American Political History

There were thirteen United States — and to the rest of the world, there were thirteen nations. This is the story of what that cost. In 1785, pirates out of Algiers seized two American ships and enslaved their crews, and the United States could do nothing to free them: no navy, no money, no power to answer. In London, John Adams sought a commercial treaty with Britain and was quietly refused, because Britain had grasped the essential thing about the new republic — that a treaty with Congress bound nothing, since Congress could not make its own states keep it. And at home, those states taxed and undercut one another like the rival nations they had become, while the one power that might have given America leverage abroad — a national authority over commerce — stayed splintered thirteen ways. This is the episode where the case for a stronger government stops being a theory and becomes a bill coming due, written in closed ports, empty coffers, and the chains of American sailors their own country could not reach. George Washington saw it plainly: thirteen sovereignties pulling against each other would soon bring ruin on the whole.

The Treaty of Paris handed the United States a wilderness empire running to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes — and the bankrupt Confederation needed to sell it, fast, because western land was very nearly the only asset it had. There was one problem: the nations who lived there had never been conquered, had signed nothing, and were not leaving. This is the story of how the United States tried to take the Ohio country on the cheap — the dictated treaties that told the Shawnee and the Delaware they were a defeated people, the great confederacy that rose to reject them and offered a negotiated peace instead, and a Congress so broke and so empty it could neither accept that peace nor fight the war that followed. General Washington had warned in 1783 that buying the land would cost less than taking it. Nobody could afford to listen. It is the story of a committee of Congress formally concluding that the government could not protect its own citizens — and of Governor Patrick Henry's warning that a frontier left undefended would drive the whole West into separation from the union.

In the winter of 1787, a few thousand indebted farmers in western Massachusetts marched on their own government — and though they lost their one real battle in minutes, in the snow outside a federal arsenal, they did more to reshape the country than any army of the age. This is the story of Shays' Rebellion: the veterans who had won the Revolution and come home to lose their farms to it, the creditor legislature in Boston that taxed them in coin they did not have, and the courthouses they closed by force to stop the foreclosures. It is the story of Daniel Shays, who sold the sword Lafayette gave him to feed his family and then reluctantly led an uprising he never wanted. And it is the story of the fear that rippled out from a Massachusetts courthouse to Mount Vernon and Paris and every statehouse in the union — the fear that convinced George Washington to leave his retirement, and convinced a wavering country that the government it had built could not govern. Both sides were right. That was the trouble.

In September 1786, a Newport butcher named John Weeden refused to take paper money for a joint of meat, and demanded silver. Under Rhode Island law, that was a crime — punishable by a fine, the loss of his vote, and a trial with no jury and no appeal. This is the story of what happened next: the farmers who took a state government by lawful election and used it to save their farms, the merchants who shut their doors rather than obey, and the courtroom in the Old Colony House where a Continental Army general argued that an elected legislature could be the enemy of liberty, and that unelected judges must be the ones to stop it. The legislature answered by breaking the judges. Watching from Mount Vernon and from Philadelphia, the men who had made a revolution against the tyranny of one man began, that winter, to write to each other about a danger they had never planned for — the tyranny of the many. The country stopped calling the place Rhode Island. It called it Rogue Island.

In 1786 the Congress of the United States asked the thirteen states for 3.8 million dollars to pay the debts of the Revolution. It collected 663 dollars. This is the story of the broken money machine underneath everything else in these years — the crisis that drove an army to the edge of mutiny, ruined the richest man in America, and finally put muskets in the hands of farmers. A government that could not tax, only ask. Soldiers like Joseph Plumb Martin, who gave 7 years to the war and came home with a certificate worth pennies, sold to speculators driving about the country, in his words, like so many evil spirits. A war debt paid down with fresh debt until the nation was openly defaulting, and could not find one person willing to lend it a dollar. And the one modest fix — a small tax on imports — killed twice, each time by a single state exercising a veto the rules handed it. It is not a story of villains. It is the story of a government built so carefully to prevent tyranny that it could not do the first thing a government exists to do: pay what it owes.

He was the richest man in America, and for most of the Revolution he was also its treasury. When the United States had no money and no credit, it borrowed on the name of Robert Morris — a Philadelphia merchant who put his own fortune and signature behind a bankrupt government, kept General Washington's army fed, and personally financed the campaign that won the war at Yorktown. This is the story of the Financier of the Revolution: the reluctant patriot who voted against independence and then signed it, the pragmatist and money-chaser who saved the country and grew rich doing it, the man who tried to build a real government out of nothing — the first national bank, the paper notes backed by his own name, the tax that could have funded it all — and who finally resigned in despair because no amount of one man's credit could fix a government too weak to fund itself. And it is the story of how that same name, the strongest credit in America, would carry him all the way to a debtor's prison. He floated a nation. It did not float him.

In the spring of 1783, with the Revolution all but won, the most dangerous enemy of the United States was its own army. Unpaid for years, cheated of their promised pensions, the officers camped at Newburgh, New York, had every reason to be furious — and an anonymous letter, circulating hut to hut, told them the time for begging was over. A faction of politicians in Philadelphia, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw in that fury a weapon they could use to force a helpless Congress into line. Their cause was just. Their argument was strong. And it led straight to the edge of a military coup. This is the story of the Newburgh Conspiracy — the crown George Washington had already refused, the rival general willing to hold the match, and the afternoon in a hall called the Temple when General Washington answered a righteous, well-armed anger not with force but with a pair of spectacles and a few tender words, and stopped the thing cold. It is the moment America stood at the line that has swallowed almost every republic in history, and did not cross it. Caesar crossed it. Cromwell crossed it. Why didn't General Washington?

If you've listening to this, you been with this show a while, scroll back to the beginning of the feed. Everything down there is new.Every episode from the start of this show has been remade. Season one, season two, all of it — re-researched, rewritten, re-recorded, and re-uploaded in place. Some seasons are even totally new content. The old files are gone. You don't have to do anything; if you have the show, you already have them.And they are not the episodes you remember.The early ones ran 5 to 15 minutes. Now they all run 20 to 30.  Jamestown isn't a paragraph about starvation anymore. It's a servant boy's letter home. The founding isn't a summary of what was argued. It's the argument.That's a lot of listening — hundreds of new hours of it, sitting in your feed.If you joined in the middle, this is your chance to start at the actual beginning. If episode one lost you years ago, that episode doesn't exist anymore. And if you've heard every episode of this show — go back anyway. You've heard maybe a third of what's there now.New episodes are paused for a couple of months while I work on the next season. But there is plenty to listen to until then.As always, Thank you for listening to American Political History. 

The Royal Navy controls the Atlantic. In November 1793. Whitehall issues orders, any neutral ship trading with France can be seized, cargo confiscated, and the ship taken as a prize. The crews can also be impressed into the Royal Navy. 

President Washington is not just sending an army, he's personally leading it.

Does the federal government have the authority to use military force against its own citizens?Or can states, or counties, ignore federal taxes they believe are unconstitutional?What happens when citizens believe a law violates their rights?

Short, Simple, Duty. President Washing accepts his second term.  

The French revolution breaks out, then France declares war on England. America is unprepared for war.  

We cover the battles to secure the Ohio territory ceded to America in the Treaty of Paris. 

We detail the emergence of political parties from Washington's own cabinet. 

Secretary Hamilton moves to create the Bank of the United States, in pushing so hard, the national divide over the issue marks the creation of political parties in America.  

America still is buried by the accumulation of debt from the revolutionary war. Secretary of Treasury Hamilton has a plan.   

We cover the story of the ratification of the Bill of Rights

We cover the creation of the court system and the earliest history of the Supreme Court.

President Washington selects his cabinet and sets the precedent on how cabinet meetings work.  

This wasn't really an election... not in the way we think of elections today. This was more like... a coronation by consensus.

We move to Virginia, whose ratification will complete the supermajority required for ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America.   

We turn to the debates in the Massachusetts ratification convention.   

The first major convention starts in Philadelphia with mobs forcing a vote for the date. Everyone knows, so goes Pennsylvania so goes the small states around them.    

The proposed constitution hit the newspapers, and public figures start taking positions and or writing with pen names to argue their points in the public sphere

Without records of all of the debates, I give the context of the materials we will cover in this season.  

The completed constitution of the Unite States of America.  

The Philadelphia convention will close with a draft of a new American constitution.  

The convention settles on the Sherman compromise for the legislature and take up the issue of slavery. Washington will form a committee of detail to draw up all of the points agreed to into a new document.  

The convention begins to breakdown, delegates threaten each other, and cannot find compromises on distribution of voting power  

The opposition unveils their own plan, and we see the factions of the federalists and anti-federalists break into the open. 

The convention starts tackling the composition of the legislative branch. Fractures begin to appear as the convection gets closer to discussing appropriations of votes and power in the proposed federal legislature    

The convention will discuss the makeup of the legislative bodies House/Senate while avoiding the truly contentious topic of the allocation of the votes of the states   

The convention begins with the unveiling of the, which was to the shock of many, an outline for a new government. 

In May 1787, the Federal Convention begins to assemble in Philidelphia. 

We discuss the bitter negations for a Spanish trade treaty and how the Philidelphia convention eventually got support.  

We discuss the westward immigration and the tensions with native nations and European powers out west.

We cover Shey's rebellion and how Massachusetts was brought back into order. 

We discuss the growing crisis in Massachusetts, as rioters close down country courthouses across the state.

We examine the growing debt issues and the closing of trade from European powers. 

The new country starts down a road of military conspiracy 

A letter begins to circulate without the army officers discussing threats towards political officials 

We explore the post war economy and introduce the growing political factions. the Federalist and the Anti -Federalists.  

We cover the exploits of John Paul Jones 

Desicuss the abolitionist movement and is growth around the revolutionary era.  

We discuss the fate of negro soldiers in the revolutionary war

On September 3rd, 1783, the definitive peace treaty was signed, by the end of 1783 all English forces had withdrawn from Colonial America.   

Political support for the war will breakdown in Parliament, although the peace will take years to negotiate, Yorktown and its fallout marked the end of armed conflict in colonial America.   

General Washington will lead his army to siege General Cornwallis at Yorktown, provoking another English's army to surrender just a day before Genral Clinton can arrive with reinforcements 

At the battle of Hana's cow pens, the whole revolution will change when General Morgan devises and implements a militia strategy that defeats an English army on the battlefield. The system of defense in depth will lead General Morgan and Greene to repeated victories against the English. 

General Cornwallis will comment, it seems the war between the English and the continentals is but a side show to the partisan war raging within the southern colonies