George William Van Cleve: We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

 

At the end of August in 1787, the French chargé d’affaires in the United States reported to his superiors at Versailles that the American “provinces” tended toward democracy, and therefore to instability. As the turmoil increased, he predicted, the Union would dissolve, as the federal government lacked the authority to prevent its own demise. The French government, he added, could watch this devolution with equanimity; by its timely intervention in the American war for independence, the French had deprived Britain of “that vast continent.” Given the geopolitical purposes of the Bourbon monarchy, that sufficed. Further American woes “will not be regretted by us.” They might indeed prove beneficial, as a North America divided into small-to-medium-sized states, along European lines, could lend itself to a French return to imperial balance-of-power ‘great politics’ on the continent. 

For the Americans themselves, Van Cleve writes, “the true heart of the controversy over the Confederation’s collapse was whether Americans were willing to transfer sovereignty—tax and enforcement powers—to a central government.” More precisely, the American people needed to decide whether to delegate a greater portion of their own sovereignty from the states to the central government. That government already had some elements of such delegated sovereignty but it lacked power to raise money to make them effective.

“Like the revolution, the Confederation’s final years were marked by deep divisions about whether and how two fluid, potentially conflicting ideas—empire and republicanism—should be embodied in any new central government.” To elaborate, Americans disputed what kind of state they wanted and what kind of regime they wanted. In terms of the state, how big did Americans want their country to be, and more, how centralized did they want their government to be? In terms of regime, it was agreed that the United States should be a republic, but what were the implications for republicanism of increasing the federal state’s size and centralization? Would America become the Rome of the New World, eventually sacrificing its republicanism on the altar of empire? 

In pointing to these political questions, Van Cleve rightly corrects the socio-economic interpretations of Charles Beard and Merrill Jensen, who deny that the Confederacy suffered from any real crisis at all, claiming that the 1787 of the Constitution amounted to little more than a power grab, a “conservative counter-revolution” by the American gentry class. Without in any way ignoring the financial and other economic dimensions of the matter, Van Cleve emphasizes that “Confederation reform was driven most heavily by the perceived need to create a sovereign national government”—sovereign in the sense of power delegated by the sovereign people, sovereignty they are forever entitled to rearrange to their liking, under the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” Such a government “could preserve American independence, protect western expansion, combat foreign trade aggression, provide unified continental government and law enforcement, and maintain internal order.” He adds, “the Confederation lacked every one of those capabilities.” 

Van Cleve begins with a description of American civil society as it emerged from the Revolutionary War. Socially, the war democratized American society; having won their independence on the battlefield, ordinary Americans scarcely intended to turn their governance over to the native gentry classes. The 25,000-to 30,000 American war deaths were the equivalent of 3 million deaths today, with the South suffering the most. On the civil-social level, the gentry could not rule alone, as “the increased prominence of the middling class…played a role in shaping the new constitutions adopted during the war by nearly all states” in the Union. In many states, this meant that voting rights were extended far beyond any other country in the world—even in Massachusetts, where John Adams’s 1780 constitution “was clearly intended to maintain rule by property owners,” and much more dramatically in Pennsylvania, where property qualifications (“other than” for purposes of “tax paying”) were eliminated altogether.

At the same time, the war threw the federal government far into debt. Like so many governments before and since, the government sought to reduce its debt by inflating the currency, issuing “about $241 million in paper money”—a sum that may have been “larger than the entire American gross domestic product at the time.” Although the peace treaty with Britain stipulated that British creditors were to be permitted to recover “the full value in sterling money of all bona fide debts,” that wasn’t going to happen. Not only inflation, but the attendant high interest rates, lack of capital for investment, the absence of proper bankruptcy laws, and a severe recession did nothing to improve the temper of the sovereign people, ninety percent of whom lived on farms and thus needed to borrow money against the projected value of their annual harvests. 

Politically, the republican regime therefore faced threats from foreign creditors—European empires, some still with a military presence on the continent—and a formidable class of domestic ‘creditors,’ namely, the soldiers, a class of men known to have overthrown republics in the past. How to proceed?

Congress debated several policies. The federal government might retain the existing “requisition” system, accepting monies from the states to pay federal debts. It might design new tax powers for itself. It might also sell its vast western lands. It might even turn “most if not all of the Confederation debt over to the states for repayment.” “Some historians claim that transferring the domestic debt to the states and land sales would have solved the Confederation’s debt problem without any need for requisitions.” Mere budget-cutting and deficit financing, both of which the government did, didn’t come close to solving the problem, and by 1786 by Confederation “was not even covering its normal operating costs.” 

The requisition system failed because states were either unwilling or in some cases, especially in the South, unable to pay. But “states chose not to pay requisitions primarily because they were politically unpopular, not because the states or their people could not afford to pay them.” This raised questions about the viability of civil-socially democratic republics, which evidently lacked sense of moral responsibility needed to govern themselves sufficiently to meet their financial obligations. “No one ever proposed a workable method of forcing states to comply with requisitions”; as Elbridge Gerry remarked, even if the foreign and domestic debts were separated, the Southern states wouldn’t repay the Northerners, and the Northerners would retaliate by “refus[ing] to pay their share of the foreign debts or Confederation expenses.” What is more, many in the war-ravaged South saw little or no reason to pay anything to the Brits: As more than one aggrieved debtor asked, “If we are now to pay the debts due the British merchants, what have we been fighting for all this while?” And obviously, too pay any of the debt in sharply depreciated currency amounted to welshing on the loans by other means. Either way, the federal state would soon disintegrate altogether, its public credit ruined, the political credit of democratic republicanism to follow.

What about selling the Western lands? To be sold, they first needed properly to be surveyed. In 1785, surveyors in the Western territories reported to Congress that two of the Amerindian tribes had politely let it be known that if they were to proceed in their assigned task they would be “made prisoners, or killed and Scalped.” In its compassion, and perhaps in view of their uneasy fiscal relations with the army, Congress relented. Further, “the western lands proved to be worth little in the 1780s.” Supply exceeded demand, demand having slackened considerably in view of Indian hostility. Congress did sell some five million acres by 1787, garnering some $760,000. Given the $50 million federal debt, this was unimpressive.

Taxation by Congress proved equally disagreeable to American democrats, who “firmly believed that granting the Confederation taxation powers would lead inevitably to the creation of a British-style aristocracy or monarchy, destroying republican freedom.” That is, solving the financial dilemma of the American national state by granting it the power to tax would destroy the American national regime. True, the slogan of the American Revolution had been ‘no taxation without representation’; true, Americans had won representation, republicanism, in that revolution; nonetheless, they still didn’t want to pay taxes. Redistribution of the tax burden “based purely on ability to pay was either politically unthinkable or unlikely to have succeeded politically.”  In the end, states did pay about one-third of the national war debt, but any more was politically, though not financially, impossible.

Several attempts to empower Congress to impose taxes also failed. Opponents deprecated such measures on both ‘regime’ and ‘statist’ grounds, despite support from such luminaries as George Washington, James Madison, and Robert Morris. For most of the 1780s, the argument that Congressional power to enact an impost “was exactly the same kind of claim made by the British government before the revolution to authorize it to tax Americans.” Even the implication “that Congress had inherent tax powers” was too much for opponents to countenance. This notwithstanding, eight states soon agreed to an import tax, but to no more than that. Farmers, especially, had no interest in helping to fund the national debt, since their markets were local, not international, and good relations with foreigners meant nothing to them. “Many Americans” also “feared that if Congress became more powerful, it might seek to control the states in the interest of an aristocratic elite or a new king.” And, that being the case, “nothing in the Confederation’s structure required or even encouraged the states’ leaders to consider anything other than their individual states’ economic and political interests.”

European imperial interests further impeded Americans’ efforts at international trade. Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, with its important arguments in favor of free trade among nations, had yet to make a favorable impression, and in any case Europe’s rulers “thought that American expansion would inevitably harm their economic and military interests.” Europeans considered free trade desirable within their empires, not among them, and typically tied their trade agreements to their military alliance structures. Without a strong federal government, American trade negotiators had no leverage with their counterparts. 

Britain remained America’s major trading partner, but it had closed the British West Indies to American trade before the close of the war and had no intention of reopening it. British imperialists and merchants backed Lord Sheffield, who advocated continued restriction of imperial trade to British ships manned by British sailors. Americans had no choice but to deal with Brits on British terms because only “British merchants would provide American merchants and consumers with credit” to purchase their manufactures; “other European countries would not provide credit.” Moreover, in Sheffield’s words, “the interests of the States are so opposite in matters of Commerce,” and Congress’s authority was so limited, that “no defensive precautions need to be feared on the part of the U.S.” France and Spain were no more cooperative.

Even in the United States itself, strong desire for international commerce was limited to the merchant classes along the Atlantic coast. Some Americans worried “that increased commerce would allow the spread of luxury, which they thought inevitably corrupted republican virtue”; some wanted protection for domestic manufactures; others imagined that trade caused “money scarcity”; still others thought merchants “greedy, unpatriotic monopolists.” By contrast, sturdy agrarian, republican yeomen seldom sold their crops to foreign countries. 

But the states faced a serious problem. Their own tariff restrictions on foreign imports didn’t hold. If one state imposed a restriction, “it was in the interest of other states to undercut it and reap the benefits of the trade lost by the state engaging in retaliation.” At the same time, they could not agree to strengthen the federal government since, as the Massachusetts delegation in Congress wrote to the state legislature, a stronger government “will afford lucrative Employments, civil & military.” “Such a government is an Aristocracy, which would require a standing Army & a numerous train of pensioners & placemen to prop & support its exalted Administration.” Such a regime change would in turn result in the breakup of the federal Union. 

The Annapolis Convention of September 1786 reached an agreement to hold a constitutional convention in Philadelphia the following year. But it was poorly attended; only three states’ delegations showed up, a grand total of a dozen men. Yet the convention, famously, occurred. Why did legislatures in such key states as Virginia and Massachusetts change their minds?

What united North and South in support of a convention was the set of controversies arising over western expansion, which both regions wanted to see, and neither could do effectively without a stronger federal government. In the 1780s, “the West was the scene of ruthless conflict and terrorism.” “More than half the landmass it covered was Indian territory,” and they killed some 1,500 white settlers “in Kentucky alone.” The settlers themselves were squatters on “Confederation lands”—i.e., lands also claimed by the Indians, in many if not all instances. Allied with the still-remaining British forces which hadn’t been evacuated from their western fortifications, the Iroquois Six Nations Confederacy was formidable, given the imbecility of the United States government. The states couldn’t help, either; in 1784, Virginia simply ceded its claims in the Ohio Valley. Under existing conditions, George Washington suspected, the western settlers might turn to secession, bringing in foreign powers as allies. He was correct. There were indeed separationist settlements among the settlers.

Spain and Britain were the principal foreigners in question. In the South, Spain regarded its Indian allies as “critical to maintaining their positions in Louisiana and Florida,” blocking American expansion. Spain signed a secret treaty with the Creeks, providing them with substantial armaments; it stopped short of sending troops, however. In the North, where Britain did have troops, the containment policy consisted of encouraging the formation of an Indian confederacy, which launched damaging raids on American settlers. They didn’t give arms to the Indians outright, but were happy to sell, as the Iroquois Confederacy made good revenue from the fur trade. “Britain’s and Spain’s western strategies were made less costly” because Congress refused to establish a standing army of any size. “As a result, the United States had only a few hundred troops in the West after 1783.”

Virginians couldn’t fund a war against Indians who attacked settlers in Kentucky, then part of Virginia. Without military support from the federal government, either, “many Virginians now decided that they wanted the Confederation strengthened so that it would have a military force to assist them against Native Americans, the British, and other possible enemies.” 

Meanwhile, the Spanish Empire closed the Mississippi River to American navigation. The Mississippi was critical to western settlement, as it provided an outlet for western farm produce, which could scarcely be transported over the Allegheny and Appalachian mountains in the days of dirt roads and Indian harassment. Like the Americans and the Indians, the Spanish claimed “much of the Mississippi River and surrounding territory at least north to the Ohio River.” They were willing to grant a trade treaty with the United States, but at the price of continuing the ban on American use of the Mississippi. The treaty John Jay negotiated with Spain conceded this point, but the Southern states particularly opposed it, Congressman Charles Pinckney of South Carolina going so far as to charge that it was part of a New England plot to retain its trade advantages. “Northern and southern states had reached an impasse not just on the treaty but on the viability of the Confederation itself. Both sides threatened secession.” The Northern state representatives in Congress decided to call the Southerners’ bluff, forcing the treaty through. This only sharpened secessionist intentions in the South, as many Southerners calculated that it would be better to relinquish the Union than to give up the prospect of navigation on the Mississippi.

What brought the Northern states’-righters to their senses was Shays’s Rebellion in western Massachusetts, a revolt of farmers against the merchants in Boston who controlled the state government. Although the rebellion failed, Massachusetts politicians saw that they might well need federal military assistance in suppressing future violence, and several other Northern states came around to the same realization. 

The rebellion centered on two grievances: debt relief and tax relief. Debt relief was tied to the states’ use of paper money. Because currency inflation enabled debtors to stiff creditors, who were wealthy, Benjamin Franklin regarded it as effectively “a tax imposed largely on the wealthy.” Creditors understandably thought otherwise, noting that non-payment of debts, or repayment in depreciated currency, gave them a strong incentive not to lend money at all in the future, which would paralyze the economy, including the farm economy. Politically, the struggle played out as a question of democracy. South Carolina politicians “justified their economic relief program on the basis that democratic majorities had power to take necessary actions to protect the public good”; the Speaker of the House of Representatives in Charleston intoned, “Vox Populi Vox Dei.” Popular sovereignty entitled legislatures to pass post facto laws altering debt contracts “to protect debtors, including by paying specie debts with paper money instead.” This “gave republican majorities unlimited power over both private and public contracts,” a power regarded as majority tyranny by creditors. Democrats defended their claim by condemning bankers as oligarchs, but even that staunch democrat, Thomas Paine, condemned such legislation as ruinous to republicanism because it violated the trust—quite literally the ‘credit’—upon which equal citizenship must rest.

Rhode Island, the most strongly democratic state in the country, illustrated Paine’s argument. “Some merchants left the state; others refused to sell good, including food, and closed their stores rather than accept paper money.” Other states were enraged when Rhode Island paid its debts to them in Rhode Island paper money, calling its citizens “cheats,” “traitors to the nation,” “armed plunderers of their neighbors,” democratic tyrants, and examples of “human depravity.” This edged more and more Americans toward demanding institutional reform of the federal government “to prevent interstate harms.” 

In Massachusetts, struggling farmers in the western part of the state demanded paper money, debt relief, and tax relief. The insurgency began in August 1786, and initially consisted of armed men blocking judges from the courts in which debt and tax cases were tried. Tax delinquencies in the state had already emptied the state treasury, and the state needed “to borrow money from merchants to fund an army.” Even that wasn’t enough. The government was powerless to act when the rebels moved against the federal arsenal in Springfield. United States Secretary of War Henry Knox persuaded Congress to reinforce it with federal troops, but Congress “had no money to pay its new troops,” either, and borrowed money against sale of western lands to fund the expedition—the very lands in which American rule was disputed by Indians, the Spanish, and the British. 

The crisis sobered the more sensible Massachusetts democrats. Men like Washington and Madison, Adams and Jefferson, needed no convincing on the matter of a new constitution. They already wanted one, and some regarded Shays’s Rebellion as relatively minor, in itself. But now many of the skeptics also relented. All agreed that Massachusetts’s inability to quell the rebellion without federal assistance portended ruin for both republican regimes in America and what Madison would soon call the “extended republic,” America’s federal republican empire. “There are combustibles in every state,” Washington warned. With most Massachusetts politicians now firmly on board, prospects for a constitutional convention brightened.

The Virginia legislature approved Madison’s convention proposal in November, citing the Confederation government’s “inability to pay the nation’s debts as the primary reason why reform was needed.” In the words of the legislature’s resolution, “the crisis has arrived at which the good people of America are to decide the solemn question, whether they will be wise and magnanimous efforts rea the just fruits of that Independence which they have so gloriously acquired.” Although U.S. indebtedness was the primary reason, for the first time the Virginians “imposed no limits on the reforms the convention could consider.” This “unmistakably signaled to other states Virginia’s acceptance that they would propose consideration of additional reforms such as Confederation commerce powers.” 

New York politicians remained divided, many unintimidated by Shays’s Rebellion. Governor George Clinton based his electoral coalition on the farmers, not the merchants of New York City. He and his ally, State Senator Abraham Yates, wanted to prohibit any reforms proposed by the convention “repugnant to or inconsistent with” the New York state constitution. This would have barred consideration of granting power of taxation to the federal government and in the end “would have prevented any agreement by the convention at all.” This attempt didn’t work; New York did send delegates to Philadelphia. But as late as the first presidential election under the 1787 Constitution, Clinton would continue to resist enhanced federal authority, effectively delaying the proceedings of New York’s electors until they could not arrive in time to cast their votes in the Electoral College. In the end, only Rhode Island boycotted the Convention.

Ever-prudent General Washington held back from committing to attend the Convention until he was convinced that it was serious. If it were not, the Union might dissolve and his reputation would suffer. He wanted to see that this would be no Annapolis Convention, with a small minority of states participating. He also wanted to see delegates chosen who were not ciphers but “capable men who were unfettered by restrictive state instructions intended to block the ‘radical cures’ that he thought were needed.” Satisfied that these criteria had been met, he headed north. “Washington’s overarching goal was to create a government that was a sovereign power capable of governing America as it expanded westward—a continental empire.” “Sovereign” meant the power to tax, a power that would enable the government “to pay its just debts and to support an army”—fundamentally, as Washington put it, to provide “the means of coercion in the Sovereign [that] will enforce obedience to the Ordinances of a General Government; without which, everything else fails.”

Van Cleve concludes that state politicians came to the same conclusion for different reasons, whether it was fear of domestic insurrection, the need to defend settlers from Indian attacks, the threat of the containment strategies enacted by Britain and Spain, indignation at the failure to repay debts, or concerns about economic calamity. The delegates to the Convention “took very large political risks not out of selfish class interest, and not just from perceived necessity, but from objective necessity.” To secure the safety and happiness of the people—the just purpose of any government, according to the Declaration of Independence—a better-designed federal government was simply indispensable. “The inescapable reality was that the United States existed in an imperial world. It would either maintain” what Washington called its “foederal dignity,” by “strengthening its national government or it would inevitably face dissolution followed by eventual European imperial takeover or civil war.” Or both, in either sequence.

 

 

 

Colin G. Calloway: The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.

 

For decades, standard interpretations of American foreign policy have been fundamentally misconceived. The claim that American imperialism began with the acquisition of the Philippines, Cuba, and other territories from Spain in 1898 is obviously nonsensical. The great period of American imperialism, in which Americans went from sea to shining sea, reducing the Amerindian nations and tribes to dependent status, was over by then. The territories acquired from Spain were marked for independence, which most of them received. The claim that regime change in foreign nations America had defeated in war began with Germany, Japan, and Italy in the aftermath of the Second World War is also false; when not based squarely on ignorance, it depends on the fanciful notion that the Indians weren’t foreign peoples. 

It is one of the great merits of Professor Calloway that he knows these things. Although his book at some points is somewhat marred by excessive sympathy for the Indians (it scarcely would have gotten published by a major university press if it were not), he frames George Washington’s Indian policy as it should be framed: as part of a geopolitical struggle in which Americans could not be assured of victory. “The Revolution was not only a war for independence and a new political order; it was also a war for the North American continent.” Therefore, “in Washington’s day the government dealt with Indians as foreign nations rather than domestic subjects. The still-precarious republic dared not ignore the still-powerful nations on its frontiers.” At the same time, in North America “Indian country was not exclusively Indian, and had not been for a long time.” Nearly two centuries of interaction with European settlers—English, Spanish, and French, and Swedish—had already begun to ‘hybridize’ their ways of life, from their diet to their household goods, to their language. Shakespeare’s Caliban was right: many Amerindians “could speak English and… their own languages lacking profanity, had learned to swear in it.” Regime change, indeed.

Amerindian regimes resembled the political societies of antiquity, as described by Fustel de Coulanges in The Ancient City, published a few years after Washington’s death. They were family- and clan-based communities, “measur[ing] their influence in the extent, and status, of personal connections.” Polytheistic and animistic, they “kept the world in balance by prayer, ritual, and ceremony, and kinship with the spirit world.” “Spiritual forces,” they believed, “permeated everyday lives and possessed and exerted power.” They regarded land not as ‘real estate’ or property but as sacred soil to be defended as the place where their ancestors, now among those spiritual forces, were buried. Triumph in war meant that the gods of the victors were more powerful than the gods of the defeated. “Upheaval and catastrophe reflected loss of spiritual power that could be explained as a result of weakened traditional culture”—literally, the cultus—and by “declining observance of necessary rituals.” Wars against the English were typically seen as religious revival as much as military-political self-defense.

When Washington’s home colony of Virginia saw its first English settlement at Jamestown in 1607, there were approximately 40 Amerindian tribes living there, numbering perhaps 20,000 altogether. By the time Washington was born in 1732 the Native population had declined by 80%, ravaged by diseases, especially when smallpox arrived (“probably on board African slave ships”) in 1696. Thanks to British immigration policies and superior methods of farming, English Virginians already had outnumbered Native Virginians by 1640, and they had defeated the principal Indian chief, Opechancanough, who had launched “a brutal war against the aggressive infant colony.” Some Indians were enslaved by the colonists; others participated in the slave trade, ranging into the more southerly colonies to capture Indians there and to sell them to the whites. And although, as one British official remarked, each Indian nation was “perfectly well acquainted with its exact original [territorial] bounds,” those bounds were no more respected by the more powerful Indian nations than they were by the English; for example, the Iroquois, originating in the northern part of the New York colony, had fought their way to western Virginia by the early 1700s. As one of its chiefs put it in 1744, “All the World knows we conquered the several Nations” living along the Potomac and Susquehanna rivers, as well as those “on the back of the Great Mountains in Virginia.”

The young Washington entered this contested terrain as many Tidewater Virginians had done and would continue to do for decades: as a surveyor and land speculator. By the age of sixteen he was already surveying along a southern branch of the Potomac in Maryland; he began his military career in 1753, by which time he was already interested in lands in the Ohio territory. Washington was associated with the Virginia-based Ohio Company, which had purchased lands west of Virginia from the Six Nations (that is, the Iroquois Confederation), which had in its turn claimed those lands by right of conquest, having defeated other Indian nations which had settled their. The Ohio Company acted in full cooperation with the British Crown, “advanc[ing] the Crown’s imperial interest by pursuing its own self-interest.” The Crown needed to proceed carefully, however, because a too-aggressive policy of territorial acquisition might push some of the Indians “into the arms of the French,” one of England’s imperial rivals on the continent. There were other competing claimants to that land, ranging from rival Virginia companies to Indian rivals of the Iroquois. No one really ruled it, except to some extent the Shawnees, who broke with the Iroquois and allied with the English against the French. 

Seeing an opportunity, in 1753 French forces gathered, hoping to seize Ohio territory. Virginia Lieutenant Governor Robert Dinwiddie appointed the twenty-one-year-old Washington to reconnoiter in the territory. With a small escort of Indians accompanying his Virginia men, Washington confirmed the French incursion; he was sent back as second-in-command with a force numbering 300, whose members, Dinwiddie promised, would receive land grants after the war. This would result in what Americans called the French and Indian War, called the Seven-Years’ War by the English who fought it in Europe. And it truly was a French and Indian war, with the various Indian nations in the region allying with either the French or the English. When one of the Indian chiefs saw the loss of an English fort whose construction he’d approved, his own prestige among the Indians declined. That same chief, Tanaghrisson “tried to save face” by goading the inexperienced Washington into a battle against the French; although Washington “is often credited with starting” the war by this action, it was really Tanaghrisson who began what many historians now consider the first of the ‘world wars.’

Washington can scarcely be said to have covered himself with glory in that war. Most fundamentally, he “consistently misread the motives and actions of the Ohio Indians who wanted to maintain a balance of power in the region” and had no intention of siding with the English and their Indian allies. Nor did Washington understand that Indian customs didn’t entail a European-style military chain of command; Indian chiefs themselves needed to persuade their warriors to fight or not to fight and, if they chose to fight, when, where, and how to do so. Chief Tanaghrisson himself complained that “Washington tried to command us as he did his slaves,” often refusing their advice. It is true that the chief was shifting the blame for his own bad advice, which Washington did take. After losing the Battle of Jumonville, Washington resigned his commission rather than accept a demotion, returning home.

The war hardly went smoothly after Washington’s departure, even with more experienced English officers in command. Colonial assemblies were reluctant to contribute a substantial share of men and material to the effort. Neither the English nor the French had accurately estimated the power of the Indians. General Edward Braddock was no better at managing Indian relations than Washington had been, and his troops suffered defeat at the Battle of Monongahela against a better-trained French force, one whose officers had more experience with Indians and were better at coordinating with them. By then, Washington had rejoined the army and survived the ambush, “escorting the mortally wounded Braddock from the field with the straggling remnants of the army.”

The main reason the French-allied Indians eventually lost the war was disunity amongst themselves. “Different tribes, and even groups within tribes, fought their own parallel wars.” They wanted “to keep their country free of European settlement” but also free of one another. One-third of the Virginia troops died, and the settlers abandoned nearly 30,000 square miles of territory. In effect, the French and Indian forces won the war in the South. Luckily for them, the war shifted to the North, where English troops were more substantial. Meanwhile, the Virginians held their (greatly reduced) line by recruiting Cherokee warriors from South Carolina and by joining with forces from Pennsylvania, which finally “abandoned its long tradition of [Quaker] pacifism in the spring of 1756.” Washington wanted to lead an expedition against Fort Duquesne in Pennsylvania, the center of resistance to British troops in the region, but London quite understandably had other ideas, selecting the Scottish officer John Forbes, who wisely mad sure that the Indian allies were well supplied. They proved as unreliable as Washington expected them to be, but by 1758 Forbes had 6,000 British troops at his command, and they turned the proverbial tide. Duly noting this, the Iroquois Six Nations and the Susquehanna Delawares made peace with the Cherokee, aligning against the French forces. Those forces were defeated at Fort Duquesne in November 1758; before retreating, they blew up the fort, a site Forbes renamed ‘Pittsburgh’ in honor of William Pitt, the British Secretary of State who had appointed him. Washington again resigned his commission, two months later, marrying the widow Martha Custis and taking over her plantation, including her 200 slaves. 

Elected to a seat in the Virginia House of Burgesses, Washington turned to building his wealth and political status in Virginia. His regiment was disbanded at the end of 1762, and the war was concluded the next year. Assessing the war, “there were those who questioned Washington’s fitness for command. He hardly deserved the military reputation he had acquired by the end of the war, and the Revolutionary War would demonstrate, time and again, that he still had plenty to learn.” And “contrary to popular myth, he did not learn how to defeat the British in the Revolution by fighting in the ‘Indian style’ he learned in the French and Indian War.” He rather learned to add that style to his tactical repertoire while continuing to prefer the European way of war, with its clear lines of command and full-on battles coordinating infantry and artillery. What no one questioned was his courage. Even and especially in retreat, he never panicked and he kept his defeated troops together. His character would prove to be his fortune, not his expertise in cultural anthropology, a discipline that did not yet quite exist beyond the pages of Montesquieu, who didn’t think much about military strategy and therefore could offer little guidance to his readers in that area.

In the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France ceded its lands east of the Mississippi to Britain, those west of the Mississippi to Spain, whom they hoped would contain the English advance. “Indians thought differently. In their view the French had no right to give their country to the English. Never having been conquered by the English or the French, nor subject to their laws, they considered themselves ‘a free people.'” Anticipating the deal, they planned war against the British, and seized several forts west of the Appalachians, nearly breaking “Britain’s hold on the interior of North America.” The war finally stalemated; its major effect was to convince London that it needed to keep a standing army in North America, to be funded by the Stamp Act of 1765. By law, “London, not the colonies, controlled western expansion,” but, like the Indians, the Americans thought differently and continued to settle in Indian territories claimed by their mother country. Land speculation flourished and, as before, Washington was in on it. Calloway quotes his fellow historian Joseph Ellis, who writes, “At bottom lurked a basic conflict about the future of the Ohio Country: Washington believed it was open to settlement; the British government believed it was closed; and the Indians believed it was theirs.” London greatly assisted the Americans’ ambitions by negotiating the Treaty of Fort Stanwix, which moved the western boundary “hundreds of miles to the west.” “George Washington was back in business.” A land rush ensued, but so did American restiveness under British rule, as London tightened its central-state controls over its colonies. When a 1774 ruling from London courts disallowed the Ohio land claims of Virginia war veterans, Washington became indignant. The War for Independence was brewing. 

During that war, Washington adopted a defensive strategy against the British, rightly depending on the vast, forested lands of North America to protect his soldiers from assaults from professional troops. Simultaneously, “he consistently advocated offensive war against Indians,” who had every reason to fear the Americans more than the British, for precisely the same reason that Washington thought he could outlast the King’s men: The British were foreigners in their own colonies, and those colonies were too big to rule militarily from London—especially since London had a much nearer enemy, France, a short distance from its western flank. Despite these fears, some Indian nations and tribes allied with the Americans if only because they expected them to win. Washington now welcomed them, recalling “from firsthand experience the psychological impact of Indian warriors and Indian ways of fighting,” maintaining “that a body of Indians combined with American woodsmen would strike fear into the British and foreign troops, especially the new recruits.” In the event, however, his suspicions remained, and he used Indians primarily as scouts. 

Crucially for his own subsequent political career, the Virginia gentryman became identified with ‘the democracy’ at Valley Forge in the winter of 1777-78, when he suffered the bitter cold with his troops. In such a circumstance, his character meant more than his military savvy or his ‘anthropological’ expertise—both of which, though much improved, remained dubious. His popularity with Americans hardly suffered when he ordered expeditions into Iroquois country against tribes that allied with the British, expeditions that centered not so much on man-to-man combat as the destruction of Iroquois crops, a form of siege warfare adapted to open country. This forced the British to confront “a refugee crisis as Indian families who had lost everything flooded” into their Niagara base. “The scorched-earth campaign and terror tactics that Washington ordered” helped to win the war while “caus[ing] untold human misery.” Nonetheless, the Iroquois continued to fight alongside their allies, if increasingly in vain.

“American actions made it impossible for Indians to ignore British warning that the rebels intended to steal their country and destroy them.” The Ohio tribes fought hard, but increasingly saw that the British would lose. For his part, Washington told the Delawares that the British are a “boasting people,” and that their only chance of survival was to learn to live with the Americans. “Learn our arts and ways of life, and, above, all the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are.” Knowing that Americans, for their part, should also learn to live with the Indians, even as they would take most of their land, he began to think of regime change among those nations and tribes as the only way to ensure the safety and prosperity of both sides. He “knew what the Indians knew: the war in the West was a war for Indian land,” but he did not necessarily want Americans to take all of it, if the Indians would ‘Americanize’ and integrate themselves into the American regime. The ruinous smallpox epidemic of 1779-80, which began in Mexico City and spread northward, further weakened Indian defenses against American plans. 

This notwithstanding, as the Articles of Confederation constitution took hold in the United States, “Indians remained the dominant power in the trans-Appalachian West,” with a population of about 150,000. The mountains were a formidable barrier for settlers to cross. Politically, “the thirteen states had achieved independence but did not yet constitute a nation, let alone an imperial republic with a manifest destiny to occupy the continent.” To observers at the time, “a more likely prospect in 1783 was that North America would continue to be divided among several empires, Indian confederacies, and multiple sovereignties that might include more than one American republic if individual states and settlements of Americans… went their separate ways,” as some indeed intended, with varying degrees of intensity, for decades to come. “Could the infant nation resist these powerful centrifugal tendencies,” given these geopolitical facts, its untried republican regime, and its loosely confederated system of states? Those states would prove a major obstacle to any unified American policy toward the Indians from the Washington administration through that of Andrew Jackson. But as in the colonial wars, Amerindians were even more divided than their U.S. rival, and they lacked modern technology, aside from things they could acquire by barter.

As president under the 1787 Constitution, “Washington thought the precarious republic’s security, prosperity, and future depended upon creating a strong government, creating a national market in Indian lands, and turning hunting territories over to commercial agriculture and economic development.” With Benjamin Franklin, he considered it “a matter of both justice and policy” that “Indians should have the opportunity to give up their lands by consent in treaties, and he hoped the process could be carried out with a minimum of bloodletting,” thanks to his policy of regime change. This country, he wrote, “is large enough to contain us all.” He preferred the Virginia colonial policy of purchasing large tracts of lands by major investors (such as himself), who would rent small plots to settlers; this contrasted with Thomas Jefferson’s approach—the “empire of liberty” in which settlers would own their own land and, once sufficiently numerous, would organize the territories into political communities which would join the Union as states equal to the original thirteen, unlike the European colonial empires. Initially, Washington’s tenant-settler policy prevailed; when Kentucky achieved statehood in 1792 only one-third of the “adult white male residents” owned land, as the majority were tenants. 

With the French removed and the British holding on to some forts in the West, America’s principal imperial rival in the South was Spain. The Chickasaws played a balance-of-power game, but as in the United States, by then factionalized by passions attendant to the French Revolution, “the diplomatic shuffling intensified divisions within the nation.” Unfortunately for the Chickasaws the empires they confronted bordered their lands, whereas the empires the Americans confronted were centered overseas. 

In the opinion of Washington as well as Jefferson, “territories shed their colonial status when they became states,” while the Indians would shed that status “when they became ‘civilized’ and incorporated into the Republic.” By ‘civilized’ Washington and the other Founders meant modern with respect to political economy and republican with respect to government. In the meantime, the Indians on their territories were regarded as self-governing protectorates of the United States, entitled to local self-rule but not to an independent foreign policy. From Vattel and from Locke before him they took the doctrine that such treatment was entirely just, given the superior civility, the superior security for natural rights, afforded by regimes that encouraged farming instead of “war and plunder.” As for the political economy of the United States, it needed to acquire and sell western land to repay its war debt. 

Accordingly, “Washington wanted Indian relations in the United States to demonstrate to the world that his nation was the equal of European nations in humanitarianism and waging civilized war.” His Secretary of War, Henry Knox, concurred, writing that “Indians possess the natural rights of man,” and ought to be treated with “justice and humanity.” What Calloway miscalls “social engineering” was actually regime change. In exchange for such change, which would reduce the amount of land the Indians needed to support themselves, the Indians would avoid further conquests by an increasingly more powerful American regime. This would free more land for purchase by American settlers. 

The problem was not so much that the Indians resisted regime change but that the settlers wanted all of their lands, even though their national government didn’t want them to have it. They continued to move west, ignoring the strictures of the federal government. “The federal government deplored their actions as contrary to its declared policies but did little to stop them. Even imposing what little control it could on the frontier risked losing westerners’ loyalties and votes.” The settlers held the trump cards: in regime terms, republicanism empowered them against the wealthy speculators and federal officials alike; in ‘state’ terms, federalism made their secessionist threats credible. As Knox wrote to Washington, “The angry passions of the frontier Indians and whites are too easily inflamed by reciprocal injuries, and are too violent to be controlled by the feebler authority of the civil power” in its attempts to enforce treaties. The best Washington could do was to send agents to live among the Indians to give the national government a presence among them. He did this at the request of the Indians, who rightly felt threatened by the ever-encroaching settlers, often backed by the state governments, especially in the South. The regime-change policy, including the agents, was funded by Congress in 1793. “The Indian policy that Washington envisioned and implemented continued with variations for more than one hundred years.” 

Although the Cherokees and Chickasaws adopted this policy, the Creek and Muskogee nations in the South resisted. Together, they numbered about 15,000-20,000 “ethnically and linguistically diverse people” living in more than fifty towns. A Scottish-Indian named Alexander McGillivray intended to form them into a “unified nation”; had he been successful, they would have ruled “a block of territory as big as a modern state” consisting of northern Florida, western Georgia, northern Alabama, and eastern Mississippi. McGillivray wanted to make a treaty with the United States; Washington, mindful of the Spanish threat and the settler threat, and the threat posed by Georgia land speculators, and knowing as well the weakness of his own government, entered negotiations. The result was the 1790 Treaty of New York, whereby the Creeks accepted the status of a protectorate. In return, the United States guaranteed protection of Indian hunting grounds against settler encroachments and the furnishing of domestic animals and farm implements to the Creeks. The treaty eventually failed, thanks to “preexisting divisions within Creek society, Spanish intrigues, opposition to McGillivray, Georgia’s resent at the imposition of federal authority in its Indian affairs, and dissatisfaction with specific terms of the treaty.” McGillivray soon returned to his alliance with Spain, before his death in 1793. 

“In the South, Washington tried to curtail the assault on Indian lands and prevent war”; in the Northwest Territory, governed under the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, “he moved quickly to acquire the Indian lands he deemed essential to the nation’s future, a move that virtually guaranteed war.” He continued to offer the Indians the option of treaties or what he called “punitive strokes” to induce them to subordination. “He badly miscalculated.” The Northern Indians wanted no part of a system of private property instead of communally-owned lands, thus rejecting a core principle of the American regime. Regime conflict loomed, with the ever-warlike Iroquois allying in confederation with the Miamis, Shawnees, Kickapoos, Ojibwas, Ottawas, and Potawatomis. Meanwhile, the Mohawks, under their chief Joseph Brant, stood ready to negotiate a compromise. The warrior confederacy defeated American troops in Shawnee country, putting the fragile United States “in a precarious position,” as frontiersmen feared for their lives and began to suspect that “the federal government lacked the resolve to bring order in the West.” Still-hostile Great Britain, fearing for its Canadian colonies, proposed “turning the Northwest Territory into a neutral Indian barrier state.” But Washington wasn’t about to cower out so easily.

In 1790 he appointed Timothy Pickering to approach the Iroquois, hoping to persuade them to act as intermediaries with the western Indians and to arrange a peace settlement. Washington knew Pickering well, having appointed him adjutant general of the Continental Army in 1777 and having served with him in Philadelphia at the Constitutional Convention. By now, Pickering was a county official in Pennsylvania and a fellow land speculator. He told Washington that “a man must be destitute of humanity, of honesty, or of common sense” if he did not feel compassion for the Indians’ circumstances. He found a tutor in Indian ways in the Seneca chief Sagoyewatha, a.k.a. Red Jacket. Red jacket was unimpressed with the administration’s policy of regime change, saying that “the Great Spirit intended Indians and whites to walk different paths,” with the Indians “follow[ing] our ancient rules.” Pickering persisted in defining the policies dictated by compassion and prudence differently, concurring with Washington’s strategy of regime change. He offered the Six Nations a conference with the president to discuss the introduction of agriculture, spinning and weaving, and literacy to their peoples. With the Indians fresh from victory in their most recent battle with the Americans, the two sides reached an impasse. Subsequent negotiations also failed; in his preparations for war, Washington took care to supplement the militia troops with an augmented complement of professional soldiers. For its part, Congress reorganized the militia and gave them better supplies.

Meanwhile, Indian factionalism intensified. The Ottawas, Ojibwas and Potawatomis dropped out. And the British, still occupying forts in the West, declined to intervene in any renewed war. Defeated at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the Indians applied for sanctuary at Fort Miamis, but the Brits denied them entry. “That dispirited the Indians more than the outcome of the battle”; they could recover from one loss, but they knew they needed the modern military force of the British if they were to hold off the Americans, who in their turn took the victory as proof of effectual sovereignty, “the young nation [having] demonstrated the ability to enforce its will by force of arms.” “The federal government and its new army had finally answered westerners’ calls and defeated the Indians”; that army went on to suppress the settlers’ Whiskey Rebellion, too.

Negotiated by Pickering, the Treaty of Canandaiga solemnized Indian cession of most of Ohio to the United States in return for goods valued at $20,000. “For the Iroquois people it was, and remains, a clear recognition of Haudenosaunee sovereignty and the seminal document in their relationship with the United States.” As usual, it didn’t stop traders and land speculators from operating in Indian country, with backing from powerful New Yorkers. The much more famous—and at the time, controversial—Jay Treaty of 1794 saw the removal of the British forts on the northern frontier, although Jefferson, Madison, and other ‘democratic-republican’ figures disliked provisions allowing the Brits to continue their free trade with the Indians and, more significantly, seemingly to align America with Britain against the Jacobin-republican regime of France. Financially, these treaties made eminent sense: “Between 1790 and 1796 the United States spent $5 million, almost five-sixths of the total federal expenditures for the period, fighting the war against the Northwestern Confederacy.” Now it “could finally generate income from sales of western land to pay down its debt.” With the 1795 Pinckney Treaty with Spain, America’s southern flank was also secured. “Washington had set the nation firmly on the path of westward expansion and laid the foundations of the nation’s empire in Indian country,” although he needed to divest himself of his own western lands to meet his personal debts. 

Being a contemporary historian, Calloway tends to interpret Washington’s intentions as if the first president were a historicist. “For Washington,” he claims, “civilization has less to do with present conduct and living Christian lives than with future progress—for both Indians and the United States.” This too-Wilsonian Washington thought that “a society based on private property could not accommodate tribal societies based on communal landholding, and Christian or not, Indians could have no place within the United States if they continued to hunt, hold their lands in common, and live separate from American jurisdiction.” This is true as far as it goes, but it overlooks the fact that Washington, along with the rest of the Founders, regarded property as a natural right and that natural rights existed not only to be secured but to be enhanced—as in the phrase, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” So, yes, he wanted to “prepare them to assume their place in the new nation as individuals rather than as members of sovereign tribes,” an assumption that “would also free unused hunting territory to fuel the nation’s growth.” But he understood that as an enhancement of natural human capacities, a moral good inseparable from economic prosperity. And yes again, he may well have concurred with the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who taught that “human societies developed in stages from hunters to herders to farmers,” but Adam Smith was no historicist, and neither was that uncompromising critic of natural right, David Hume, whom the Founders associated with moral skepticism and Toryism. Nor did Washington and Knox confuse natural right with biological determinism or ‘racism.’ With Locke and many other natural-rights thinkers, Knox held that “the idea that the difference between civilized and savage ways of life was based on different ‘races of men possessing distinct primary qualities’ was fallacious; the differences arose from ‘education and habits.'” In this he, and Washington, followed the argument of that firm natural-rights man Thomas Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virginia, his refutation of the Comte du Buffon’s Histoire naturelle, an early example of ‘race science,’ a doctrine eventually tied to historicist evolutionism.

Notoriously, for many subsequent decades Southern slaveholding plantation oligarchs turned to Buffon, not Jefferson, and the Southern Indians followed them in their claims, or at least in the practices supposedly justified by those claims. “By the time Washington died, many Creeks and Cherokees held and regarded African slaves much as their white neighbors did.” A decade or so after Washington’s death, the Creeks then succumbed to the sort of religious fanaticism Locke, Washington, and Jefferson had all worked against, as those who saw the benefits of regime change were overbalanced by what Calloway calls “a movement of spiritual and cultural rejuvenation that ultimately led to civil war within the Creek Nation and war with the United States.” This is a rather sanitized description of the Red Stick War, a campaign inspired by the itinerant Shawnee chief, Tecumseh who, along with his brother, Tenskwatawa ‘the Prophet,’ drew upon the claims of previous Amerindian seers who had claimed that Americans would be destroyed by in a vast apocalypse ordained by the Great Spirit, acting through His peoples. Tecumseh had uncompromisingly opposed the treaties ceding Indian lands in Ohio and Indiana, continued to call for a united Indian nation that would extirpate the Americans once and for all. This false prophecy induced a strong faction of Creeks, called the Red Sticks, to precipitate first a civil war among the Creeks and then a foreign war against the Americans. Leaders of the majority of Creeks, who preferred to adhere to the treaties with the United States, were murdered for their pains, their property seized by the Red Sticks. In the war, concurrent with the Americans’ War of 1812 against Britain, Creek leaders requested assistance from the aged George III, which was more than enough to goad General Andrew Jackson to crush the rebellion and confiscate 23 million acres of Creek land, exercising the same right of conquest that Indians and Europeans alike had recognized for centuries, albeit on different terms. 

Overall, Calloway excellently conveys the geopolitical complexities Washington and his contemporaries confronted, complexities they met with strategies including federal- and commercial-republican imperialism and regime change. Their policies met with mixed success, although in the longer term and for the most part the American founding succeeded spectacularly, in time serving as a bulwark against the tyrannies of the twentieth century and to this day.

 

 

 

 

Danielle Allen: Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2014.

 

 

The Declaration of Independence tells its readers who is doing the declaring: “We… the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled,” acting “by the Authority of the good People of these Colonies.” In practice, this meant that political independence of those united states from the British Empire was asserted by citizens, mostly white and male, acting however on behalf of the women, children, and indeed the slaves who lived in their households. Notoriously, it was the case that the equal unalienable rights that formed the moral basis of the newly-claimed sovereignty of that people were not reflected in the civil-social institutions and laws the people had enacted. Therefore, Professor Allen argues, “we cannot have freedom” in full “without equality.” Just as a people, in asserting its sovereignty, “assume[s] among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them,” that same natural equality ought to prevail among individuals living within the same civil society. The civil conditions by which such equality will be secured won’t be the same as the conditions prevailing under the law of nations, inasmuch as no one American, and no group of Americans, enjoys the same degree of sovereignty over himself that an independent people enjoys. Americans live under one regime; the United States lives under no regime, and indeed asserts exactly that in the face of the British monarch.

Both political liberty and civic equality engage not only the natural rights of human beings but their natural capacities or powers, preeminently the distinctively human capacity of speech. The Declaration of Independence amounts to ‘nothing but words.’ The words needed backing by physical force. But the words justified the use of that force. More, they animated the founding of the regime that would replace the British regime, after Americans won the independence they had asserted. Language and force: “The achievement of political equality,” which must be earned, and is seldom simply bestowed, “requires, among other things, the empowerment of human beings as language-using creatures.”

This is where the ‘our-ness’ of “our Declaration” comes in. Americans declared their independence on the basis of their equal natural rights a long time ago. Since then, many Americans have denied the existence of those rights. Such defenders of slavery as John C. Calhoun charged that every sentence of the Declaration’s opening paragraphs were falsehoods, based upon a wrong understanding of human nature. To this day, conservatives who prefer not to conserve the Declaration look to tradition, not the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God, as the source of moral and political right. On the ‘Left,’ a panoply of thinkers has denied the principles of the Founders as retrograde, perhaps useful for the time but now superseded by historical progress. Marxists regard natural rights as excrescences of the ruling bourgeois class, but the much more numerous (and moderate) ‘Progressives’ of various stripes also regard such rights as obsolete relics of a time gone by.

It is a leading merit of Allen’s study to vindicate the Declaration from its critics but especially from its critics on the ‘Left.’ She wants all Americans to reclaim the Declaration for themselves. To do so, she must convince advocates of economic, social, and political equality that the Declaration speaks for them, too, and that they can and should speak up for it. What “individual citizens” need in order to defend their natural equality is a degree of political equality that enables them to gain “sufficient control over their lives to protect themselves from domination”—to be able to secure their natural rights from those who would violate them. Since no one individual can do this on his own, citizens will need to talk with one another, reaffirm and sometimes reform their political institutions and laws, looking to the Declaration for the unchanging standards against which all such practical efforts should be judged.

How to make the Declaration “ours,” so many years after its original ‘owners’ wrote and enacted it? Read it slowly, Allen recommends. Only after understanding it can one know what its authors, with their command of language, wanted to talk their fellow-citizens into. She sees that the beginning of that understanding, the beginning of wisdom respecting the Declaration, is to see that it is a syllogism, a “logical argument” that you will be rightly talked into, once you’ve seen the rational necessity, and consequent moral necessity, of that argument. She identifies the logictextbook the Signers likely had studied, Isaac Watts’s Logic; or, The Right Use of Reason in the Enquiry after Truth with a Variety of rules to Guard against Error in the Affairs of Religion and Human Life, which went through twenty editions beginning in 1724.

Logical arguments reach out to the interlocutors of those who make such arguments. Since the Declaration was declared by a few on behalf of many, not by one voice issuing a decree, because it was “written by a group” even though Thomas Jefferson was its principal draftsman, the argument itself was refined in dialogue, as if one of the Socratic inquiries we can now read had not been written by Plato or Xenophon, but had really occurred among acting politicians. Allen calls the Declaration the product of “the collective mind” of the Founders and indeed of Americans, which is how Jefferson himself described it in his old age. Meanwhile, the mind of the British, represented in the mind of their sovereign, George III, had firmly closed itself against rational argument. By late summer of 1775 it was clear that “there would be no reconciliation, no effort to solve differences through negotiation rather than military compulsion.” Force, not reason, would prevail; hence the celebrated phrase, “We hold these truths to be self-evident….” To minds that are closed, even self-evident truths seem sophistical. Such closed minds incline to impose their opinions with force rather than arguing for them with words, but habits of unreason readily lead to unintended consequences. One means by which the Crown intended to force Americans to obey was to offer freedom to slaves and indentured servants in Virginia, if they “joined the British military” to put down the rebels. “This proclamation instantaneously radicalized Virginia’s slaveholding elite,” proving that the fight for natural equality can benefit from surprising allies. 

This suggests that the British regime was not only close-minded ‘in theory’—refusing to acknowledge equality of natural rights—but rationally deficient ‘in practice,’ imprudent. Not so, the Americans. Far from throwing themselves into a war for independence without considering the consequences if they won, they deliberated on the political means by which they could secure their rights after independence was achieved. John Adams outlined a model for the forms of government the united states might take. This included separation of powers, representation or republicanism, and bicameral legislatures. “Adams’s purpose in providing such a concrete script [was] to allay anticipated fears about the difficulty of setting up new governments in conditions” of what he called “sudden emergency.” “Pulling down tyrannies,” he wrote, requires “erecting Such new Fabricks” as may be “best calculated to promote [the] Happiness” of each former colony, and of their union as a whole. As early as 1776 Adams drafted a preamble that each colony could attach to their new constitutions. 

As for the Declaration itself, Congress edited Jefferson’s draft, reducing it “by about 25 percent.” In deference to the powerful plantation slaveholders whose support they needed, they omitted Jefferson’s vehement denunciation of slavery, while retaining the fundamental argument that puts slavery on trial for its life. They also removed a flowery passage describing the colonists as unrequited lovers of the British, although they more chastely continued to call the British their “brethren.” The added phrases acknowledging God—the “Supreme Judge of the World,” a world ruled by “divine Providence”—much to doubting Thomas Jefferson’s discomfiture. Even the calligraphers got into the act, capitalizing “GOD,” “CREATOR,” and “DIVINE PROVIDENCE” in the final document. “The monumental achievement of Thomas Jefferson is, ultimately, to have produced a first draft—and a general argumentative structure—that, through its philosophical integrity and unquestionable brilliance, could surive such intense committee work and bear this much demand for agreement. But the authorship of the document belongs to all those who participated in the conversations leading up to the decision to declare independence and to all those who wrangled over the consensual statement of justification.” And so “when we sit down to read the Declaration, it is their argument that we read, not Jefferson’s alone.” “The art of democratic writing,” the product of the art of democratic thinking—democratic in the sense of argued over, then consented to—is something that “we must learn to appreciate” if our public discourse is not to degenerate into a verbal war of all against all, vehement assertion against vehement assertion, in which no reason need apply. What is now the Declaration’s most controversial omission, “the language criticizing slavery,” demonstrates that “when groups of people write texts together, some choices are always made on the basis of votes, not truth. There will be compromises.” Without such compromises, the war for independence will never be won, and if somehow won, cannot secure the rights it was fought to secure, or frame the governments needed to perpetuate their security.

The Declaration is “an ordinary memo,” Allen writes, a document announcing a change and giving reasons for it. In so saying, she intends to make the Declaration seem ‘approachable’ to contemporary readers, but of course the Declaration isn’t a memo. It is what it says it is: a formal and indeed legal document appealing to the law of nations, similar to a declaration of war. In her attempt to ‘democratize’ the Declaration, she even goes so far as to claim that “we are all equal in having the capacity to judge relations among facts, principles, and courses of action,” equal in “being political creatures.” On the contrary, we are not equal in the capacity to judge (except in the sense that any sane person has such a capacity, even if not to the same degree); we are by nature political creatures, although again not all to the same degree, and some scarcely at all, content with being told what to do).

Allen returns to firmer ground in observing that the Declaration proceeds in four steps: “declaring reasons, presenting facts to witnesses”—the “candid world,” unbiased—then “declaring independence, and making pledges.” As a “unanimous” Declaration of the American Congress, it gives voice to many representatives but with one soul—as she cogently remarks, unus or ‘one’ and anima or ‘soul.’ Soul implies not only mind but life; “this comes through in the link between the words anima and ‘animal.'” Through their representatives, through the nucleus of their future republican regime, Americans have formed a group “committ[ing] its energies fully to a common goal.” Another way to say this is to recall that the Declaration says that governments derive their “just powers” from “the consent of the governed.” “This country was born in talk,” and not just any kind of talk but rational talk, a syllogism; consent means rational assent, not mere ‘going along.’ Consent is needed because human beings are equally human, that is, born with the capacity to reason, if not to the same degree and obviously not with the same willingness to exercise that capacity on a regular basis.

In its rational character, “the Declaration is nothing less than a very short introduction to political philosophy,” raising questions of what it is to live well along with the practical question of whether we are in fact living well. And it begins to answer these questions by raising the question of what it means to be “created equal.” Allen rightly denies that in invoking equality the Signers mean ‘sameness.’ She identifies five “facets” of their idea of equality: a condition in which no party dominates another; “equal access to the tools of government”; “egalitarian approaches to the development of collective intelligence,” by which she means moral and civic education; “egalitarian practices of reciprocity” or the ruling-and-being ruled relations Aristotle identifies as the characteristic of a sound marriage; and finally “shar[ed] ownership of public life and in co-creating our common world”—that is, the intention to exercise the tools of government to which every citizen has access. All of these facets of civic equality derive from the natural equality human beings have, equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The link between human nature and civil society is moral necessity—in this case, the necessity of dissolving the political bands that have connected Americans to the English. That moral necessity in turn derives from the logical contradiction between the equality of Americans and Englishmen by nature and the British regime’s refusal to secure the natural rights which both peoples equally share. Moral necessity impels them to turn to national “self-government” in lieu of the failed imperial government, to equal status as a sovereign people, not yet equal to the great British Empire in power (as Allen puts it) but “equal as a power,” as a sovereign people among a world of other equally sovereign peoples.

Allen pauses to remark that the phrase, “separate and equal station among the Powers of the earth,” which the Signers declare, was later distorted and misused by the majority opinion of the United States Supreme Court in the infamous Plessy v. Ferguson case of 1896. In that ruling, the Court declared racial segregation constitutional if accommodations on railroad lines, restaurants, and so on were “separate but equal.” “Whereas the colonists sought an external separation, the segregationists—a cross-class alliance of white-power advocates—sought separation internally.” Of course, such separation never really mean equality but rather the opposite: racial domination, “to keep many people subjected and dependent.” Given this correct analysis, it is not quite right to say that “the Declaration provided tools for liberating some and dominating others”; it is more accurate to say that later Americans used the materials of which the Declaration’s “tools”—its words—could be reshaped and repurposed for evil.

As Creator, God endows all human beings with certain unalienable rights. The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God also entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the powers of the earth, if (given their circumstances) moral necessity commands them to assert that station. As a law of nature and of nature’s God, moral necessity is as necessary as the law of gravity, although not quite in the same way. It is indeed felt in “the natural instinct to survive,” as Allen says, but a mere instinct implies no right; to claim that it does would be to run afoul of David Hume’s famous distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ Rather, “the source of rights” is the nature of human beings ‘in full.’ Whether created by God or not, a good human being must fulfill its nature as such, just as a good horse or a good cornstalk is one that fulfills its nature. There are, of course, those who do not want human beings to fulfill their nature but rather to bend their fellows to serve those who dominate them, to turn those so dominated into beings less than what they are by nature. They want most human beings to be bad examples of human nature. In so desiring, they make themselves into bad examples of human nature, inasmuch as it is ‘self-evident,’ a matter of definition, that any being which is less than what it is by nature is a bad human being, and to desire the bad for others must therefore be a bad desire.

As Allen puts it, “Successful self-government is a success for nature, because it expands the flourishing of one set of natural creatures, human beings. Because all human beings desire to survive and flourish, they all struggle to interpret the events of their social worlds in order to ascertain whether things are going well or ill for them and their communities and to ascertain whether they need to change course.” Each person has “the potential to be a reasonable judge” (emphasis added)—a “moral sense,” as Jefferson would say, following the doctrine of the philosopher Francis Hutcheson. To realize this potential, each citizen must “grasp the importance of self-knowledge” and strive to achieve it. This is the Socratic lesson at the heart of the Declaration.

If so, then the human capacity of judgment entails the use of government to secure natural rights, inasmuch as one people might be considerably less willing to secure those rights for another people, as the British regime has demonstrated. The capacity so to use government requires a capacity readily to acknowledge certain truths about human beings. Hence the language, “self-evident.” Allen lists the truths the Signers consider to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that those rights include life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that governments have been instituted among men, based on the consent of the governed to secure those rights; that when governments fail to secure those rights, the people have the right to change their government and instituted a new government, “laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This is more than a list of truths, Allen observes; it is a syllogism. It is a syllogism that George III preferred not to acknowledge. Even Jefferson himself did not fully act on it, inasmuch as he failed to emancipate all of his slaves. But failure to acknowledge, or in acknowledging but failing to act upon, a logical argument does not invalidate the argument. No ad hominem argument refutes a syllogism unless the syllogism is about the nature or the behavior of a person. The major premises of the Declaration syllogism concern human beings as a species, not any one person. As Allen restates it, the syllogism is: (1) All people have rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; (2) Properly constituted government is necessary to their securing these rights; (3) all people have a right to whatever is necessary to secure what they have a right to; (4) all people have a right to a properly constituted government. This provides a standard by which persons and their action may be judged; it assumes nothing about the person or persons making the argument. Mao Zedong could say as much (although he did not); to counter-argue that Mao was a mass-murdering tyrant would be to say something true but irrelevant to the question of whether the argument is sound.

If equal unalienable rights are endowed by our Creator, who or what created human beings? This also raises Hume’s ‘is-ought’ question. “Why is it… that we possess our powers of mind, body, and spirit, which enable us to live, be free, and pursue happiness by means of politics, as a matter of right?” The Declaration leaves room for its readers to define the term ‘Creator’; Jefferson and Franklin evidently defined it differently than did that eminent Presbyterian co-signer, John Witherspoon. The fact that we must judge good and bad, the fact that no one can be ‘non-judgmental’ in any strong sense of the term, self-evidently or logically requires some ultimate source of right, whether that source is nature, or God, or some combination of the two. This puts the axe to Humean conventionalism, the claim that the real source of right can be custom or prevailing opinion, inasmuch as existing customs and opinions may be demonstrated to be bad for the human beings who practice and hold them. It does not put the axe to the later philosophic doctrine of historicism, which defines ‘God’ as Hegel does, as an ‘Absolute Spirit’ that unfolds dialectically through the course of human events. It does provide the beginning of an answer to historicism, but that is another matter.

So much for the theory of the Declaration. The Signers were not philosophers following their argument in all its implications but politicians with a practical intent. There is theoretical reasoning; there is also practical or prudential reasoning, equally obedient to the principle of non-contradiction. “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience has shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” What Allen calls the Signers’ “spirit of prudence” points them to “the third facet of equality,” the “need to build a collective intelligence” through moral and civic education, an intelligence that enables a people to analyze “how the present connects to the future”—that is, how to counteract the tyrannical designs of a George III with plans for effective self-government. 

The Declaration’s invocation of prudence leads immediately to the minor premises of the syllogism, the list of charges against the monarch and the English Parliament. One highly useful step in educating oneself in political prudence is to learn how to recognize tyrannical designs. Given our ignorance of others’ thoughts, we can only identify a tyrannical design by a set of actions that fits a pattern. When the Declaration describes “the history of the present King of Great Britain” as “a history of repeated injuries and usurpations,” it means just such a pattern, a story or narrative of events. The prudence of the Signers comes out, as Allen remarks, not only in their recognition of this telltale pattern but in the timing of their counter-actions. They didn’t wait until the would-be tyrant had got his rule cinched in—a rule that contradicted both the natural rights of all human beings and the constitutional rights of Englishmen. 

The list of eighteen grievances itself has a pattern, moving from bad to worse to worst. “King George has begun to make war on the colonists,” and in a way that violates the rules of just war as set down in the law of nations. “He is an aggressor,” violating the laws of jus bellum, and his means of war, which the Signers compare to the tactics among the Indian nations and tribes that are savage, violate the laws of jus in bello. Oddly, Allen cites the “multitude of New Offices” the king has imposed on the colonies, but she misses its significance. An example of these offices, as she points out, was the American Board of Customs Commissioners, “whose members were to live in the colonies and regulate everything that had to do with trade and tax.” These and other such measures were part of his attempt, in collaboration with Parliament, to consolidate British rule before, during and especially after the war is over (a war he obviously expected to win). A multitude of new offices bespeaks the institutional structure of the centralized modern state; George III and Parliament intended to extend the central state’s tentacles into the American colonies. Anticipating Tocqueville and many others, the Signers see such statism as the prime instrument of tyranny in the modern world. Limiting immigration is another such tactic. As Allen remarks, the Americans disliked this because it stunted their economic growth (“societies under the thumb of tyrants do not grow prosperous”); it is also true that tyrants don’t want large populations of restless colonists who might reach the ‘critical mass’ that would make their revolution successful.

As a syllogism, the Declaration teaches those who follow it. “The Declaration teaches people how to do the very thing that it argues that everyone has the capacity to do, namely, make political judgments.” Political judgments, recall, are judgments made in common, reflecting the reciprocal ruling-and-being-ruled fellow citizens exercise. In this sense the Declaration leads its readers “to a very deep understanding of human equality.” “When we read the Declaration, we watch political judgment in action,” as the Signers first lay down the standards of right human conduct, then measure the conduct of the British regime against those standards, find it contradictory to it, and announce a timely action in response to it. Allen suggests that the Declaration “tests its own hypothesis” with respect to the capacity of Americans at least, and maybe all people as well. “If all people can read or listen to it and understand how political judgment works in the Declaration beyond the Declaration itself—which is to say, regardless of whether they have gone to school, or how much history they have learned—then the Declaration is right about human equality.” If so, so. This may be carrying the principles of natural right rather too far into optimism about their likelihood of practice. But Allen is undoubtedly right to think that those who carry those principles to the people can and did find a wider audience of persons who did indeed understand those principles, and did indeed have the capacity to apply them in practice, than tyrants, oligarchs, and demagogues have typically thought possible or desirable. And this capacity can be strengthened by educators.

She also sees clearly that the portrait of a tyrant provides a sort of photographic negative of what good government looks like. Good governments take actions exactly the opposite of those undertaken by the British. Good governments will respect the rule of law, the orderly transaction of legislative business, and the actions of an independent judiciary; it will govern by popular consent, not by bureaucracy and armies; it will not wage unjust war against its own citizens or foment violent factional strife among them but instead strive to keep a civil peace. 

This being so, “what are we to make of the fact that the signers, who formally declared a commitment to equality, also protected slavery and ruthlessly sought to deracinate, if not exterminate, Native Americans?” To this, Allen replies that many of the Founders did indeed work to end slavery, putting it on the road to extinction in many of the states. It isn’t as easy to do things like that as it may seem, from a distance of two centuries. “In order to germinate and come alive in the world, ideas have to function as rules for action.” They must move from the head to the heart, from thought to habit. That requires step-by-step planning and consistent implementation of the progression of steps—setting out the future course of events, then taking each step along that course. “By the time the colonists affirmed the Declaration of Independence, they had already for over a century been scripting for themselves the set of actions that could bring the ideal of equality to life among themselves.” They had “built specific new habits for interacting with each other at the same time that they were developing general ideas about political equality,” but had not done so with respect to “interacting with slaves or Native Americans.” To be sure, some did: Quakers and their ‘secularist’ ally, Benjamin Franklin worked for the education of free black children in Pennsylvania; the Washington administration sought to change the regimes of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ in the deep South. But such projects proved too limited and desultory; in the case of Washington’s policy, the people of Georgia moved to push the Indians out, anyway, and succeeded. “Ideas don’t change actions on their own. Our desires matter too. This, finally, is why a shadow of tragedy trails our Declaration,” a trail of tears that became a river, and then a flood less than a century later. The troubled waters have yet to recede, entirely, to this day—another reason to read the Declaration of Independence, slowly.

Allen turns to the Americans’ attempts to persuade the king. “In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms,” only “to be answered by repeated injury” by him, a man therefore “unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” The capitalization of “We” was added by the printer but was not removed by the Signers when they reviewed his work. Allen makes much of this, saying that “it’s as if the Declaration is telling a story about how ‘We, the people’ was born.” Given the Declaration’s clear indication that Americans were already a people before their separation from the political bands that connected them to the English, it is more as if they are saying that We, the people have come to political maturity, that we are ready for self-government and indeed insist on it. We are reasonable, in theory and in practice; the British regime is not. We have developed “habits of reciprocity,” as Allen nicely puts it. The king, habituated to rule with no back-talk, has not. The colonists understand “the kind of equality that needs to be in play in relations between people in order for freedom to obtain,” relations that are political in Aristotle’s sense. The connection between genuinely political relations and reason is that both presuppose dialogue and dialectic, reciprocity, not one-way commands. There will come a time, after such deliberation, when commands are issued; otherwise, there is no rule, no government. Allen identifies the two times the phrase “We hold” occurs in the Declaration. First, “We hold these truths to be self-evident”; we, as a people who have engaged in political conference, in rational dialogue, have made our decision and we will stick to it. Second, we hold our “British brethren,” along with “the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends”; again, we have decided, together. Against any extra-logical, ad hominem questions about “the rectitude of our intentions,” they simply refer the matter to the Supreme Judge of the World, who alone can discern rectitude or the lack of it. They are willing to be judged by their fellow men in the same way they have judged their fellow men, by their actions directed at building “a political order that puts [the] recognition of human equality front and center.” And so they have been judged, although judgments have varied, ever since. 

“All adults should read the Declaration closely; all students should have read the Declaration from start to finish before they leave high school.” To do so “would prepare us all for citizenship” by “learn[ing] the democratic arts.”