We all know the story of the passerby who asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government the participants in the Constitutional Convention had created in Philadelphia in 1787. Franklin’s answer purportedly was “A republic . . . if you can keep it.” He might have easily responded, “A republic . . . if you can build it.” The 55 participants in the Constitutional Convention had written a remarkable document, but no one was sure how, or even if, it would work. This class, which I taught for Osher in the fall of 2021, focused on the key events of the 1790s as the United States went about the process of nation-building.
The spreadsheet at the beginning of this essay summarizes the series of events that occurred in the 1790s across four themes: elections, governing, economics, and foreign policy (including issues with Native Americans). When I began to dig into the research to create this class, I realized that these threads crossed and impacted each other and that I needed to untangle the strings to understand them.
I read – a lot – in preparation for teaching this class. I read the standard histories of the 1790s, including Empire of liberty: a history of the early Republic, 1789-1815 by Gordon S Wood, The Age of Federalism by Stanley M Elkins and Eric L McKitrick, several biographies by Joseph Ellis, and (of course) Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. However, three lesser-known specialized histories taught me a lot:
Eagle and Sword: The Beginning of the Military Establishment in America by Richard H. Kohn illuminated an ongoing problem of the 1790s: how to establish and maintain a military in a nation steeped in the English Whig anti-military philosophy. A standing army was anathema to the revolutionary generation; but the crises of the 1790s, involving the nations of Europe and the natives on the frontier, led the government’s leaders to recognize they needed a military. But questions remained -- what kind, how large, and for what purposes? As crises heated up on the frontier between 1792 and 1795, and as war threatened with Britain in 1794 and with France in 1798, leaders made decisions about raising and maintaining a military force. None of the solutions they reached in the 1790s helped them much moving forward.
The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World 1788-1800 by Jay Winik began to educate me about the role the United States was to play in the birth of the modern world. The author takes his readers on a grand tour of world politics at the end of the 18th century, setting the revolutions in the United States and France in the context of broader European affairs, including the reign of Catherine the Great in Russia, whose years in power (1762-1796) included the years of the greatest upheaval in both the United States and France. In the introduction to his book, historian Jay Winick states the following:
“The Americans, the French, the Russians, as well as the Ottomans, the Poles, and the British, were all part of one grand, interwoven tapestry. And it is these relationships and interrelationships, that laid the foundations for the world we know today. Yet too often the story of these connections is left out, or is seen from only one side or one perspective. To appreciate the full magnitude of the remarkable American success in solidifying the United States in this decisive period, including how it managed its own rebellions and tensions that nearly split the still embryonic nation apart, one has to see it in the context of the larger setting and the world – just as the Founders did.”
Winick makes the point that three great powers – the United States, France, and Russia experienced political upheaval in 1800-1801. In France, Napoleon took sole control of France, and would name himself emperor in a couple of years. In Russia, the weak successor to Catherine the Great – her son, Paul – was assassinated, paving the way for the ascension of Catherine’s grandson, Alexander. In the United States, the change came about as a result of an election.
I am a student of American history, and I realized I had a lot to learn about the 1790s because I had studied the decade only from the American perspective. I highly recommend this book, both because it covers an important topic and because it is very readable.
I came across the third book, When the United States Spoke French: Five Refugees who Shaped a Nation, by Francois Furstenberg, as I was beginning my research for the course. In reading a historical novel about this decade – A Refuge Assured, by Jocelyn Green — I came across a reference to the large number of refugees from France who came to Philadelphia in the 1790s, and how they became an important part of society at this time. In digging a little deeper, I found When the United States Spoke French, which introduced me to this part of the story. The five refugees that Furstenberg writes about were all members of French noble families who interacted in the high-level government and social arena of early Philadelphia. They knew all of the major players and dined with people like Jefferson and Hamilton. One of them was Tallyrand, whose mistreatment of American envoys in 1798 (in what came to be called the XYZ Affair) was the cause of America almost going to war with France. Tallyrand spent two years in Philadelphia and used his knowledge of America (and his personal acquaintance with the envoys who came to France in 1798) to his own advantage.
Elections:
It goes without saying that elections occurred regularly throughout the 1790s. This was what the Revolution was all about, right? The consent of the governed? But when we look closely at the first several elections we discover that no one really knew how elections were supposed to be conducted, and every state kind of went its own way.
A few quick observations from the information on this chart.
Every year, there were varying numbers of states that did not even conduct a popular vote for the presidency. You would think that the states might have gotten better at this as they held more presidential elections – but the election of 1800 is worse than any of the preceding elections in this regard.
The states that did have a popular vote did not agree on how to allocate electors — some states chose to do an “at-large” allocation, others chose to do it through districts, and still others used a hybrid approach. And the states sometimes changed their process from one election to the next. — usually to swing votes to their favored candidate. Imagine that — changing election laws to benefit a particular party.
Neither was there any fixed nationwide date for elections. The official election process always took close to a month and it varied from state to state.
Governing
They had to figure out how to govern as well. We’re accustomed to charts that look like this:
But in the 1790s, none of this was clear. The separation of powers and checks and balances chart looked more like this:
Here are some of the things they didn’t exactly know how to do:
Hold elections
Pay government officials
Ratify a treaty
Veto a bill
Override a veto
Fund the government
Create an army
Add new states to the union
Acquire new territory
Employ militia in new territories
Use the federal courts
And you could add “and everything else” because that’s what they didn’t know how to do.
Economics
One overriding question of the decade was “where would the government get its money?” This question continues to be debated today, of course, as we wrestle over tax policy. Here’s a chart that explains how the answer to this question has varied over time.
And the next chart shows another important issue – how the government was spending its money.
Given these issues, it’s not surprising that economic plans were among the first major issues the new government tackled in the early 1790s.
Foreign Affairs
The importance of this topic surprised me, although it probably shouldn’t have. Traditional American History survey courses gloss over this time period, and what we do focus on emphasizes what is going on within the United States. But the US was part of a world order in which it was pretty much a minor player during this decade. We were much more heavily impacted by what was going on in the rest of the world than the world was by us — particularly in terms of economics, as I just alluded to. Here are just a few examples of what was happening:
The “foreign policy” issues facing the United States in the 1790s were not all in Europe or the Caribbean. The new country was surrounded by potential adversaries – Spain to the west and south, and Britain to the north. As war swept through Europe and alliances shifted, this had an impact on how the United States interacted with these powerful nations lurking on the frontier.
In addition, the Native Americans on the frontier – particularly in the Ohio Valley – presented immediate problems for the expansionary United States. After the Revolution, Americans were eager to move into the attractive land of the Northwest Territory – the area bounded by the Ohio River, Mississippi River, and Great Lakes. The native tribes in the area were not so welcoming to these new settlers. Spend some time looking at the next map to understand the source of the problems.
Most of the serious discussion about American military power in the 1790s – focusing on state militias, a national militia, and a standing army and navy – was concerned with this threat on the frontier. The United States did not plan to construct a military establishment to participate in the wars in Europe, and it could not have built a serious counterweight to the military power of France and Britain even if it had wanted to.
This map shows the military engagements during the 1790s in the Ohio Valley.
To deal with the growing threat on the frontier, Congress passed two militia acts in 1792.
In addition, the first American political parties came into being in the 1790s.
We all know that George Washington famously railed against “the spirit of party,” in his 1796 Farewell Address, but we need to remember two things.
This address was published in the newspapers just a few weeks before the 1796 elections, and Washington was trying to paint the opposition (Jeffersonians) as being divisive; Washington described the partisans he agreed with (the Federalists) as being patriots.
No one understood yet that representative democracies require political parties to form majorities. They weren’t stupid – they just didn’t understand the kind of political system they were attempting to create, because it had never existed before.
There’s a lot more to say about the 1790s. I found it a fascinating decade just because of the sheer volume of things the new country had to figure out.
A great read. Thanks.