by Allan Appel The New Haven independent
Who knew that Ethan Allen, on whose eponymously named furniture company’s comfy yellow chaise longue sofa I all too often lie, once said to hell with the weak central government of the colonies that were then at war with England.
Back in 1777, he was so frustrated with decades-old land disputes between New York and New Hampshire, he began negotiating with the British to leave him alone, and, if they did, he wouldn’t fight any longer against the king, and instead declare — roll the drums — the independent Republic of Vermont.
Which he did, and the Vermonters even got to work writing their own constitution.
That was one of many anecdotal tidbits Yale Prof. Joanne Freeman utilized to show the profound weakness of central government under the Articles of Confederation, created by the colonies in the midst of revolutionary rupture with England.
Her lively lecture, titled “What Kind of Union?,” was the fourth of a planned 26 over 14 weeks in the ongoing Yale public course “America at 250: A History.” That class is taught by Freeman and two other distinguished Yale profs, David Blight and Beverly Gage, and presented to 400 Yale students at Battell Chapel, and here online and available to everyone.
Because the fear of centralized authority under the king had been so profound, Freeman said in her latest lecture, “It [the Articles of Confederation] created a league, not one continental nation, more of a united nations,” a kind of pact, a club almost; in short, a weak confederation.
Twelve years later comes the corrective, the Constitution, with an executive branch with real authority, yet one whose power was structured to be checked and balanced at every turn.
You have to be someone who has severed his cables not to hear this history as coming full circle around today.
For the president, over the decades and administrations — and accelerated most dramatically in the last eight months — has in a sense returned us to those initial revolutionary political traumas in American history, as our executive has begun acting like the king we rebelled against.
Contemplation of contemporary issues through the lens of history of course is the point of Yale’s whirlwind course as the country lurches into its sesquicentennial year.
But the teacher, so far, lets you, the student, hear the voices from the past and you make the connections.
“We never thought,” Freeman quoted one of her favorite historical interlocutors, John Adams, “of consolidating this vast continent under one national government. Instead a confederacy of states each of which must have a separate government.”
And if we can write our own state constitution, why not go a little farther? And Ethan Allen was not alone.
Welcome to a little known (at least by me) story of a short-lived entity that came into being in Franklin County, when folks there in western North Carolina got upset their lands were being seized and threatened to be sold by the Confederation Congress to pay Revolutionary War debts.
Hold your horses, those Tar Heels said. Not going to happen if we declare a republic, and so it was, the Republic or State of Franklin.
Those Franklinites didn’t want their land to be given to congress to pay back war debts. “They said ‘No,’” Freeman paraphrased the cry of those post-Revolution revolutionaries, “Let’s be our own state.”
Eventually, as the Confederation Congress did not act, “North Carolina dealt with its own problem, and took back its offer to cede western lands,” Freeman said.
There were also minor but scary attempts at coups by military officers who refused to disarm without receiving their back pay, culminating in Shays Rebellion of 1786.
Massachusetts farmers were losing their land to high taxes by a rising and hated American “aristocracy,” and their petitions to the central government weren’t answered. When they took up arms (in a repeat of the cycle of rebellion that made Shays an echo of 1776), the Confederation couldn’t raise money or pay a militia to put down the revolt.
By the time it was settled, Freeman said, everyone saw the glaring weakness of the Articles.
“All the Confederation’s inadequacies . . . they can’t raise money, or deal with Revolutionary War debts, or solve boundary disputes between states, or states seceding. This was dismemberment of states and states aligning with the British.”
All of this, she said, along with resolving the stress on commerce from a dozen different customs systems across the states “ultimately leads to the Constitution.”
The questions people asked at this time, and in the Federalist essays that were soon to come, are eerily the same as we ask today.
The war had brought people together in crisis, Freeman said, but when over, they went home and that spirit was lost.
“The problem to Hamilton,” Freeman concluded, “and other strong nationalists, was that people were so focused on their states they seemingly had forgotten to think of themselves as Americans, a united people. Were there enough common bonds? Could they only be defined when pitted against common enemies? Was there enough of an American identity in and of itself?”
Is there?
See below for other articles about Yale’s “America at 250” course.