1783

 

_________ 

“A thin ghost of a government.” 

Benjamin Andrews.

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Newspaper printing.

January: In October 1781, Congress asked the states for $8,000,000 to fund the national government; in January 1783, it had received less than half a million. 

    “The war had cost about $150,000,000. In 1783 the debt was $42,000,000 – $8,000,000 owed to France and Holland, and the rest at home. … Five millions were owing to the army.” (2/162-173)

 

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June: “A handful of Pennsylvania troops, clamoring for their pay, besieged the doors of Congress, and that august body had to take refuge in precipitate flight.” (2/162-173) 

    The problem of pay was solved, in part, by issuing land warrants to state militia and Continental veterans, “instruments which the holder could either convert into acres of his own or sell for spot cash. In most states, this redistribution of land made the status of “freeholder” available to almost everyone. 

    Speculators did snap up many of these warrants. Still, by the end of the year, more than 25,000 settlers were living west of the Allegheny Mountains. (48/365)

 

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September 3: Once peace was agreed to, the Americans had to adapt from a revolutionary mindset, which is “negative,” that is fighting against that which they did not like, and build something better.

 

    Says Van Loon,

 

    Thus far the American rebels had been held together by a common ideal which consisted mostly of things they did not want to do. For example, they did not want to pay taxes to the British government. They did not want to have bishops of the official British church appointed for America . They did not want the King to tell them they must keep out of certain western lands which were supposed to be reserved for the Indians. They did not want Parliament to put a duty on their tea and on their glass and on their paint. They did not want to do this and they did not want to do that.

 

    But now the period of the “don’ts” had come to an end.

 

    The much less exciting era of the “do’s” had begun.

 

    He compares what they had done to “a surgical operation,” say, to remove a tumor, “or the destruction of an old building that has outlived its usefulness.”(124/237)

 

    It was time to build a nation.

 

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AFTER THE WAR: James Monroe “declined all recompense for his services, as he had done throughout most of the Revolution. His fortune was small, he told Jefferson, but he looked upon it as his duty to make this contribution to the common cause.” Monroe did receive a land bounty of 5,333 1/3 acres in Kentucky. In all he succeeded in patenting more than 100,000 acres. (24/33, 38)

 

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November: Attendance in Congress dwindled. “Less than twenty delegates were present, representing but seven States…” “The Government was an engine without steam.” 

    It was “a thin ghost of a government set in charge over a lot of lusty flesh-and-blood States.” (2/162-173)

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IT HAS BEEN “estimated that the reading-matter in all the forty-three papers which existed at the close of the Revolution would not fill ten pages of the New York Herald now.”  (2/26)