It is January 23rd. Welcome to Episode 23 of History in a Year. Today, the party is over. The war is won, but the peace is a disaster. We explore the chaos of the “Critical Period”—the 1780s—where the United States functioned more like thirteen bickering children than a nation. We see New York declaring trade wars on New Jersey, Rhode Island printing worthless money, and George Washington watching from Mount Vernon in horror as he realizes the new nation is nothing but a “rope of sand.”
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STEPHEN:
Welcome to History in a Year: America’s First 250 Years.
LEAH:
Join us every single day as we journey from the Revolution of 1776 to the 250th anniversary of the United States.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode and join the discussion at PointedWords.com. I’m Stephen.
LEAH:
And I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
It is January 23rd. Welcome to Episode 23. Yesterday, we had a very emotional episode. We watched George Washington resign his commission in Annapolis and ride home to Mount Vernon in time for Christmas 1783.
LEAH:
It was a happy ending. The hero goes home. The bad guys leave. The credits roll.
STEPHEN:
But in history, the credits never roll. Life goes on. And for the United States, the years immediately following the victory—from 1783 to 1787—were actually some of the most dangerous years in our entire history.
LEAH:
Historians call this the “Critical Period.” And frankly, it was a mess. The United States wasn’t really “united” at all. It was a loose collection of thirteen independent republics that barely liked each other.
STEPHEN:
The problem was the government. During the war, the Second Continental Congress had adopted a constitution called the “Articles of Confederation.”
LEAH:
Now, when we hear “Constitution,” we think of the document we have today—the President, the Supreme Court, the Congress. But the Articles of Confederation were completely different.
STEPHEN:
You have to remember the mindset of 1776. The Americans had just fought a long, bloody war against a powerful central government—the British King and Parliament. They were terrified of tyranny.
LEAH:
So, when they designed their own government, they swung the pendulum all the way to the other side. They created a government that was weak on purpose.
STEPHEN:
Under the Articles, there was no President. They were afraid a President would turn into a King. There was no Supreme Court. They were afraid judges would overrule local laws.
LEAH:
There was only a Congress. And in this Congress, every state got exactly one vote. Virginia, with hundreds of thousands of people, got one vote. Rhode Island, with a tiny population, got one vote. And to pass any major law, you needed 9 out of 13 votes. To change the Articles, you needed unanimous consent—13 out of 13.
STEPHEN:
Which meant that one tiny state—like Rhode Island—could hold the entire country hostage. And they often did.
LEAH:
But the biggest weakness was money. The central government had absolutely no power to tax. None.
STEPHEN:
Imagine a government today that couldn’t tax you. It sounds great, right? Until you realize that the government has to pay for the army, the navy, and the interest on the massive war debt.
LEAH:
The Congress could only “requisition” money from the states. Basically, they sent a letter saying, “Hey Virginia, your share of the bill is $200,000. Please send it when you can.”
STEPHEN:
And Virginia would say, “Sorry, times are tough,” and send nothing. It was a government run by a GoFundMe campaign.
LEAH:
Robert Morris, who was the Superintendent of Finance (basically the first Secretary of the Treasury), nearly went insane trying to keep the country afloat. He begged the states for money. He pleaded. He threatened to resign. But the money didn’t come.
STEPHEN:
The result was that the United States was a deadbeat nation. We defaulted on our loans to France. We stopped paying our soldiers. Our credit rating was junk status.
LEAH:
But it wasn’t just the federal government that was broken. The states started fighting each other.
STEPHEN:
Without a strong referee, the states started acting like rival warlords. They started fighting trade wars.
LEAH:
New York was the bully. New York City was the main port. So, New York decided to slap a tariff (a tax) on goods coming in from other states.
STEPHEN:
If a farmer in Connecticut chopped firewood and rowed it across the sound to sell in Manhattan, he had to pay a tax. If a farmer in New Jersey grew cabbages and brought them across the Hudson, he had to pay a tax.
LEAH:
New Jersey was furious. They called it “The Tax on Cabbages.” So, the New Jersey legislature retaliated. They taxed a lighthouse that New York owned on Sandy Hook (which is on the Jersey shore). They taxed it £30 a month.
STEPHEN:
It was ridiculous. Connecticut merchants agreed to suspend all trade with New York for a year. This wasn’t a “United States.” It was the Balkans.
LEAH:
Then there was the currency crisis. The old “Continental Dollar” had collapsed during the war. “Not worth a Continental” was a common insult.
STEPHEN:
So, the Constitution (the Articles) allowed states to print their own money. And they did. Seven different states printed seven different currencies.
LEAH:
If you were a traveler going from Boston to Philadelphia, you had to change your money at every state border like you were traveling through Europe. And the exchange rates fluctuated wildly every day.
STEPHEN:
The worst offender was Rhode Island. They became known as “Rogue Island.” The politicians there were controlled by debtors—people who owed money. So, they decided to just print massive amounts of paper money to make it easier to pay off debts.
LEAH:
Inflation exploded. The money was worthless. Merchants in Providence started closing their shops and hiding their goods because they didn’t want to accept this “funny money.”
STEPHEN:
So, the Rhode Island legislature passed a “Force Act.” It made it a crime to refuse the paper money. They literally sent judges into butcher shops to force butchers to sell meat for worthless paper.
LEAH:
It was anarchy. Wealthy property owners were terrified. They looked at Rhode Island and saw a nightmare where the mob could just vote to steal their property by printing money.
STEPHEN:
Internationally, the United States was a laughingstock.
LEAH:
The British looked at this chaos and said, “Why should we respect the treaty?” They were supposed to leave their forts in the Great Lakes region (places like Detroit and Niagara). But they just stayed. They refused to leave.
STEPHEN:
When John Adams, our ambassador in London, complained, the British just laughed. They said, “You can’t even get your own states to pay their debts. Why should we listen to you?” They knew the U.S. had no army to force them out.
LEAH:
In the South, Spain controlled Florida and New Orleans. In 1784, Spain closed the Mississippi River to American traffic.
STEPHEN:
This was a death sentence for farmers in the West (Kentucky and Tennessee). They couldn’t drag their crops over the Appalachian Mountains to the East Coast; it was too far. They needed the river.
LEAH:
Some Western settlers got so angry they started talking about leaving the United States and joining the Spanish Empire just so they could sell their corn. The country was literally threatening to break apart at the seams.
STEPHEN:
And watching all of this from Mount Vernon was George Washington.
LEAH:
He was supposed to be retired. He was trying to fix up his house and plant his gardens. But every day, the newspaper brought more bad news.
STEPHEN:
He wrote letters to his friends—James Madison, John Jay, Alexander Hamilton. His letters from this period are filled with anxiety and gloom.
LEAH:
He realized that everything he had fought for—the eight years of war, the starving at Valley Forge, the friends he buried—was about to be wasted.
STEPHEN:
He used a famous metaphor. He called the Confederation “A Rope of Sand.”
LEAH:
It looked like a rope. It connected the states. But if you put any pressure on it—if you pulled—it would just disintegrate in your hands.
STEPHEN:
He wrote to John Jay: “We are fast verging to anarchy and confusion!”
LEAH:
Alexander Hamilton was even louder. He was young, brilliant, and impatient. He called the Articles an “imbecility.” He started writing essays arguing for a strong national government—a “energetic” government.
STEPHEN:
But most Americans weren’t listening. They still preferred their local state governments. They were suspicious of Hamilton. They thought he wanted to create a monarchy.
LEAH:
It was going to take a shock to wake the American people up. It was going to take a crisis that proved, once and for all, that the “Rope of Sand” couldn’t hold.
STEPHEN:
And that crisis didn’t come from the British. It didn’t come from the Spanish. It came from the heartland of the Revolution itself. Massachusetts.
LEAH:
In 1786, thousands of angry farmers—many of them veterans still wearing their old Continental uniforms—would grab their muskets again. Not to fight for the government, but to overthrow it.
STEPHEN:
Join us tomorrow for Episode 24. The rebellion that panicked a nation. We witness the chaos of Shays’ Rebellion, the shutting down of the courts, and the moment George Washington decided he had to put his boots back on.
LEAH:
I’m Leah.
STEPHEN:
And I’m Stephen.
STEPHEN:
You can find every episode at PointedWords.com. And this… is our story.