Hi everyone and welcome to week six. This is video lecture one on the First Republic. We are going to start this lecture on PowerPoint slide two, your first content slide in this PowerPoint section. So the Revolutionary War created extended and heated debate in the colonies. long before victory about what new government should take the place of the British monarchy.
As colonies broke away from royal law and entrenched themselves in self-government, experimentation and innovation at the colonial, now state level, created a bank of ideas and experience that could be considered during the creation of a new government. Next slide. Newly created state constitutions generally shared a separation of powers to safeguard against abuses in the government. Citizens worried that any government over them could enact unjust laws or abuse their position, as had been the case with England. So on the state level, the executive branch was the governor.
The legislature was the state legislature, and the judicial was the state courts. Most of the state constitutions also included a Bill of Rights, something that the citizens had cherished as colonists and didn't want to lose now in a new nation. Next slide. Richard Henry Lee's resolution for independence contained a motion that the colonies create a confederation. This would later turn into a confederation among the states.
This meant that the colonies and later the states would be associated into a larger entity, but that the states would be sovereign. The document that would create the first independent national government, the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, was adopted in November of 1777. But the national power in this new government was exceptionally, incredibly weak. The people, after a long battle with Parliament, the King, and a war for British rights, were in no emotional place for a strong central government.
And that's simply not what the Articles of Confederation were. That said, we have to understand the Articles because it was the government that our revolutionary fighters had in their minds and hearts when they were fighting. The American Revolution was simply not fought for the Constitution.
So when we talk about our modern government, just remember that our current government wasn't the original dream, the original plan, or the original reality. Next slide. In 1786, Thomas Jefferson wrote the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom that declared no person should be compelled toward any religion or discriminated against for their beliefs.
This would become the basis for religious freedom, not just in Virginia, but in the new confederation. Why would Jefferson pin such a document? He didn't fit in religiously.
He was a deist and had an interest in religious freedom. The Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom is not just significant for the Articles of Confederation. It also will eventually become the basis for the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights that gives you freedom of religion. So this is going to be something that is significant right after the American Revolution.
but is just as significant today, even if Americans don't know the whole trajectory of where that came from. Slide six. For Americans, the spirit of independence that had swept the colonies evolved into a desire for equality.
That said, no state, even the most liberal among them, had universal male suffrage, universal male voting. But remember, after the English Toleration Act, the qualification to vote was property ownership. After the war, all states had seized loyalist estates, and they also claimed all the unsettled lands previously owned by the crown. Much of that land was used to grant bonuses to the men that had fought in the Continental Army. Also remember, those were the poor.
Free African Americans, criminals and immigrants, those without property, those without social standing, those who, even having served in the military, would not have been given suffrage in the new nation. But with these new lands granted them for service, they were given citizenship and a voice in the new government. It was a significant payment for those men. So in 1787, the new government granted 1.5 million acres in this way. It had a dual benefit.
It settled the debt owed them to the men's satisfaction, and it also settled far western lands that were wild and dangerous. These men were gritty fighters, though, and willing to defend the frontier for their new nation. Slide seven. almost immediately looking at all the new land. The states knew that in the future, new states would be carved out of them and considered what that would mean for the Confederation.
In 1779, they decided that those western lands, when populated, would be treated the same as the colonies, now states. that had fought in the revolution. They wouldn't be treated as less than.
They wouldn't be treated as colonies to the states that had fought. They knew what happened when people were treated as less than. So those newly created states, when they emerged, would be treated as equals.
Slide eight. In 1785, they also created the land ordinances that would cut a rectangular pattern on the land. The ordinances anticipated that a new region could apply for statehood when the population reached 60,000.
It also excluded slavery from the newly created Northwest. It was the best the founders could do to further the ideas of freedom and not infringe on the fiery desire to expand slavery in the southern states. So looking at the line on the map, the Mason-Dixon line, where the red line is, slavery is legal north and south.
Where the blue line is shown is above the red line and west of the blue line, there can't be slavery in the settlements there. So in the northwest, there cannot be slavery. Below the red line, and west of the blue line, there will be slavery.
This will create the division of slavery that separates the nation before, during, and to some extent after the American Civil War. So just to be clear, out of those four quadrants, only the northwestern region doesn't allow slavery. All three of the other sections do allow slavery.
Slide nine. Post-war, the states that had previously been constrained by British law were loosed into global trade. American merchants had not lost their talent for business and now had the run of the seas.
They opened markets with the Dutch, the Swedish, Europe, Asia, Africa, and China. Still, the states struggled with currency because there was no common currency after the war between the states. So the states could make money abroad, but struggled to trade within the Confederation because there was no uniformity. When we talk about the Articles of Confederation, people often say they were militarily weak, but there's no evidence of that at all.
It's a misinterpretation of the truth that the Articles of Confederation were weak. not militarily, but economically. Slide 10. It was becoming clear, particularly to the wealthy businesspersons of the new nation, that there was a need for a stronger government to regulate currency and heal the issues of chronic cash shortage on the continent. Another problem was the issue that average citizens were experiencing with paying tax and debt payments.
There were calls for those payments to be postponed until the government could figure out how people could make those payments without easy currency. It was a real concern because if those tax payments went unpaid, your property could be confiscated, and with your property, your vote. Slide 11. Farmers, including those that had received lands from the government as a service bonus.
all struggled to pay bills in the post-revolutionary period. The problem wasn't that they weren't working hard. The problem was that everyone with a parcel of land was working hard as a whole.
They were producing an enormous amount of agricultural output. And you know this. If the supply is too high, then there isn't enough demand to keep prices high or stable.
And it means the commodity prices become depressed. Even those that owned their land outright had taken out some credit to build and establish planting on these fresh lands. Creditors only wanted to be paid in hard currency that could be used anywhere, not paper currency valid only in one state. Massachusetts, the state with the most debt from the Revolutionary War, the state government levied the highest taxes of any state to pay off their war debt. Basically, Massachusetts after the Revolution did what England did after the French and Indian War.
As is always the case, the taxes hurt the poorest the most. The people wanted the Massachusetts legislator to come up with an alternative plan for how people could pay their bills without hard currency. They really wanted them to print more paper money and force creditors to accept it. Or...
put a stay on the consequences of non-payment like confiscation or foreclosure. However, the Massachusetts legislature adjourned without providing a solution and leaving people in fear of foreclosure. Next slide.
So without assistance and fearing to lose their property and voting rights, 1,200 armed men appeared at the Massachusetts court. using the threat of violence to prevent foreclosure by intimidating judges. They were led by American Revolutionary War veteran from the Continental Army, Daniel Shays. This is interesting because when we talk about this Shays Rebellion, it often is as a rowdy, negative, anti-government protest that is considered dangerous.
But I want you to remember that these men had lived in... fought during the revolution. So these tactics were the same used against England that most people celebrate as patriotism. To these men, arming themselves violently and pressing for rights was the norm.
The only difference is that in one scenario, it's against the British government, and in the second, it's the new independent Americans. government. Before you think Chais was acting too precipitously, he had sold everything of value outside of his land that he owned, including a sword that the French Marquis de Lafayette had awarded him for bravery in battle. So he sold everything to pay what he could before running out of options and becoming desperate.
The men were now... asking to be able to use their crops, corn or wheat, as payment since there was no other hard or paper currency easily available to pay the debts that they owed. Slide 13. In response, the Massachusetts state government dispatched 4,400 state militiamen to put down the rebellion.
Here is where the difference between the militias and the Continental Army become significant. Remember, the militia were men of social standing. and overall the militias looked down on the Continental Army and the men in it.
The militia members scattered the army men with a single cannon volley that left four of the farmers dead. Rumors began to spread among the upper classes in America, those that held the debts, that the common people were revolting and refusing to pay their bills by using violence. This isn't exactly true. but it's what the wealthy feared. It goes to show that governing is never easy, no matter who or what power is in charge.
In total, the events of the rebellion and its threats were greatly over-exaggerated, but it sent in motion calls among the wealthy elite that a stronger central government was needed to control the population and to fix the money issues so that debts would be paid in an acceptable way. fashion. Slide 14. Elected representatives began discussing the idea of revising the Articles of Confederation.
Now, to the people, revising meant altering the government document they believed in and fought for. The people liked sovereign states linked only for the purpose of defense against an outside power. So... As the Articles of Confederation were written, if Massachusetts had a rebellion, no other state was obligated to help them. If one state had a corrupt governor, no other state was obligated to help them.
If England attacked, they would band together and fight against that. That was the only obligation the states had to each other, and that's what they wanted. Virginian James Madison personally concluded and shared privately among his wealthy colleagues that only a new republic could work, that the Articles of Confederation had to be scrapped.
He also worried that under the new government, common people had been given too much power. He believed that the new republic could only depend on the virtue of the elites. for success. The representatives decided to meet together in what is now called the Constitutional Convention in 1787. It would not have been called that in 1787 because the people believed they were revising the Articles of Confederation to work better economically.
They had no idea that the representatives were doing something completely different. Slide 15. In fact, revision was not to be. It took four months in the heat of summer for the delegates to hammer out something new with much intense debate. Just so you have an idea of who was in the room, there were 39 men that signed the new Constitution. Of them, they tended to be fairly young, with an average age of 42. 21 were American Revolutionary War veterans.
Only George Washington and Alexander Hamilton would have come from the Continental Army. So just so you know, we'll come back later to talk about Hamilton and Washington's relationship in the war. We'll address that again probably in our next lecture. The rest of the men would have come from militias, men of social standing and property holding.
Seven of the men were now state governors with lots of ideas coming from their state constitutions. Many of the men had served on one of the continental congresses, and eight had signed the Declaration of Independence. Slide 16. Though the founders came from diverse and varying regions, overall... Their political philosophies were fairly commonly shared.
They believed that government derived its just powers from the consent of the people, John Locke, but that society also had to be protected from the masses. They assumed that most people were naturally selfish, and so government had to be strong. Slide 17. At the outset, the delegates unanimously elected George Washington as president of the convention. Washington was older now, stately, and generally a good candidate for a job like this.
Having commanded the Continental Army, he had led men from every colony and was therefore seen as less interested in the success or power of only one state, whereas most delegates suspected each other of self-interest. Washington had also succumbed to massive... dental issues, particularly infections and abscesses in his gums that caused intense pain and swelling.
To clear the infections, dentists had one by one pulled virtually all of his teeth. Washington had then turned to an early form of dentures. Most people think that Washington's first set of dentures were made of wood, but that isn't true.
Washington's first set of dentures were made of animal bone and animal teeth that had been carved to look human, but they still didn't look quite natural. As he drank dark wine over time, they did stain and look kind of like wood, which is where that rumor comes from. The discoloration is exactly what bothered Washington. Washington's less discussed second set of dentures were made of human teeth.
Where did those teeth come from? The mouths of his slaves. Dentists pulled the ones they needed and set them in silver on a spring that Washington had to actively compress in his mouth to keep in place.
So he pushed down and kept his mouth closed to keep them located where they should be in the back. This meant that Washington had become a man of few words from pain and effort. When you see portraits of Washington, this is also why his jawline looks quite odd.
Mount Vernon just stopped selling a magnet of Washington's dentures in February after historians went online to petition that it wasn't appropriate since slaves lost teeth to provide them to him. Some claim that Washington paid the slaves for the teeth, but even that is contested. I did post an article for you guys in this Blackboard.
It's kind of an opinion piece about this. The person writing it is very passionate about the subject and says in the article, he doesn't believe that Washington would have paid slaves for teeth because slaves weren't paid for labor. And while I get that logic, Slaves actually did get paid occasionally, not for their labor, but bonuses and incentives to do things that were considered above and beyond their obligation as slaves. So we'll talk about this later in the semester, but when women had babies in the institution of slavery, very often mothers were given a coin, like a dollar.
or clothing. They were given something for having a baby. Sometimes slaves would work seven days a week.
They wouldn't even take Sunday off. And they would work small patches of land. They could sell that agricultural surplus to their master for small sums of money.
So it is possible that Washington paid his slaves a small sum of money for these particular teeth that they had. pulled. And quite honestly, in the 18th century, it wasn't all that unusual for the poor to sell teeth for wealthy individuals who were having dentures like this made. So it is possible that Washington really did pay the slaves for this. Now, I'm the first to admit that doesn't mean the slaves necessarily wanted to do it.
It just means that they were paid an overage. for doing more than was required of most slaves. But I've posted that article, those articles, in Blackboard if you guys would like to look over them. Under Washington's direction, one of the first decisions was that the convention should meet behind closed doors and that the proceeding should not be made available to the public.
Obviously the delegates knew they were meeting in secrecy. because they did not intend to do what the public thought their elected representatives were doing. But they told the public that their meeting had to be private to prevent extending the time needed by having politicians give long theatrical speeches for public merit. Since the public was desperate to have the interstate monetary issue resolved, they readily agreed to give the convention privacy.
We only have any knowledge of what happened behind those closed doors. from one document, James Madison's private notes. That's not ideal. We'd like something to compare that to, but it's all that we know of that exists. It was Madison that drafted and proposed the Virginia Plan, the plan proposing that the Congress discard the Articles of Confederation and create an entirely new document.
The new plan proposed a truly national government that would make laws binding on all citizens regardless of state, and that would in fact have power over the states themselves. The most heated aspect of federal control of states came in determining representation from each state in the new federal government. Slide 18. The debate on representation, however, had to be paused as they determined the issue of slavery.
South Carolina and Georgia made clear immediately that any new government that failed to protect the institution of slavery would be unacceptable to them, and that if the Congress could not promise at the outset to protect it, they would leave the convention then and tell all the states what the representatives were actually doing. This was somewhat... akin to blackmail.
The representatives couldn't let the people know what they were doing, because to most people, it would have been a form of treason to lie to their constituents and overthrow the government out of the preference of just a few. Here again, we'll see for the second time, the founders fail to handle the issue of slavery. once again sweeping it under the rug and preference of unity. At that, very few framers were abolitionists, meaning wanting to abolish slavery altogether immediately. Slide 19. Once they agreed that slavery would be legal, they had to consider how that would be worded.
Northern states that tended to lean toward eventually ending slavery would not like a new overarching document that openly supported the expansion of slavery. Then again, the slaveholding South would not like a document that did not clearly support it. This was a tense game because the states would have to accept the new constitution or else all this work would be in vain and they'd be sent back to actually revise the Articles of Confederation. In the final draft of the Constitution, the founders decided to protect slavery by saying that people were entitled to life, liberty, rights, and property. And slaves were considered property.
Southern states argued that this was fine because human property, they said, was no different than owning tables or chairs. The conversation then turned back to the issue of federal representation. This became complicated yet again, however, when southern states wanted federal representation for slave numbers, claiming that their states had small, free, white populations as compared to northern states. All states saw immediately that long-term congressional representation could be important. because those votes would dictate future laws governing them all and could theoretically have the power to keep or dismiss slavery.
The northern states argued the southern states should not get representation for slaves since according to the south they were no different than furniture. Could the north have representation for tables and chairs then? It was a cutthroat argument, but a valid point.
Still, knowing that southern states would abandon the new government if their demands were not met. they agreed to something called the three-fifths compromise. For every five slaves, they would count for three people in terms of representation.
This made the North happy because the South would not get one-for-one power. This actually made the South happy too because it seemed to them that even Northern delegates were agreeing that enslaved persons were not equal to free whites. After the compromise was proposed, there was little dissent concerning the idea and the convention moved on.
Slide 20. The most sensitive issue involved an effort by the Northern delegates to eventually stop the transatlantic slave trade into the United States. Slavery showed no signs of slowing. People in the newly developing Western territories were already calling out for slaves to clear and plant their new rough lambs.
Unable to come to a solution on this issue, the delegates simply established a date at which the new government could consider its elimination, 1808. Of course, no one in the room could have known at the time, but the man that would be president in 1808 was present. Thomas Jefferson. I hear often that while the founders did allow slavery to continue, and they did, that the United States as a whole never profited from the institution, and that's blatantly false.
The new government levied a ten dollar tax per new slave purchased, meaning that money went to the federal government for each slave auctioned. after being brought across the Atlantic. The actual word slavery would not appear in the Constitution until 1865, after the Civil War, when the 13th Amendment abolished it.
How interesting that we had a war over the intent of the founders concerning slavery. It's a common debate. People say founders intent.
And I've always been confused by that because these are diverse men at odds about the future they wanted for the nation. When you say founders intent, my question is, which founder? They had different intents and different understandings of how this would all eventually.
play out. But to be clear, for the moment, during the Constitutional Convention, they do not use the word slavery. They agree that the word property will cover the institution of slavery. Slide 21. Another issue that states were sensitive to was how the structure of the federal government would magnify the importance of the physical size of the states because it seemed obvious that more square mileage would eventually translate to higher populations, more representation, and more power.
It was less a matter of one state versus another. Rather, the concern was already North versus South, slavery versus freedom. The alignment of the Civil War was already emerging at the birth of the nation.
It also seemed obvious to those in the Congress that this new federal government would need leadership. But the idea of a chief executive, as they originally called it, gave everyone pause. They all worried that they might be establishing a new position that could wield the overarching power.
that the monarchy had in England. In an effort to prevent that, the founders made the office of the presidency purposely weak. Constitutionally, the president doesn't have the right to declare war. That power belongs to Congress.
But obviously, the modern presidency has overstepped the constitution because our last constitutionally declared war wherein Congress voted on it, was World War II, declared in 1941. That means that the Korean War, the war in Vietnam, the Gulf Wars, and the war on terror are all technically unconstitutional. The president also does not have a constitutional right to make peace. The end to all of the unconstitutional wars that we just listed is complicated because Congress isn't very cooperative. when their powers of declaration are initially usurped by the presidency.
We'll go into more depth on those next semester, but for now, just keep that in mind. The founders also worried a lot about tyranny. So they created a loophole wherein a corrupt president can be impeached.
In our history, only four presidents have been impeached. Andrew Johnson. who ended up keeping his office, Richard Nixon, who resigned rather than be impeached, Bill Clinton, who kept his office, and Donald Trump, who also held his office.
Okay, let's take a break here, and we will come back in our next video lecture and talk about the Constitutional Convention emerging with this new document. how the states and the people responded to it, and the first couple of presidents under this new government. So you guys take a break and I will see you in our next video lecture.