by the colonies prior to the war. As explained in the
following pages, this combination created a poisonous stew threatening the integrity of
the union.
26
U.S. Articles of Confederation. art. 8, cl. 2.
Hendrickson, Peace Pact, 4. For more on requisitions under the Articles of Confederation see Dougherty,
Collective Action Under the Articles of Confederation, 34. For example, Virginia governor
Edmund Randolph wrote, “The probable delinquency of other States has been the pretext for noncompliance with every State.
28
Hendrickson, Peace Pact, 5-7.
27
16 Interstate Tariff System
Though the Articles of Confederation prohibited the tariffs of one state to tax the
commerce of another, commercial states often found ways to, for all intents and purposes,
lay duties upon their agricultural neighbors. For instance, the New York legislature,
controlled by upstate interests, decreed that out-of-state ships must pay entrance fees at
Manhattan Island.29 This privileged upstate agricultural products over goods from nearby
Connecticut and New Jersey, which had “carried thousands of dollars out of the city and
into the pockets of detested Yankees and despised Jerseymen.”30 In James Madison’s
words, this New York tariff and others protecting Pennsylvania’s hinterland settlements
bled New Jersey’s commerce like “a cask tapped at both ends.”31 In reaction to the
Manhattan entry fee, Connecticut and New Jersey agricultural producers threatened to
halt further commerce with the hated state.32 To the Jerseymen, New York and
Pennsylvania tariffs seemed an unjust tribute exacted in violation of their sovereignty.
One New Jersey newspaper contributor vented his frustrations at his state’s dependent
situation: “[W]e are subject to a tribute to those states which even Great Britain would
have disdained to exact.”33 Not surprisingly, the New Jersey legislature retaliated, placing
29
U.S. Articles of Confederation. art. 4.; Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 157.; Jensen, The
New Nation, 339. Morris, The Forging of the Union,150.; Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace,
Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 279.
These were some of the principal supporters of Governor George Clinton, landowners in upstate
counties. The impost kept their land taxes low and the treasury full. Their support allowed him to
retain power despite opposition from the merchants and artisans of New York City who backed
Hamilton.
30
Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 146.
31
Madison. “Origin of the Constitutional Convention,” 395.; Morris, The Forging of the Union,142.
32
Gentlemen at Trenton, “Extract of a letter from a gentlemen at Trenton, New Jersey to his correspondent
in this city, dated March 20, 1786,” 2.; William Columbus Hunter, “The Commercial Policy of
New Jersey under the Confederation, 1783-1789” (Thesis., Princeton, 1922).; Fiske, The Critical
Period, 147.; Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 157.; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham,
279.
33
Hunter, “The Commercial Policy of New Jersey under the Confederation.”
an astonishing $1,800 tax on a New York municipal lighthouse located in Jersey
17 jurisdiction.34
Either at their ports or their borders, certain states imposed commercial barriers.
These barriers separated areas into distinct markets that fell within certain states’
exclusive jurisdiction. For example, Maryland enacted multiple measures to extract
monies from interstate commerce. By placing tolls on commerce going down the
Susquehanna canal, Maryland hindered Pennsylvania’s commerce because only
Maryland proprietors benefited from the toll revenue.35 Maryland’s inspection of salted
goods arriving in Baltimore made it more expensive for out-of-state producers to sell in
that market.36 Baltimore’s port wardens forced ships not belonging to Maryland’s citizens
to pay an entry fee.37 These commercial barriers isolated markets and made the states less
dependent on each other.
State commercial barriers evoked visceral reactions that threatened the union
itself. This point is analogous to T. H. Breen’s argument that, by taxing exports to
America, the British separated the home market from the American colonies.38 By doing
so they differentiated themselves from the colonies, despite the colonies’ continued
dependence on British goods. For example, Maryland did something similar with the
Fiske, The Critical Period, 147.; Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 157. Acts of Incorporation and the Supplements Thereto, Passed by the Legislatures of Pennsylvania and
Maryland in Reference to the Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal Companies (Baltimore: Bull &
Tuttle, 1839, 43-47.
36
Virgil Maxcy ed., The Laws of Maryland with the Charter, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution of the
State, and its Alterations, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United
States, and its Amendments; with a General Index. Vol. 2. (Baltimore, Phillip H. Nicklin & Co.,
1811), 3-8. This act is the re-establishment of Maryland’s inspection of salted provisions
following the breakdown of internal improvement negotiations in November 1786.
37
Jacob Harry Hollander, The Financial History of Baltimore, (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1899), 33.
For more on Baltimore’s commerce under the Confederation see Gary Lawson Browne, Baltimore
in the Nation, 1789-1861. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 3-13.;
Edward C. Papenfuse, “The Legislative Response to a Costly War: Fiscal Policy and Factional
Politics in Maryland, 1777-1789,” in Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty, ed. Ronald
Hoffman and Peter J. Albert. (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1981), 134-156.
38
T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 2.
34
35
18 entry fee for out-of-state ships. By doing so, the state not only marked arriving ships as
foreign but made out-of-state goods that much more expensive for Maryland
consumers.39 The fee not only placed citizens of different states but also the goods of
different states “on the same footing with those of foreign nations”40 In this way,
Madison claimed, the measure introduced elements “adverse to the spirit of the Union.”41
Further, by similarly separating their own market from Connecticut and New
Jersey, New York helped to transform their fellow Americans into detested Jerseymen
and Connecticut Yankees. The New York import duties treated ships from Connecticut
and New Jersey like “ships from London or Hamburg.”42 Resident New Yorker
Alexander Hamilton observed that, “the citizens of each [state] would at length come to
be considered and treated by the others in no better light than that of foreigners and
aliens.”43 Pennsylvanian Tench Coxe warned New York’s citizens that Connecticut and
New Jersey citizens would retaliate against their entrance fee: “The combined spirit of
interest and resentment would sharpen the ingenuity of their legislatures, and a few strict
laws might easily be framed, that would…compel you to grant them a share of the
impost.”44 Thus by each state extracting fees analogous to the odious British commercial
measures, John Fiske hypothesizes, “shots would have been fired and the seeds of
Hollander, The Financial History of Baltimore, 46. James Madison, Selected Writings of James Madison, ed. Ralph Louis Ketcham (Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing Company, 2006), 37.
41
James Madison. “Observations by J. M,” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2 of The Writings of
James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 363.
42
Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 146-147.; John P. Kaminski ed. et al.,, The Documentary
History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition. (Charlottesville: University of
Virginia Press, 2009) In support of Fiske’s claim about the prospect of war, contemporary Tench
Coxe suggested that New York’s actions might lead to armed conflict, “should you hastily appeal
to arms…the militia of Connecticut and New Jersey would not be contemptible antagonists.”
43
Alexander Hamilton, “Federalist #22,” in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York:
Mentor, 1961), 145.; Hamilton, “Federalist #7,”, 63.
44
Kaminski, The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution Digital Edition.
39
40
19 perennial hatred sown on the shores that look toward Manhattan Island.”45 Instead of
making Americans, these discriminatory tariffs clearly undermined any sense of unity of
the United States or shared citizenship.
Trade goods convey messages about belonging or difference. They discourage or
enhance national identity. Benedict Anderson argues that members of a nation perceive
the national community as an equal comradeship “regardless of the actual inequality and
exploitation that may prevail.”46 By opening up Western commercial channels, Eastern
canals encouraged the settlers in the West to see their relationship with Easterners as
based on equality rather than exploitation. By contrast, British goods had conveyed the
wrong message through taxation. American commerce would spread what Washington
termed the cement of interest: free and equal trade. As the general noted, “commercial
connections of all others, are the most difficult to dissolve.”47
Erecting barriers encourages resentment and separatism instead. For instance,
Maryland’s inspection tariff required all salted goods to be stamped with the word
“Baltimore,” regardless of their state of origin. In addition to making interstate commerce
more expensive, Maryland’s stamp emphasized her sovereignty at the expense of
emphasizing her allegiance to the United States. Absent such a stamp, the goods shipped
from other states conveyed the unspoken message to Maryland consumers that they
depended upon other Americans. By stamping “Baltimore” over the port of origin,
Maryland destroyed that message. It obscured the “cement of interest.”48
45
Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 146-147.
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Rev. ed. (London: Verso, 2006), 7.
47
George Washington and Archer Butler Hulbert, Washington and the West (New York: The Century Co.,
1905), 102.
48
Maxcy, The Laws of Maryland with the Charter. Vol. 2., 3-8. Contemporaries Americans associated
certain goods with geographical areas. For instance, a newspaper advertisement for ships
offloading goods hawked things like Irish linens, French Brandy, and West Indian Rum. Stephen
Wilson, “Advertisment,” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, November 28, 1786,
46
20 Free Trade Ports
Yet not only discriminatory state tariffs endangered the young union. Beyond
retaliation like the embargo of New York, the non-commercial states of Connecticut,
New Jersey, and Delaware, all caught between neighboring states with ports, enacted
some measure of free trade, to attract foreign trade. Historians John Fiske and Ernest
Wilder Spaulding record that the state of Connecticut allowed British products to be
imported without tariffs to let Connecticut consumers avoid having to pay New York’s
entrance fee.49 Pillaged by its two larger neighbors, New Jersey feared, “the day (though
Heaven forbid it!) when our native state may be drained of its resources and wealth, by
its powerful sister states”50 To prevent this, Jersey opened the ports Perth Amboy and
Powles-Hook to the commerce of the world.51 Situated like New Jersey between rival
commercial states, Delaware admitted foreign ships and goods duty-free to Wilmington
and New Castle.52 Like New Jersey, its citizens insisted that free trade with foreigners
1. Likewise contemporary Americans must have known that certain goods originated from other
states in the union. They would have known that rice probably came from South Carolina, furs
from the Ohio country, herring from Massachusetts, Connecticut or New Hampshire, and tobacco
from Virginia and possibly Maryland.
49
Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 145.; Spaulding, New York in the Critical Period, 57.
Spaulding’s source is the personal papers of New York governor George Clinton.
50
The Farmer, “To the Inhabitants of Maryland,” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser,
February 17, 1786, 3.
51
Alternative spelling for Powles-Hook is Paulus Hook. George Boughton Curtiss, The United States from
1607 to Today, vol. 2 of The Industrial Development of Nations and a History of the Tariff
Policies of the United States, and of Great Britain, Germany, France, Russia and other European
Countries (Binghampton, NY: George B. Curtis, 1912), 2: 70.; Boris I. Bittker, Bittker on the
regulation of Interstate and Foreign Commerce, ed. Brannon P. Denning, (New York: Aspen
Publishers, 1999), app 24.; Gentlemen at Trenton, “Extract of a letter from a gentlemen at Trenton,
New Jersey to his correspondent in this city, dated March 20, 1786,” The Maryland Journal and
Baltimore Advertiser, April 4, 1786, 2. For scholarship see William Columbus Hunter, The
Commercial Policy of New Jersey under the Confederation, 1783-1789, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1922), 27-28.; Jensen, The New Nation, 338.
52
An Act to establish certain free ports within the Delaware State and for the encouragement of commerce,
DE. (Minutes of the Council of the Delaware State, from 1776 to 1792) (Passed February 2,
1786); Claudia Bushman, Harold Hancock and Elizabeth Homsey ed. Proceedings of the House of
Assembly of the Delaware State, 1781-1792, and of the Constitutional Convention of 1792,
(Cranbury: Associated University Presses, Inc., 1988), 332.; State of Delaware, “An act to
establish certain free ports within the Delaware State, and for the encouragement of Commerce,”
The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, March 28, 1786, 3; Unknown, “Baltimore,
remained, “the only mode of aggrandizing the state and giving it right and
21 respectability among its sister states of the Union.”53 Faced with the ruinous effects of
their fellow Americans’ protective tariffs, these states turned in desperation to foreign
commerce.
This only further justified neighboring commercial states’ protective measures.
Threatened by British goods smuggled in from New Jersey and Connecticut, New York,
which had previously only taxed ships entering Manhattan, forced all her neighbors’
imports to submit to inspection or pay a duty.54 Because the neighboring states failed to
distinguish between foreign and American industry, New York argued that these states’
imports should be, “subject to like duties as are paid by goods imported in British vessels,
unless it be proved…that such goods were not imported…in British vessels.”55 Certain
states’ free trade policies forced their neighbors to resort to protective measures.
Americans feared that free trade with Britain would entail a return to the
consumer culture of dependence that had characterized the years before the revolution.56
The Philadelphia Gazette opined that cheap imports brought in via Wilmington and New
Castle perpetuated the same commercial dependence that they had endured in the colonial
period, “We have been blind to our own interest and our existence as a nation. We have
encouraged the importation of British gewgaws…Ready-made clothes and every article
February 14,” 2.; Adam Williamson, “For Liverpool,” The Delaware Gazette or the Faithful
Centinel, August 16, 1786, 3 (Delaware Historical Society). For scholarship see Forrest
McDonald, We the People: The Economic Origins of the Constitution, 4th ed. (New Brunswick,
NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991), 118.; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 149.
53
New Castle a free port, Petition, January 20, 1786, Jan-Feb 1786 Legislative Petitions, Record Group
1111, Delaware Public Archives.
54
Unknown, “Philadelphia, August 14,” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, August 14,
1786, 2.; Curtiss, The United States from 1607 to Today, 71.; Fiske, The Critical Period of
American History, 146-147.
55
William Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United States (Baltimore: Guggenheimer, Weil
& Co., 1893), 49.; Curtiss, The United States from 1607 to Today, 67.
56
For more on the colonial consumer culture see Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 2.: Laurel
Thatcher Ulrich, The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth,
(Vintage Books: New York, 2001), 175-177. 22 of merchandise…so that valuable branch of men, the mechanics, would… be reduced
to beggary.”57 In New York, a letter from the tradesmen and manufacturers of the city
observed that the Americans’ renewed penchant for British luxuries seemed a step
backward: “[F]oreign importations have embarrassed the infant arts in America. We are
sensible that… they nourish a spirit of dependence, which tends in some degree to defeat
the purposes of our late Revolution”58 They recognized that the free influx of British
goods struck at the heart of their newborn polity’s raison d’etre.
British goods not only made the former colonies economically subservient, but
culturally dependent. To Philadelphia merchant Tench Coxe, to consume English goods
encouraged Americans to ape English manners, corrupting the United States’ emerging
cultural identity. By reverting to the conspicuous consumption of the colonial era and
purchasing British products merely “because they were foreign, showy or expensive,” his
countrymen condemned themselves to be poor imitations of real Britons, utterly lacking
in originality. By adopting the habits of their former oppressors, Coxe argued, Americans
cut themselves off from developing any traditions distinctly their own. By failing to wean
themselves off of the cultural products of England, they would never develop the taste for
appropriately American consumer products such as “dresses, furniture and carriages.”59
By allowing British goods in duty free, free trade ports let Britain accomplish through
57
Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United States, 65-66.
Original Letter dated November 17, 1788. Tradesmen and Manufacturers of New York, “A letter from
the Tradesmen and Manufacturers of New York to the Tradesmen and Manufacturers of Boston,”
The American Museum or Repository of Ancient and Modern Fugitive Pieces, &c. Prose and
Poetical. January 30, 1789, 54.; Andrew W. Young, National Economy: A History of the
American Protective System and its Effects upon the Several Branches of Domestic Industry. (New
York: N. C. Miller, 1864), 17.; David Hastings Mason, 1783 to 1789, vol. 1 of A Short Tariff
History of the United States from the Earliest to the Present Time (Chicago: David Hastings
Mason, 1884), 73.; Burrows and Wallace, Gotham, 279.
59
Tench Coxe, A View of the United States of America, in a Series of Papers, Written at Various Times
Between the Years 1787 and 1794 (Philadelphia: Printed for William Hall and Wrigley &
Berriman, 1794), 50. This portion is taken from an address Coxe made before a group of
businessmen at the University of Pennsylvania on August 9, 1787. It gives a general overview of
the commercial situation during the preceding years. 58
commerce what she could not in war: making the former colonies culturally
23 subservient to the mother country.
Brought in duty free, cheap imported goods conveyed a message that threatened
pride in dearly won self-determination. To newly independent Americans, the ease with
which cheap British goods overwhelmed America’s fledgling manufactures in continental
markets made it seem futile to distinguish between themselves and their former mother
country. The obvious superiority of British manufactures recast the recent fight for
American self-determination as a foolish mistake. This explains the New York
manufacturers’ sentiment and why Coxe derided, “our untimely passion for European
luxuries as a malignant and alarming symptom, threatening convulsions and dissolution
to the political body.”60 To Coxe, such consumption by his fellow Americans implied a
loss of pride in their new country. What was the point of independence if Americans
willingly remained under “the tyranny of foreign fashions”?61
By contrast, tariffs on foreign commerce conveyed pride in the new union.
Tariffs, like a 1786 Massachusetts act, provided protection from competition by foreign
products to manufactures of any state in the union.62 Not only did this tariff make British
goods more expensive, but it also emphasized the new nation’s sovereignty. Without such
tariffs, nothing differentiated domestic products from foreign imports. Such tariffs
ensured that British goods conveyed a message about difference, while American
manufactures carried a message of belonging. They made the British into a “them” and
60
Coxe, A View of the United States of America, 50.
Coxe, A View of the United States of America, 53.
62
Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United States, 150.; Curtiss, The United States from
1607 to Today, 66. The original act is from November 17, 1786. There was to my knowledge no
physical stamp indicating that a duty had been paid on a good. But consumers might know that a
tariff had been paid on a particular good because tariff acts were often printed in the newspapers
of the time. For example a 1785 Pennsylvania tariff act was printed in the Pennsylvania Gazette.
Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United States, 146.
61
fellow Americans into an US. In Tench Coxe’s words, such imposts became “the
24 means of our political salvation.”63 Tariffs on foreign goods created pride in the union’s
self-determination by giving real meaning to the phrase in the Massachusetts tariff act,
“manufacture…of the United States of America.”64
Complete openness threatened self-determination. Free trade ports opened by
Delaware and New Jersey contradicted the sentiment behind their sister states’ tariffs on
foreign commerce. Through such imposts, states designated that certain goods created an
“us” and that other goods created a “them.” Without such differentiation, Delaware and
New Jersey threatened to drown the products of their compatriots in a sea of foreign
commerce. By failing to discriminate between an “us” and a “them,” Delaware and New
Jersey let an emerging American identity drown, too, endangering the integrity of the
union.
Two Sides of the Same Coin
Yet these twin dangers also suggested a dual solution to the Confederation’s
troubles. First, to ensure the United States’ future integrity, the states needed to make free
and equal trade between Americans, no matter their state, a guiding principle. Second, to
secure the union’s hard-won self-determination, the states needed comprehensive
protection against foreign goods. Like the twin terrors, these two solutions would
reinforce one another. By addressing one problem, the states simultaneously addressed
the other. For example, by removing interstate tariffs, commercial states erased the
justification for their neighbors’ free trade policies. Conversely, by repealing free trade
policies, non-commercial states removed the reason for their sister states’ inspection
laws.
63
64
Coxe, A View of the United States of America, 54.
Hill, The First Stages of the Tariff Policy of the United States, 150.; Curtiss, The United States from
1607 to Today, 66. 25 But this solution could not come from Congress. Under the Confederation’s
political structure, states did not have incentive to give up power to the federal
government and by extension their neighbors if they could absolutely avoid it. For
example, in 1783 Congress proposed the impost amendment, a five percent federal tariff
on foreign goods. With all of the other states voting to grant Congress the power to levy
the impost, in May 1786 New York insisted that New York customs officials act as
collectors. Further, the state required that the impost be collected in New York’s paper
currency. In effect New York retained its’ state impost, and thus the power to tax its
neighbors, under the guise of a federal policy. Having given up its free trade policy, New
Jersey took it upon itself to force New York to accept the impost amendment on federal
terms. To do this, New Jersey threatened to stop all further requisition payments to
Congress if New York was not brought to heel. 65
Hence, reform under the Articles could only go so far. To reach a solution, there
had to be some other spark, some different incentive for states to cooperate. This is where
interstate internal improvements enter the picture. In negotiating interstate internal
improvements, states had to depend on each other to ensure an enterprise got off the
ground. If even one state got any impression that it’s neighbor had failed to afford it
equal treatment, it could walk away. Thus, as we will see, an early step in negotiation was
for states to work towards a uniform commercial policy, both in anticipation of future
interstate commerce and to remove potential sticking points. In essence, making free and
65
James Madison. “To James Monroe, April 9th, 1786.” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2 of The
Writings of James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 234.; Fiske, The Critical
Period of American History, 219.; Jensen, The New Nation, 411-416.; McDonald, We the People,
292.; Jack N. Rakove, The Beginnings of National Politics, 338-341.; Pauline Maier, Ratification:
The People Debate the Constitution, 1787-1788, (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010), 324. The
various states allowed Congress the power to levy the impost each on different terms. Some states
allowed Congress to hold the power for 25 years. Other states allowed it other periods of time.
equal trade between Americans, regardless of state, a guiding principle was a first
26 essential condition in planning interstate internal improvements.
Burying Their Mutual Jealousies
Internal Improvement Negotiations
I discuss in the following sections the initial competition between Pennsylvania
and Maryland over improving the Schuylkill River and canalizing the Susquehanna
River; negotiations between Virginia and Maryland over the Potomac canal and a road
from the Potomac to the Ohio; and finally the negotiations between Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Delaware over shared waterways and various trade duties. The first
provides a counter-example where plans for state internal improvements exacerbated
competition. The latter two provide case studies where states set aside discriminatory
commercial policies in favor of cooperation. All affected the run-up to the Annapolis
Convention and by extension the Constitutional Convention.
Pennsylvania and Maryland Internal Improvements 1783-4
Pennsylvania’s western settlers proved ambivalent in their loyalty to the state
government. The Susquehanna River directed the Wyoming Valley’s trade toward
Baltimore and away from Philadelphia. In October 1784, Philadelphia’s merchants
earned the resentment of the valley’s inhabitants by evicting them from their homes. To
the settlers in the Wyoming Valley, a distant rapacious government in Philadelphia
threatened all they held dear, “We care not under what State we live…in mercy,
goodness, wisdom, justice… leave us our possessions, the dearest pledge of our
brothers…which their hands have cultivated, and their blood spilt in the cause of their
country, has enriched.”66 Pennsylvania’s western settlers saw eastern rule as exploitation,
66
David Craft, History of Scranton, Penn: With full outline of the natural advantages, accounts of the
breaking the bonds of affection so recently forged by their collective effort in the
27 American Revolution.
Yet to Philadelphia merchants, the Susquehanna valley inhabitants’ illicit trade
with Maryland endangered Pennsylvania’s commerce and by extension the body politic.
Western timber, coal, and produce went to Baltimore instead of Philadelphia.67 To
Philadelphians this attested more powerfully than citizenship to which polity the valley
residents belonged. For example, Thomas Paine complained of how, through commerce,
Maryland stole the affections of the western settlers: “The commerce and traffic of the
Back country members goes to Baltimore. From thence are their imports purchased, and
thence do their exports go. They come here to legislate, and go there to trade…”68 The
valley’s commercial relations represented a dangerous affinity for Maryland that
threatened Pennsylvania’s political integrity.
But from the perspective of Pennsylvania’s western settlers, eastern neglect
forced them to deal with Maryland. In the spring, boatmen braved the Susquehanna’s
rapids rather than the bad roads to Philadelphia.69 Timber and other goods flowed down
the river due to eastern refusal to use western taxes to improve those roads.70 In the minds
of Pennsylvania’s western settlers, they had not betrayed their state. It had betrayed them
by not heeding their pleas. One petitioner to the government in Philadelphia wrote: “The
Marylanders have indeed been among us. They… lay before us the great advantages of a
Indian tribes, early settlements, Connecticut’s claim to the Wyoming Valley, the Trenton decree
down to the present time, (Knoxville: H.W. Crew, 1891), 52.; Peter S. Onuf, The Origins of the
Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775-1787, (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 65.
67
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 129.; Johann Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation: 1783-1784, trans.
Alfred Morrison (Philadelphia: William J. Campbell, 1911), 116.
68
James Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 1780-1860, (Manchester, NH: Ayer
Publishing, 1947), 8.
69
David Sweeney. “Advertisement.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, April 11, 1786, 4.;
Schoepf, Travels in the Confederation, 229-230. Schoepf relates that nearly 9 months out of the
year boats could almost reach Bedford on the Juniata, a tributary of the Susquehanna.
70
Unknown “Advertisement.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, May 12, 1786, 3.
28 near navigation…The people at present seem Avers to have any Intercoas with them,
but what neglect & disappointment may soon produce in this matter needs no great
penetration.”71Put simply, the government in Philadelphia had lost the allegiance of the
Western settlers by neglecting their needs.
Against this backdrop, the internal improvements planned by both Pennsylvania
and Maryland in 1783-84 only exacerbated the animosity between these states. In
September 1783, the merchants of Philadelphia urged the general assembly to recapture
their lost hinterland once again, “conducting the streams of commerce from the river
Susquehanna to the port of Philadelphia.”72 The Pennsylvania legislature promptly
authorized improving the navigation eastward from Philadelphia along the Schuylkill
River with roads to bridge the gap between the headwaters of the Schuylkill and the
Susquehanna.73 In turn, in November 1783 Maryland approved construction of a canal up
the Susquehanna River to the border with Pennsylvania.74 In response, Pennsylvania
passed a law imposing a ruinous fine of $2000 upon anyone who removed the boulders
that made the Susquehanna immediately north of the Maryland border hazardous.75 As
historian John Lauritz Larson writes, “Few examples mocked the ‘spirit of improvement’
71
Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 7.
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 129. This is a report of the committee for inland navigation. This resolution
came out of a petition by the merchants of Philadelphia. Hazard, Commencing 1783, 212. The
merchants who signed the petition were John Nixon, Isaac Hazlehurst, Clement Biddle, Charles
Pettit, John Ross, and J. M. Nesbitt.
73
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 128.; M. Carey and J. Bioren ed., Laws of the Commonwealth of
Pennsylvania, from the Fourteenth Day of October, One Thousand Seven Hundred, to the Sixth
Day of April, One Thousand Eight Hundred and Two. vol. 2, (Philadelphia: Carey and Bioren,
1803), 467.; Pennsylvania. General Assembly. Committee of Ways and Means, Plan of a Report
of the Committee of Ways and Means (Philadelphia: s.n., 1785), 11.; Washington. “To Benjamin
Harrison October 10, 1784,” 402-414.
74
Acts of Incorporation and the Supplements Thereto, 43-47.
75
John Lauritz Larson, Internal Improvement: National Public Works and the Promise of Popular
Government, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 25.; Livingood, The
Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 33.
72
29 more than the bitter rivalry between Baltimore and Philadelphia over the Susquehanna
River.”76
Through both free trade and protection, Pennsylvania tried to strengthen her own
state economy at the expense of another. By preventing improvements to the
Susquehanna, Pennsylvania tried to preserve a barrier between the Western settlers and
Baltimore. Conversely by canalizing the Schuylkill and building western roads, the state
sought to tie the western settlers to Philadelphia. Though Pennsylvania succeeded in
fostering a particular identity, she had to pursue different policies: building a free trade
zone in her interior and instituting protective measures at her borders.
Chronology of the Virginia-Maryland Negotiations
September 1784-Washington tours Virginia’s Western settlements
October 1784-Virginia legislature incorporates the Potomac Canal Company
November 1784-Maryland legislature incorporates its own Potomac Canal Company
March 1785-Mount Vernon Conference between Maryland and Virginia
March 1785-Maryland and Virginia propose building a road through Pennsylvania
December 1785-Maryland invites Delaware and Pennsylvania to discuss commerce
September 1786-Annapolis Convention between Virginia, Delaware, Pennsylvania,
New York, and New Jersey
Many eighteenth-century Americans believed commercial ties bound their young
union together. After his 1784 trip to Virginia’s western settlements, George Washington
became a fervent advocate of internal improvements. He proposed constructing a canal
on the Potomac River and a road to the headwaters of the Ohio River to curb western
settlers’ fickle flirtations with Britain, Spain, and secession.77 In Washington’s mind,
76
77
Larson, Internal Improvement, 23.
George Washington and Archer Butler Hulbert, Washington and the West (New York: The Century Co.,
1905), 92-94.Washington worried that the trade of the Ohio River would flow down to New
these internal improvements encouraged western settlers’ loyalty to Eastern
30 governments: “Let us open a good communication with the settlements west of us—
extend the inland navigation…apply the cement of interest to bind all parts of it
together,”78 These internal improvements would cure the localism and provincialism
plaguing the West by enlarging the market and thereby consolidating the new union.
The rising American empire in the west forced eastern states to bury their mutual
jealousies in favor of cooperation. Baltimore interests feared a Potomac canal might
threaten their dominance of the Chesapeake.79 But that event seemed preferable to
western separatism or Britain and Spain capturing western trade while Eastern states
bickered. Meanwhile Pennsylvanians resented Maryland and Virginia roads that siphoned
off “the Trade with the Western Parts of our own State.”80 Yet the state entertained a joint
proposal by her southern neighbors to build a road from the headwaters of the Potomac to
those of the Ohio River.81 The eastern states sacrificed individual interests to further
transportation projects that would enlarge the American market.
Orleans and with it the western settler’s allegiance. John Lauritz Larson, Internal
Improvement,10-16.; Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 147-153,
200-201. During the Confederation, eastern governments could not control their settlers. In the
north, Vermont continued to declare its independence from New Hampshire. Further south,
settlers in what is now eastern Tennessee seceded from North Carolina to form the State of
Franklin. Jensen, The New Nation, 335-337.; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 4, 225-226.;
Merrill Jensen, “The Sovereign States: Their Antagonisms and Rivalries and Some
Consequences,” in Sovereign States in an Age of Uncertainty, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J.
Albert. (Charlottesville: The University of Virginia Press, 1981), 242.; Onuf, The Origins of the
Federal Republic, xv.
78
Washington and Hulbert, Washington and the West, 99-100. The term inland navigation often refers to
canals. Ron Chernow, Washington, A Life, (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 480-481. For more
on Washington and the Potomac canal see Walter Sanderlin, The Great National Project: A
History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946), 27-32.;
Thomas F. Hahn, The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: Pathway to the Nation’s Capital, (Metuchen,
N.J.: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984), 13-29.; Ronald Shaw, Canals for a Nation: The Canal Era
in the United States, 1790-1860 (Lexington: The University of Kentucky Press, 1990), 7-8.;
Holton, “Did Democracy Cause the Recession that Led to the Constitution?,” 450.
79
George Washington. “To Thomas Jefferson March 29, 1784,” in 1782-1785, ed. Worthington Chauncey
Ford, vol. 10 of The Writings of George Washington (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 375377.
80
Hazard ed., Commencing 1783, 377.
81
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 60-61.; George Washington. “To Richard Henry Lee, President of Congress,
31 Yet to construct an adequate legal framework for interstate commerce, states
had to regard their neighbors’ citizens as equals to their own. To do so, states had to
emphasize the equality and mutual advantage that underlay the union. Political scientist
David Hendrickson claims that prior to the Constitution, “the sense of common
nationality was more a consequence of mutual entanglement and exiguous necessity than
of a sense of common peoplehood.”82 In making the Potomac a public highway open to
all United States citizens, Virginia and Maryland enshrined the equality between
participants in a common market.83 In building an interstate political economy, they lay
the groundwork for the union.
Virginia and Maryland approached the discussions about jurisdiction over shared
waterways as a chance to enact a sound interstate commercial policy. Virginia’s general
assembly incorporated the Potomac canal in October 1784.84 The following month,
Maryland’s legislature granted a charter identical to that passed by Virginia, down to the
tolls for products passing through the canal.85 Yet this did not satisfy the Virginia general
assembly as enough to prevent “the great inconveniences…found to result from the want
of some concerted regulations between this State and the State of Maryland.”86 Though
February 8, 1785,” in 1782-1785, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford, vol. 10 of The Writings of
George Washington (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1891), 437-438.; Rowland, “The Mount
Vernon Conference,” 421.
82
Hendrickson, Peace Pact, xi.
83
Virgil Maxcy ed., The Laws of Maryland with the Charter, The Bill of Rights, The Constitution of the
State, and its Alterations, The Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution of the United
States, and its Amendments; with a General Index. Vol. 1. (Baltimore, Phillip H. Nicklin & Co.,
1811), 536-540.; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 250. 84
An Act for opening and extending the navigation of the Potomac River, VA. (Congressional Edition
1839) (Passed October 1784).: Washington, “To Benjamin Harrison October 10, 1784,” 402-414.;
James Madison. “To Thomas Jefferson January 9, 1785,” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2
of The Writings of James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 104.
85
An act for establishing a company for opening and extending the navigation of the river Potomac, MD.
(Congressional Edition 1839) (Passed November 1784).
86
James Madison. “To Thomas Jefferson, March 16, 1784,” in 1783-1787, ed. Gaillard Hunt, vol. 2 of The
Writings of James Madison (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 41-42. Madison describes in
a letter to Jefferson foreign merchant ships exploiting the lack of concert between the two states.
The merchants would play the two states against each other by favoring whichever had the lowest
32 Virginia applauded the dual canal charters as a first step toward a uniform policy, the
state’s general assembly proposed as the only permanent solution that the two states
“frame such liberal and equitable regulations concerning the said river as may be
mutually advantageous.”87 The two states seized the impetus from the canal proposal as
an opportunity to further interstate commerce.
During the Mount Vernon conference on the Potomac canal, Virginia and
Maryland enacted measures that pushed them toward becoming a common market. The
two states agreed not to lay tolls on each other’s goods. But more importantly, Virginia
and Maryland concurred on fixed currency values as well as the same import and export
duties.88 In the words of Virginia commissioner and future anti-federalist George Mason,
by not merely removing obstacles but by actively working toward a common market, the
conference produced “a compact of such just and mutual principles, that executed with
good faith, will perpetuate harmony, friendship and good offices between the two
states.”89 In other words, by ensuring that each state saw the relationship as equitable, the
negotiators furthered mutual affection between neighbors.
Though on the surface they produced a mere trade compact, the negotiators at
Mount Vernon actually made a profound statement affirming a larger identity. The
agreement repealed commercial measures that had sharpened the differences between the
two states, while enacting others that made a statement about belonging. For example,
customs duties sparking a race to the bottom between the two states. Rowland, “The Mount
Vernon Conference,” 413.; Morris, The Forging of the Union, 248.
87
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 414. Kate Mason Rowland, The Life of George Mason,
1725-1792 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1892), 2; 72.
88
Maxcy, The Laws of Maryland with the Charter, Vol. 1., 536-540.; Fiske, The Critical Period, 214.;
Morris, The Forging of the Union, 250.; Ferling, A Leap in the Dark, 275.
89
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 418. ; Rowland, The Life of George Mason, appendix. The
Maryland appointees were Samuel Chase, Thomas Stone, and Daniel of St. Thomas Jenifer. The
Virginia commissioners in attendance were George Mason and Alexander Henderson. James
Madison and Edmund Randolph were also appointed but did not receive notice of their
appointment in time to attend.
33 differing currency as well as differing import and export duties helped the citizens of
each state to identify as either Virginians or Marylanders. These measures emphasized
where one state’s sovereignty ended and another’s began. Removing such measures was
akin to abolishing a border. In this vein, commissioner George Mason called the
agreement “such a fair and liberal compact, as might prove a lasting cement of friendship
between the two states.”90 In the quote, Mason implicitly understood the interplay
between commercial differences and perceiving different identities. He understood that
removing commercial measures that encouraged animosity between neighboring states
would encourage both trade and affection across borders.
In the conference’s wake, Virginia and Maryland spread the principle of free and
equal trade between Americans to neighboring states. To Pennsylvania, they proposed
extending the Potomac navigation via a road connecting it with the Ohio River.91 In a
mirror of the infrastructure project’s extension, Virginia and Maryland expanded the legal
framework for interstate commerce, inviting Pennsylvania and Delaware to confer with
them on common commercial regulations.92 Through a joint resolution, both states
insisted that Pennsylvania could not enact interstate improvements without acceding to
the reality of the common market and giving “every encouragement to measures which
have for their object, the interest and convenience of their citizens, and those of the other
90
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 417. For more on Mason during the Mount Vernon
Conference see Rowland, The Life of George Mason, appendix.; Jeff Broadwater, George Mason,
Forgotten Founder, (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 155.
91
Pennsylvania. Supreme Executive Council., Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania:
From its Organization to the Termination of the Revolution, Vol. 14. (Harrisburg: Theo. Fenn &
Co., 1853), 467.; Washington. “To Richard Henry Lee, President of Congress, February 8, 1785,”
438.; Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 421. Fiske, The Critical Period, 214.; Morris,
The Forging of the Union, 250. All plans for the roads had it originating at Cumberland. But the
destination varied in between different tributaries of the Ohio River. The different options
mentioned were the Mongahela, the Cheat, and the Youghegany.
92
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 424.; Fiske, The Critical Period, 215. Fiske briefly
mentions the Chesapeake and Delaware in regard to Virginia and Maryland’s reasoning to consult
Pennsylvania and Delaware: “since the scheme should rightly include a canal between the
Delaware River and the Chesapeake Bay. And why not also consult with these two states about a
uniform system of duties?” Ferling, A Leap in the Dark, 275.
States in the Union.”93 The two states hoped that Pennsylvania and Delaware would
34 understand that all Americans, regardless of state, had a mutual interest in a common
framework for interstate trade.
After Mount Vernon, Virginia commissioners expected the 1786 Annapolis
conference to be like Maryland and Virginia’s earlier discovery of mutual interests, writ
large. Virginia’s invitation to all the other states to attend the Annapolis conference was
based on the hope that mutually beneficial commercial agreements might strengthen their
common attachments. The invitation to the meeting urged attending states to “examine
the relative situations and trade of the said States; to consider how far a uniform system
in their commercial regulations may be necessary to their common interest and their
permanent harmony.”94 Virginia expected this meeting would cure the myopically
discriminatory state measures plaguing the Confederation.
Chronology of the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware Negotiations
November 1785-Pennsylvania invites Maryland and Delaware to negotiate concerning
the Susquehanna canal and navigation between Chesapeake and Delaware Bays.
Maryland invites Pennsylvania and Delaware to talk about commerce.
January 1786-Delaware ignores invitation to negotiate.
February 1786- Delaware makes Wilmington and New Castle into duty-free ports.
March 12, 1786-Maryland declines invitation to the Annapolis Convention.
March 30, 1786-Maryland drops its salt duty as a gesture of good faith.
June 15, 1786-Delaware accepts negotiation proposal and invitation to Annapolis.
September 11-14, 1786-Annapolis Convention meets.
November 1786-Canal negotiations break down, and Maryland reinstates salt duty.
93
94
Rowland, “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 422. Hazard, Commencing 1786, 521.; Unknown, “Baltimore, February 14,” The Maryland Journal and
Baltimore Advertiser, February 14, 1786, 2.
35 Like the Virginia-Maryland negotiations, the discussions between Pennsylvania,
Maryland, and Delaware also encouraged interstate cooperation. On November 25, 1785,
the president of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Benjamin Franklin, sent a letter to the
governors of Maryland and Delaware proposing negotiations over opening their shared
waterways. To secure Maryland’s cooperation in building a canal between Chesapeake
Bay and Delaware Bay, Pennsylvania offered to open the Susquehanna River. 95 Unlike
the adversarial interstate tariff system, Franklin proposed: “The ground upon which it is
proposed to conduct this negotiation is that of equal and reciprocal advantages….it is the
only permanent basis of political contract.” 96 Understanding its dependence upon its
neighbors, Pennsylvania offered concessions.
Even as Pennsylvania’s proposal was in transit to Maryland and Delaware,
Maryland proposed to Pennsylvania and Delaware that they extend their negotiations to
the subject of commercial regulations. Following the Mount Vernon commissioners’
recommendations, Maryland suggested that Pennsylvania and Delaware confer with
Maryland about trade duties. On November 27, the state invited her neighbors to appoint
95
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 78.This is the letter Franklin wrote to the Pennsylvania Commissioners in
October 1786. Franklin knew Maryland’s price would be the Susquehanna navigation from the
start of negotiations in November 1785. Pennsylvania appointed Francis Hopkinson, David
Rittenhouse, John Ewing, Robert Milligan, and George Lattimer to negotiate with Maryland and
Delaware. Hazard, Commencing 1786, 755.
96
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 540-541. The letter to Maryland is dating November 25, 1785 while the
letter to Delaware is dated the next day. This initial proposal came from a November 18, 1786
report by the committee on inland navigation. Hazard, Commencing 1783, 538-539. So far the
only other scholars that have examined the 1785-1786 negotiations between Delaware, Maryland,
and Pennsylvania are Ralph D. Gray and James Livingood. Livingood, The PhiladelphiaBaltimore Trade Rivalry, 91.; Gray, The National Waterway, 8. Livingood cites the two initial
letters Pennsylvania sent to Maryland and Delaware. Gray cites a procedural vote in the Delaware
general assembly appointing commissioners to meet with Pennsylvania and Maryland as well as a
letter by George Washington and the earlier Delaware legislative resolution initially refusing to
negotiate. He also cites Delaware: A Guide to the First State as support for a claim that there was a
November 27, 1786 meeting between the 3 states in Wilmington. This last claim is incorrect and
will be addressed later in the paper.
commissioners to discuss the matter.97 Pennsylvania sent a positive reply four days
36 later.98 From a mere discussion of interstate transportation, the negotiations expanded to
encompass a legal framework for interstate trade.
By contrast, Delaware dismissed her neighbors’ invitations. A committee of the
Delaware general assembly ignored Pennsylvania’s invitation concerning the Chesapeake
and Delaware canal. The legislators felt that the canal would injure Delaware’s carrying
trade across the Delmarva Peninsula. Roads across the peninsula terminated at the
growing ports of New Castle and Wilmington, where ships loaded goods. The committee
worried that the canal would allow ships to bypass these two ports. In place of the canal,
the committee recommended road improvements. At the same time, it shelved
Maryland’s invitation to discuss interstate commerce laws, fearing that such discussions
might lead to demands that Delaware raise its duties on foreign goods to match its
neighbors’ imposts on overseas commerce.99 At least initially, Delaware ignored offers to
negotiate.
97
Maryland General Assembly, Votes and Proceedings of the Senate (Annapolis: December 1785)
reproduced in William Hand Browne, Edward C. Papenfuse, et. al. eds., Archives of Maryland,
215+ volumes, (Baltimore and Annapolis, Md., 1883-), 3185: 730 (hereinafter cited as Archives of
Maryland). The votes and proceedings of the Maryland legislature record that Maryland received
Pennsylvania’s invitation to discuss the canals on December 3. This was too late for the November
27 letter to be a reply to Pennsylvania. Instead it seems to be independent invitation inspired by
the Mount Vernon conference since the Maryland general assembly was ratifying the agreement
from that conference at the time. (Archives of Maryland) 3185: 724.; Hazard, Commencing 1783,
542. This is merely a message accompanying the Maryland general assembly resolutions inviting
Pennsylvania to consider discussing interstate commerce. The actual resolutions have been lost,
but their content survives in a contemporary Delaware general assembly report. Apparently
Maryland sent the resolutions to Delaware as well, and the Delaware report describes their content
before dismissing the invitation. Though Delaware’s dismissal is only recorded by a Delaware
report not in either of the larger states’ records. Report upon the President’s Message of 11th
January, 1786, Report, January 16, 1786, Jan-Feb 1786 Resolutions & Reports, Record Group
1111, Delaware Public Archives.
98
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 543. This is Pennsylvania’s reply, a personal message from Franklin to
governor Smallwood of Maryland.
99
Report upon the President’s Message of 11th January, 1786, Report, January 16, 1786, Jan-Feb 1786
Resolutions & Reports, Record Group 1111, Delaware Public Archives.; Gray, The National
Waterway, 8.
37 Yet Delaware’s neighbors seem to have been oblivious to the little state’s
reluctance to proceed. The following month the Maryland legislature sent the Delaware
general assembly a list of its negotiating commissioners, implying that it anticipated
Delaware’s participation.100 Indeed, the vice president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme
Executive Council Charles Biddle announced that negotiations with both states had
commenced, possibly indicating that Delaware had neglected to notify its neighbors.101
Though Delaware remained hesitant to participate, her larger neighbors proceeded
without her.
The little state ignored the invitations because of the deep mistrust wrought by her
neighbors’ exploitative tariffs. A few weeks after ignoring the proposals from Maryland
and Pennsylvania, Delaware initiated a free trade policy.102 Through New Castle, Irish
linens, West Indian rum, and French brandy alleviated the pinch of her neighbor’s
imposts.103 In a petition to the legislature, the inhabitants of New Castle had earlier
100
Annapolis 21st February, Communication, February 21, 1786, May-June 1786 Communications, Record
Group 1111, Delaware Public Archives. Maryland appointed Samuel Chase, Samuel Hughes,
Peregrine Letterbury, William Smith, William Hemly, and Baltimore Town. By the House of
Delegates-Feb. 21st 1786, Communication, February 21, 1786, May-June 1786 Communications,
Record Group 1111, Delaware Public Archives. This is a copy from the Delaware general
assembly records of the Maryland announcement that it had appointed negotiating commissioners.
This and the accompanying Pennsylvania announcement suggest that the two states assumed their
smaller neighbor would participate. Further there is no record of the Delaware general assembly
report dismissing the Pennsylvania and Maryland invitations in either of the larger states’ records
to my knowledge. This evidence argues Delaware neglected to inform its larger neighbors of its
decision. Hazard, Commencing 1786,
101
Pennsylvania. Supreme Executive Council., Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania,
644. Dated February 23, 1786.
102
An Act to establish certain free ports within the Delaware State and for the encouragement of commerce
DE. (Minutes of the Council of the Delaware State, from 1776 to 1792) (Passed February 2,
1786); Bushman, Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State, 332.; State of
Delaware, “An act to establish certain free ports within the Delaware State, and for the
encouragement of commerce,” 3.; McDonald, We the People, 118.
103
Stephen Wilson, “Advertisment,” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, November 28, 1786,
1.; Unknown, “Wilmington, July 5, 1786,” The Delaware Gazette or the Faithful Centinel, July 5,
1786, 1 (Delaware Historical Society).; Robert Taylor, “Advertisment,” The Delaware Gazette or
the Faithful Centinel, November 22, 1786, 1 (Delaware Historical Society).; Vincent & Joseph
Gilpin & Co., “Advertisment,” The Delaware Gazette or the Faithful Centinel, April 11 1787, 2
(Delaware Historical Society).; Alcohol like Holland gin, Liverpool beer and London porter seems
to be a large portion of imports. Although there is also mention of salt, coffee, dry goods, and mill
38 begged the assembly to throw the state to the mercies of foreign trade to “emancipate
our Commerce from the arising and dependent situation in which it is at present subject
to Pennsylvania, free us from the payment of heavy Duties.”104 In light of this action,
Delaware’s government must have initially thought that the negotiations would further
the aims of its commercial neighbors to the detriment of her own.
Meanwhile, with work underway on Maryland’s Susquehanna canal, Delaware’s
fellow Chesapeake states dreamed of commercial empire in the West. By March, workers
had completed a two-mile cut. Company officials such as Samuel Purviance hoped this
would form the first link in a great western waterway.105 According to one newspaper
article, with an extension of Maryland’s canal through Pennsylvania, “Susquehannah,
that great source of the Chesapeake, will, no doubt in a short time pour into the lap of
commerce the immense treasures with which her various and fertile branches may
abound.”106 Like the Potomac canal to the south, the Susquehanna canal seemed to its
builders like the gateway to immense fortunes awaiting them across the Appalachians.
stones.
New Castle a free port, Petition, January 20, 1786, Jan-Feb 1786 Legislative Petitions, Record Group
1111, Delaware Public Archives.
105
The Maryland proprietors of the Susquehanna canal hired as their engineer James Brindley, the nephew
of the James Brindley that had constructed the Duke of Bridgewater’s canal in England. George
Washington, The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, ed. Theodore J. Crackel.
Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2008. Washington Diary Entries March 29
& 31, 1786. Washington to Moultrie, May 25, 1786. Samuel Hughes, a Maryland legislator and
one of the negotiating commissioners, was involved with the canal in some capacity. Washington,
The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition. Washington to Moultrie, June 14, 1786. A
Washington letter mentions him as the manager. From Samuel Purviance to Washington, May 12,
1786. He also was one of the canal proprietors. Acts of Incorporation and the Supplements
Thereto, Passed by the Legislatures of Pennsylvania and Maryland in Reference to the
Susquehanna and Tidewater Canal Companies, 43-47. Samuel Purviance also acted in some
managerial capacity based on his letters to Washington. The canal’s proprietors hoped that with
Pennsylvania’s cooperation they might extend the canal north and then construct a portage to the
Alleghany River, thus rivaling the Potomac canal’s planned portage. Washington, The Papers of
George Washington Digital Edition. Samuel Purviance to Washington, March 6, 1786.
106
Unknown. “Philadelphia, March 25. ” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, March 31,
1786, 2.
104
39 Unaware of Delaware’s decision to ignore negotiation proposals, businessmen
in neighboring states eagerly anticipated the interstate common market created by inland
navigation. One newspaper contributor to The Maryland Journal and Baltimore
Advertiser wrote warmly of the negotiations: “It is with pleasure we…find such a
friendly disposition in the different Legislatures of Maryland, Pennsylvania and the other
governments, towards improvements of that kind.”107 News that Pennsylvania would
improve the Susquehanna near the border encouraged new subscriptions for funds for the
canal on the Maryland side and caused a jump in riverside real estate’s value.108 An
advertisement for land read: “From the measures lately taken by the States of Maryland,
Pennsylvania and Delaware, for the improvement of inland navigation, Susquehannah
will probably be the channel for a considerable part of the Western trade.”109 Commercial
interests expected internal improvements to unlock the treasures of interstate commerce. Plans for internal improvements highlighted barriers to a uniform system of
commercial regulation. Based on earlier promises to Pennsylvania, Maryland dropped her
port duty on salt in March 1786 until such time as Virginia and Pennsylvania instituted
107
Unknown. “Philadelphia, March 25.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, March 31, 1786,
2. The reference to other governments probably includes both Delaware and Virginia. The same
article talks about the Potomac canal juxtaposing different state governments support for that
project with support for the Susquehanna.
108
Gabriel Christie. “Advertisement.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, February 21, 1786,
3. The Proprietors of the Susquehanna canal began meeting again in February 1786 at the same
time the Maryland government announced its’ cooperation. That one of the proprietors, Samuel
Hughes, was also a legislator explains the timing. Maxcy, The Laws of Maryland with the Charter.
Vol 1. 476-477. ; Maryland. General Assembly. Senate. Votes and Proceedings of the Senate of
the State of Maryland, (Frederick Green: Annapolis, 1787), 8. Further two of Maryland’s
negotiation commissioners were proprietors, Hughes and William Smith. Hazard, Commencing
1783, 744. The proprietors opened public stock subscriptions in July 1786. . Gabriel Christie.
“Advertisement.” The Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, July 12, 1786, 3. The
Pennsylvania legislature does not seem to have approved a canal per say on its side of the
Susquehanna. Rather they agreed to improve the river by removing obstructions or straightening
channels. To underwrite this project they planed to open subscriptions for funds. Unknown.
“Philadelphia, March 25.” 2. This reversed their earlier policy of prohibiting improvements in the
stretch near the Baltimore border. Unknown, “Mill-Seats. To be Sold,” The Maryland Journal and
Baltimore Advertiser, May 12, 1786, 3.
109
Unknown, “Mill-Seats. To be Sold,” 3.
duties.110 In their joint resolution to Pennsylvania concerning a road between the
40 Potomac and the Ohio, Virginia and Maryland had agreed that other Americans enjoyed
the same right to trade upon the Chesapeake as their own citizens.111 By discriminating
against out-of-state commerce, the salt tariff violated the principle of free and equal trade
between Americans. By repealing the tariff, Maryland proved its adherence to the
reciprocal advantage espoused by Pennsylvania in its invitation to negotiate and
willingness to enact measures “which may tend to promote a friendly intercourse and
commerce between this and the said states.”112 As a barrier to interdependence, the salt
tariff conflicted with the common market promoted alongside interstate internal
improvements.
Reversing its earlier decision to ignore negotiation proposals, Delaware seized on
the Annapolis convention and the canal negotiations as a chance to lobby against
discriminatory state tariffs. Noting the growing projected attendance at the coming
national meeting in Annapolis, Delaware appointed commissioners in June 1786. It
charged its delegates with discussing both the proposed internal improvements and the
larger meeting’s purpose to establish a “uniform system of commerce.”113 To the
Delaware general assembly, a national gathering to enact an adequate legal framework
for interstate commerce seemed a golden opportunity “to remonstrate against the unjust
and partial conduct of the said states in their commercial regulations, which have
operated much to the injury of this state.”114 Delaware decided to negotiate because it
110
Hazard, Commencing 1783, 753. This is a Maryland letter to the President of Pennsylvania It is dated
March 30, 1786 and says that as of April 1 Maryland will drop her salt duty until such time as
Pennsylvania and Virginia decides to re-establish theirs.
111
Rowland , “The Mount Vernon Conference,” 421-422.; Hazard, Commencing 1786, 512.
112
(Archives of Maryland) 3185: 150. 113
Bushman, Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State, 349-350.
114
Bushman, Proceedings of the House of Assembly of the Delaware State, 350. Delaware appointed
George Read, Gunning Bedford Jr., Eleazar McComb, Jacob Broom, and William Hensley.
saw in both the convention and the inland navigation discussions the opportunity to
41 wage war upon the interstate tariff system.
Yet the Maryland government had not come as far as Delaware’s in connecting
the Articles’ deficiencies with interstate trade problems. The Maryland Senate refused to
appoint commissioners to the Annapolis convention. Having already acceded to the
impost amendment, the Maryland senate saw the Annapolis meeting’s attempt to regulate
the union’s trade as redundant in the wake of the congressional effort.115 Instead to deal
with internal improvements, a subject not under the purview of Congress, the Maryland
senate resolved that commissioners would meet delegates from Pennsylvania, Delaware,
and Virginia parallel to the general convention to confer about those projects and if their
neighbors insisted to discuss commercial regulations.116 Maryland’s refusal to attend the
Annapolis meeting supports the contention of scholars that the states required a crisis to
motivate them to abandon the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution. Maryland’s
reticence implies that William Grayson’s was at least partly correct when he observed in
May 1786: “[O]ur affairs are not yet arrived at such a crisis as to insure success to a
reformation on proper principles.”117
Prior to the Annapolis convention and the parallel inland navigation meetings,
states’ interlocking interests compelled them to the negotiating table. For example,
Pennsylvania held Maryland’s Susquehanna canal hostage to get consent for the
Chesapeake and Delaware canal. Observing this, Madison seemed encouraged that the
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition. Madison to Jefferson, May 12, 1786. (Archives of Maryland) 3185: 807-811.; James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition,
J. C. A. Stagg, editor. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2010. Madison to
Jefferson, August 12, 1786. Maryland resolved to send the same men who had negotiated with
Virginia at Mount Vernon to discuss inland navigation, and if necessary commerce, with
Pennsylvania and Delaware. These were for the most part different appointees than the legislature
had earlier agreed would negotiate with Delaware and Pennsylvania.
117
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, J. C. A. Stagg, editor. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2010. William Grayson to James Madison May 28, 1786.;
Dougherty, Collective Action Under the Articles of Confederation, 138. 115
116
42 threat of mutual ruin might highlight the need for a permanent compromise to people
like Maryland negotiating commissioner and future anti-federalist Samuel Chase.118 A
mere month before Annapolis, Madison wrote: “It is lucky that both parties are so
dependent on each other as to be mutually forced into measures of general utility.”119
More than any other experience, internal improvements negotiations taught states and
advocates of de-centralized federal power that these were not merely temporary
convergent interests but long-term commitments that required a permanent structure.
With Maryland absent from Annapolis, other states at the convention worked
toward constructing an adequate legal framework for interstate trade. Inspired by the plan
for a road from the Potomac to the Ohio, Pennsylvania proposed to Virginia an
assimilation of their respective commercial systems. In an official communiqué, the
Pennsylvania commissioner Tench Coxe specified certain measures as conducive to
maintaining the union’s integrity since they promoted free and equal trade between
Americans. Like the earlier Mount Vernon compact between Virginia and Maryland,
Pennsylvania’s overture to Virginia proposed complete equality in ship tonnage rates,
118
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 61-63.; Samuel Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the
Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788-1828 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1999), 44.
119
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition. Madison to Jefferson, August 12, 1786.
Madison wrote that if Pennsylvania refused to improve the Susquehanna north of the Maryland
border, “Unless this is permitted the opening undertaken within the limits of Maryland will be of
little account.” He also mentions that Pennsylvania complied with the request by Maryland and
Virginia to open a road from the headwaters of the Potomac to the headwaters of the Ohio as well
as to grant the free navigation of the Ohio within her jurisdiction. Pennsylvania. Supreme
Executive Council., Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania:
From its Organization to the Termination of the Revolution, Vol. 15. (Harrisburg: Theo. Fenn &
Co., 1853), 71. On August 25, 1786 Pennsylvania President Benjamin Franklin mentioned in an
official message: “Some farther progress has been made in the negotiation with the States of
Delaware and Maryland since your last session: Commissioners have been appointed, an interview
proposed, and every inclination to meet this Commonwealth on the ground of reciprocal
advantage discovered.”
import duties, and imposts. As Pennsylvania’s proposal concluded, these were
43 “measures which by blending the interest must cement the Union of the States.”120
During this encounter, Pennsylvania explicitly identified discriminatory local
measures as a threat to the foundation of the union. In a letter to the Virginia
commissioners Madison, Randolph, and Tucker, the Pennsylvania commissioner wrote,
“[N]one should be adopted which militate against the fundamental and essential
principles of the Union.”121 He maligned local regulations that favored the enacting
state’s commerce, while exacting a tribute upon fellow Americans — and thereby
treating them like foreigners. To the Pennsylvania commissioner, a union founded upon
equality could not continue if discriminatory local tariffs continued. Inequality between
goods from different states led to inequality between citizens and states. Inequality
destroyed the union’s fraternity by dividing it into competing state identities.
Two days after the convention, in a brief encounter with the Maryland negotiating
commissioners, Coxe railed even more forcefully that interstate tariffs endangered the
bonds of union between the states. According to the Pennsylvania commissioner,
discrimination in favor of local commerce would “counteract the design and spirit of the
Union by placing the citizens of the Confederacy on the footing of foreigners”122 He
120
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison Digital Edition, J. C. A. Stagg, editor. Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2010. Tench Coxe to Virginia Commissioners, September
13, 1786. Coxe related that the Pennsylvania government had specifically identified those three
types of regulations as the cause of the differences in the commercial regulations of the several
states. He called the situation, “evidently opposed to the great principles and spirit of the union”
He stated that the Pennsylvania government had already corrected it’s commercial regulations to
treat citizens of one states as equal to those of another state.
121
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 61-63. This is a letter dated September 13, 1786. Coxe wrote in a later letter
to the Pennsylvania general assembly that the Virginia commissioners had not been authorized to
discuss an assimilation of the commercial regulations of the two states. Coxe did however get the
Virginia commissioners, Madison, Randolph, and Tucker, to communicate the proposal to the
Virginia legislature. Hazard, Commencing 1786, 60-61.
122
Ibid. A letter from Tench Coxe to the commissioners of Maryland is addressed to the exact same men
Maryland originally appointed to negotiate with Pennsylvania and Delaware concerning inland
navigation, Samuel Chase, Peregrine Leatherbury, William Smith, Samuel Hughes, and William
Hensley. It is dated September 16, 1786, two days after the Annapolis convention's close. Further
44 chided the Maryland legislature for retaining a tonnage duty on out-of-state ships and
an impost on rum from neighboring states. These deviations, though slight, eroded
neighboring states’ efforts to build a uniform system to regulate trade. They counteracted
the essential principle—free and equal trade—that knit the citizens of the young union
together through bonds of mutual affection.
Preparations for later negotiations between Maryland, Pennsylvania, and
Delaware evidence how much these states now perceived themselves as dependent upon
their neighbors. In a letter written on October 26th 1786, Benjamin Franklin cautioned
Pennsylvania’s commissioners that petty self-interest on their part actually harmed
Pennsylvania. Before the planned November 27, 1786 meeting with Maryland and
Delaware, he warned: “The States, parties to the negotiation have the same general
objects but as each may be attached to ways of accomplishing them particularly favorable
to itself, unless a spirit of mutual concession take place among the Negotiators, a partial
bias may tend to disappoint the main purpose.” He stressed how much Pennsylvania’s
trade depended on navigation between Chesapeake Bay and Delaware Bay and reminded
the commissioners that Maryland likewise depended on the Susquehanna. To Franklin,
mutual advantages among the states were “some ideas, which in certain conjectures, may
it is postmarked from Baltimore where most of them lived. This and the text of the letter suggests
that there was some sort of meeting planned, but the Maryland commissioners did not show up.
He writes, "As a commissioner from the State of Pennsylvania, I expected the satisfaction of a
conference with you under a commission from the legislature of Maryland" Yet it seems probable
that there was some sort of brief contact between the two parties after this letter was postmarked.
A letter from Tench Coxe to the Pennsylvania general assembly three days later reads, “a meeting
with the commissioners to be appointed by Virginia and with your commissioners upon the latter
business is earnestly desired by the commissioners of Maryland” Coxe would not have known that
Maryland earnestly desired a meeting if he had not had some sort of contact with either the
Maryland commissioners or representatives of the Maryland general assembly. This letter is dated
September 19, 1786. Hazard, Commencing 1786, 60-61. It seems that Coxe in general was
working from old information. He sought out the men Maryland originally appointed to discuss
inland navigation not those it later designated, the same commissioners from the Mount Vernon
conference. This seems to account for the planned meeting’s failure.
serve you as leading principles and be pleaded as motives.” 123 By understanding on
45 what terms their neighbors might see trade as equitable, Pennsylvania had identified the
cement of interest: free and equal trade between Americans.
Conclusion
To conclude, the Annapolis Convention and by extension the Constitutional
Convention that followed it represented the culmination of negotiations among several
states to build an interlocking network of internal improvements. In offering commercial
concessions to their neighbors in return for cooperation, these states slowly took the first
steps toward the ideal of free and equal trade between Americans. By giving Congress
real power to regulate trade, the new Constitution turned the United States into a massive
free trade zone. This replaced the lack of a uniform system of interstate commerce under
the Articles. During the Confederation, certain states either taxed their neighbors or
opened their markets to foreign commerce. In negotiations, these policies became
obstacles to cooperation between neighboring states. But that was not all. Since the basis
for these policies was the provision in the Articles that “Each state retains it sovereignty,
freedom, and independence,” it too became an obstacle to cooperation.124
The two problems of free trade with foreign countries and states taxing their
neighbors’ commerce suggested a dual solution, even to contemporaries. First, to prevent
the economic disintegration of the union, the separate states needed to enact free and
equal trade between Americans. Second, to block dependence on foreign goods, the
union needed a national tariff. Congress’s attempts like the impost amendment to enact
this solution failed. The negotiations between states to build internal improvements were
123
124
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 78.
U.S. Articles of Confederation. art. 2.
different. They provided an incentive for cooperation because one state’s refusal to
46 participate would doom the whole plan. The dream of interstate commerce facilitated by
these internal improvements coaxed states to leave the de-centralized political structure
established by the Articles and to take shelter in a strengthened union.
Having lured the former colonies to Philadelphia, Madison argued in the Virginia
plan that the United States needed a national impost and that the Articles could not
accomplish such a goal.125 As Madison’s ally Edmund Randolph insisted; “A provision
for harmony among the States, as in trade…must be made. The powers for these
purposes, can never be given to a body, inadequate as Congress are in point of
representation…and possessing no more confidence than they do.”126 Even
acknowledged anti-federalist George Mason understood the need for a remedy for the
vices of the system.127 From the first crawling steps towards cooperation during interstate
internal improvement negotiations, the Constitutional Convention represented the states’
explicit realization that the Confederation could not give them the thriving interstate
commerce they wanted.
In 1789, upon the resumption of business under the new constitution, the federal
government finally passed a national tariff. It is striking that something that had eluded
congress for so long under the Articles would come so easily under the Constitution.
Despite this achievement that would supposedly stem foreign commerce, the country
remained dependent on England. In the 1790s, the balance of trade swung even further
against the United States, which had largely failed to develop manufacturing.128 In the
1800s, continued dependence rankled Americans as President Jefferson turned to
125
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, 2: 730.
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, 2: 877. 126
127
128
James Madison, The Papers of James Madison, 2: 748.
Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1790
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 380.
47 desperate tactics like the Embargo Act of 1807 to stand up to Britain. With the failure
of these tactics, the union turned to war in 1812.129 In hindsight, federalists of the 1780s
had been overly optimistic in their expectations concerning a national impost.
Not surprisingly, the Constitution contained no provision for the United States
government to construct internal improvements. It merely prohibited a state from laying a
duty upon the commerce of its neighbors. This seems consistent with the origins of the
document, since as the states planned to grant the federal government the power to
regulate trade they met independently to discuss building roads and canals. What they
truly wanted the federal government to do was to guarantee, in Benjamin Franklin’s
words, “the fair and equal ground of reciprocal advantage.”130
Unlike the push for a national tariff, the plans for interstate internal improvements
eventually failed. It is not even clear whether the meeting between the three states
planned for November 27, 1786 ever took place.131 The last record is a line in the Minutes
of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, mentioning that the commissioners
129
Carl Benn and Robert O’Neill, The War of 1812: The Fight for American Trade Rights (New York: The
Rosen Publishing Group, 2011), 6. 130
Hazard, Commencing 1786, 540.
131
George Everett Hastings, The Life and Works of Francis Hopkinson, (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1926), 326.; Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Digital Edition,
ed. Barbara B. Oberg and J. Jefferson Looney. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press,
Rotunda, 2008. Francis Hopkinson to Thomas Jefferson, November 8, 1786. The last mention of
the planned November 27 meeting was this Francis Hopkinson letter. Ralph D. Gray, The National
Waterway: Chesapeake and Delaware Canal, 1769-1965, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1967), 8. Gray argues that the meeting took place and that luminaries like James Madison,
Benjamin Rush and Benjamin Franklin attended. Gray’s source is Federal Writers Project,
Delaware: A Guide to the First State, (New York: The Viking Press, 1938), 336. The Federal
Writer’s Guide cites no source. Based on a conversation with Bruce Haase public services
manager at the Delaware Public Archives the origin of this claim is Thomas Sharf’s 1888 History
of Delaware. Bruce Haase (public services manager Delaware Public Archives) in telephone
conversation with author, August 22, 2012.; John Thomas Sharf, History of Delaware: 1609-1888
(Philadelphia: L.J. Richards & Co., 1888), 2: 686. Sharf mentions a scientific meeting in
Wilmington during 1786 where Rush, Madison and Franklin attended. Apparently Franklin
demonstrated electricity at the old academy in Wilmington. This is what Gray and the compilers
of Delaware: A Guide mistook for the canal discussions. Further Merrill Jensen alleges that the
internal improvements meeting never took place. Merrill Jensen ed., The Documentary History of
the Ratification of the Constitution: Volume III, Ratification of the Constitution by the States of
Delaware, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Vol 3., (Madison: State Historical Society of
Wisconsin, 1978), 40.
for inland navigation presented a report.132 Either way, it seems that Maryland
48 reinstated its salt tariff in the same month as the planned meeting, while the Susquehanna
canal proprietors continued work on a canal south of the Pennsylvania line that was
finally finished in 1802.133 Though work continued on the Potomac canal, it was not
completed until 1831 and not by the company sponsored by George Washington.134 Only
with the completion of the National Road as far as Wheeling, West Virginia, in 1818 did
a connection open between the headwaters of the Potomac and the Ohio.135
Despite the gushing predictions of Washington and the proprietors of the Potomac
and Susquehanna canals, internal improvements played little part in early western
settlement. Hamstrung by states’ fears that federal involvement in transportation would
undermine their power, the canal projects floundered for lack of funding.136 Only the
National Road, funded by Congress in 1806, had much of an impact before 1820.137
During the 1820s, states gave most of these canal projects funding.138 Yet this was too
little too late for internal improvements to deliver the promised vast interstate commerce
their early proponents expected.
In the twenty-first century, Americans have largely forgotten the critical period
when congressional power was but a shadow of what it is today. The ease with which
people and commerce move makes it seem unsurprising that the founders once dreamed
132
Supreme Executive Council., Minutes of the Supreme Executive Council of Pennsylvania, 15:135. This
mention is dated December 19, 1786.
133
Maxcy, The Laws of Maryland with the Charter. Vol. 2., 3-8.; Gabriel Christie, “Advertisement,” The
Maryland Journal and Baltimore Advertiser, February 16, 1787, 1.; Livingood, PhiladelphiaBaltimore Trade Rivalry, 37.
134
Sanderlin, The Great National Project, 27-32.; Hahn, The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, 13-29.; Shaw,
Canals for a Nation,7-8.
135
Young, “A Political and Constitutional Study of the Cumberland Road.” 136
David Allen Berry, A History of the Chesapeake and Delaware Canal (Charleston: The History Press,
2010), 35.
137
Hulbert, The Cumberland Road, 20-25.
138
Gray, The National Waterway, 43-44.; Livingood, The Philadelphia-Baltimore Trade Rivalry, 61.;
Larson, Internal Improvements, 89.
of what we wake up to and absurd that little Rhode Island once thought of itself as
49 something like a sovereign state. The union that we have lived in for over 200 years
seems natural. To recapture the sense of how it was constructed, it is necessary to look at
groups of countries today that are in situations analogous to the American states in the
1780s.
In today’s ongoing financial crisis, the countries of Europe may be learning a
lesson similar to that which produced the Constitution in the United States. As the actions
of Greek, Irish, or Spanish bankers threaten the solvency of their German or French
counterparts, it suddenly seems apparent that national control of fiscal policy is
antithetical to an international common market. In other words, it appears that the legal
framework of the European Union is not adequate to protect its common market. As with
the transition from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, we may see nearly
independent states give up sovereignty in pursuit of trade. As the Founding Fathers used
to say, “commercial interest is the strongest bond for political union.”
50 Appendix
Map for Pennsylvania-Maryland Negotiations 1783-84
Figure 1. Pennsylvania’s planned improvement of the navigation of the Schuylkill River in blue. The planned road between the Schuylkill and the Susquehanna is in brown. Maryland’s Susquehanna Canal is in green. The green dots represent Baltimore and Philadelphia. Map for Virginia-Maryland Negotiations
Figure 2. Potomac Canal outlined in green. The road between the Potomac and the Ohio outlined in brown. The small green dot represents Baltimore. 51 Map for the Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware Negotiations
Figure 3. Canals outlined in green. Improvements to river navigation outlined in blue. The four green dots represent Baltimore, New Castle, Wilmington, and Philadelphia. Wilmington is slightly north of New Castle. 52 Bibliography
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