The British, realizing that things are not going their way, decide to make the American's an offer to end the war.

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Hello, and welcome to the political history of the United States.

Episode 4.50 the Carlisle Commission.

I want to begin today by acknowledging that this episode may seem to be somewhat oddly placed.

Two episodes ago, we had talked about that peace delegation that was sent over from Great Britain that was more or less racing the french treaty to Philadelphia.

Lord north was offering the Americans wide ranging concessions that would have essentially granted them home rule and independence in all but name.

Of course, the peace delegation, known as the Carlisle Commission, was rebuffed, and the Americans agreed to the french alliance.

I had thought that was the end of it.

I got across the pertinent information, and we all know that the british peace offering is going to be rejected and that the french alliance is going to be ratified.

However, sometimes, as I work on the show, it becomes clear to me that there is much more of a story to tell and that I would not be doing anybody listening to this show any kind of favors by skipping over it.

This, as it turns out, is one of those times.

If we view it through the lens of the Carlisle commission, we can get a sense of where the Congress, the states, and the population at large all stood and what they were thinking during those critical months of the war.

Now, as we have already discussed, the Congress had little interest in any kind of reconciliation, and indeed, the commission found absolutely no success in America.

However, to leave it at that, we are only telling part of the story.

The threat of peace with the British put the Congress into a place where they were forced to justify what it was that they were even fighting for.

I have often talked about on this show the concept of where the breaking point was between the american colonies and Great Britain.

I think there are probably a couple of different points that we can look at, but I have generally settled on the Boston Tea party as marking that moment when the war became more or less inevitable.

This is not to say that there was still not a way to still back down from the precipice, but it would have likely taken more energy to avoid the war at that point, as opposed to descending into it.

Sure enough, following the passage of the coercive acts, we begin to see what the British deemed to be the collapse of civil government, though, in reality it was the colonies taking governance into their own hands?

We talked about all of this back in episode 4.25.

However, following Burgoyne's defeat and the Americans reaching an alliance with France, the British found themselves offering the Americans independence in all but name.

Yet, even though that would have been an absolute win for the Americans just a few years earlier.

Now, when the offer came, the Americans defiantly rejected the offer with very little debate.

The problem for Congress is that the Carlisle commission suddenly brought up new questions regarding their own legitimacy and presented a serious risk of undermining the hard fought and occasional tenuous unity that existed between the states.

Recall from our last episode that even as Philadelphia itself was occupied, real differences between the states were being exposed as they struggled to form a government under the Articles of Confederation.

There was a real fear amongst the congressional delegates that it was at least possible that a handful of states may decide that the peace being offered by parliament was enough and that they would choose to break away from the Union and reconcile with the British.

For the individual states, especially those in the south that had largely to this point been spared fighting on their home soil, the prospect of wrapping up the war may sound pretty alluring.

The conditions throughout all of the states during the war years was rough.

Even in Boston, the declining conditions had led to food riots.

In that case, women upset at the high price of coffee took it into their own hands, assaulting Boylston and taking his goods.

Boylston, to be very clear, was not some loyalist.

He was a complete supporter of the american cause.

Although John Adams would essentially shrug it off.

This was hardly the first food riot in the United States during the course of the war.

In fact, such rioting had become a common occurrence as shortages of staple goods led to rapid inflation of those same commodities.

Some states did attempt to temper this inflation with the use of price controls.

However, the merchants quickly fought back, complaining that such price controls were anathema to liberty.

At a core level, if we consider the justification for the revolution in the minds of the colonists starting as an unlawful taking of property, the idea of price controls becomes questionable.

Despite the pragmatic need to check inflation.

Regardless of the feelings of either the Congress or the state governments, there was a real fear that the public, upon inevitably learning about the Carlisle commission and their offer, may decide that they have had enough of the instability, that they were tired of the war and thus ready to come to terms, terms that, as it would turn out, gave them everything that they had initially been asking for.

This situation forced Congress to deal with a very real question about their own legitimacy in rejecting any such deal from the British.

The concessions that parliament was willing to make were sweeping and basically were a total capitulation to the american demands that had started the war in the first place.

With the exception of a recognition of independence, parliament was willing to concede every other point to the Americans.

While many in Congress recognized their newfound power as a result of the victory at Saratoga and the alliance with the French, others found themselves questioning the sudden power of the Congress to reject a deal that had addressed the grievances that had started the war.

As we are going to see today, concerns over the potential for individual states choosing to reconcile with the Crown was enough that the Congress would take exceptional actions in order to suppress the risk that the british delegation posed.

Even before the delegation had reached the United States, news of the proposed peace had begun getting published in the loyalist press.

This gave Congress the advantage of time as they were able to begin framing their response.

Prior to the arrival of the delegation, these efforts included the standard polemics that one would expect more than just words.

However, Congress was looking to take action here.

Congress offered an amnesty to any loyalists who were helping the crown.

Furthermore, they decided to attempt to undercut the British by appealing to their german allies, making promises of western lands.

Historian Robert Parkinson points out that more than anything else, what Congress did in order to cut off the potential for reconciliation was to quickly agree to the alliance with the French when it landed in their laps that may.

Although this alliance was widely celebrated, it too did have its problems.

Over the course of the 18th century, the two sides had fought three separate wars against each other, the last being the french and indian war.

A lot of blood had been spilled between the two peoples.

This is to say nothing about the large amount of anti Catholicism that ran throughout all of the colonies.

These feelings were nothing new and indeed something that we have already talked about on occasion throughout the run of this podcast.

A treaty with the Catholic France meant that the people were going to have to not only put behind them generations of war, but religious sentiments that go back to the very beginnings of the colonial eradic.

If the situation was already fraught with danger, the task that Congress now had in front of it was justifying the continuation of a war with the aid of an ally who had long been their enemy.

Considering the terms that the peace delegation was proposing, that standard appealsthings like taxation without representation really could not apply here.

Instead, what the Congress chose to do was to go with an impassioned plea to the states.

This plea, rather than hitting on the topics that the entire war was presumably based around, focused instead on some of those deepest fears held by the colonists.

Likewise, in order to fit everything into a nice timeline, this address came just days after Congress had ratified the treaty with France, further ensuring that the Carlisle commissions proposals would be dead on arrival.

On May 9, the congress issued an address where they painted the British as being nothing short of supervillains.

Well, portraying the american cause as a virtuous battle fighting for the natural rights of human nature, they cast the British as fighting a war of violence for the furtherance of despotism.

Now, all of this, dramatic as it may be, can still be somewhat ascribed to mere rhetoric.

You would not really expect the Americans to portray the British as being friendly right now.

The crux of the address, however, came in the section where it became necessary to justify why they had to keep fighting and as a function of that, reject the proposed peace.

Here, Congress placed their focus on the damage that they had done to the bonds of society.

They talked about the British encouraging slaves to rise up and kill their masters.

They talked about the efforts of the British to encourage indian attacks, going as far to talk about, and I am quoting here, savages whose rules of warfare is promiscuous carnage, who rejoice to murder the infant smiling in the mothers arms, to inflict on their prisoners the most excruciating torments, and exhibit scenes of horror from which nature recoils.

This address by Congress was not exactly new and uncharted ground.

Jefferson had levied similar accusations against the British in the Declaration of Independence.

However, here we see the grievances aired in a far more vitriolic way.

Really, it should hardly come as a surprise that the emotional pleas by Congress to the colonies to reject the Carlisle commission would focus on questions surrounding slavery and indian relations.

Both groups had been, at various points, used to help create a sense of unity out of the common fear of rebellion.

Lord Dunmore's threats and eventually his proclamation offering emancipation had done much to infuriate southern colonists and push them towards the american cause.

Few things worried people living along the frontiers more than the risk of an indian raid.

Of course, these fears over slave rebellions and indian raids were nothing new and existed long before the war.

These were fears that lived deep in the american psyche.

Beginning with the enslaved population as well as the free blacks, we find that they had been active participants in the war since the very beginning.

Going back to the Boston massacre, we can find their influence.

Crispus atticus, a half African, half Wampanoag, was among the dead in the massacre.

Free blacks had fought at Lexington and Concord, as well as at Bunker Hill.

Well, many free blacks fought bravely for the american cause.

In the case of the slaves, things were more complex.

Dunmores proclamation years before had opened the door for the enslaved people to join the British, with emancipation being the cost of their participation.

However, it would be erroneous to assume that the slave population fought exclusively for the British.

For slaves who did wish to fight for the United States, it was not as though they could just go grab a gun and march off.

There was absolutely no universe where the owner population was going to be okay with this.

Slaves were going to require permission to join the fight, often bargaining with their masters for freedom upon participation.

One such slave, Peter Salem, fought at the battle of Bunker Hill, where he was credited with killing Major John Picarron.

At other times, slaves would fight right alongside with their owners.

Some states did offer freedom to slaves who agreed to fight as a method whereby they could attempt to fill their required manpower quotas.

Nobody enjoyed the prospect of a military draft, and this was offered as a viable alternative.

Knowing that slave owners were likely not to be terribly keen on surrendering their slaves, the state offered to excuse the owner from his own duty to serve, while at the same time offering financial compensation.

A quarter of all the enslaved able bodied men in Rhode island would end up joining for the Continental army at large.

Slavery had long posed a frustrating question for Washington, although the northern states were more likely to allow with permission.

Of course, enslaved men and free blacks to fight.

The southern states were far more reluctant to accept a more inclusive army in a society that carried with it deep fears of potential slave rebellion in conjunction with sizable populations of said enslaved people.

The very last thing that they wanted to allow was Africans anywhere near the continental army.

This led to a quick vacillation six weeks later where he partially reversed course and agreed to allow freed blacks to serve.

For those freed blacks, they did serve in large numbers often proportionally exceeding the number of white Americans to serve.

In Massachusetts, for example, it is estimated that half of the free blacks in the state would end up signing to fight in the continental army.

Indians posed an entirely different problem for the Americans.

If the deepest fear of the Americans had been the risk of slave rebellion then the risk of indian attacks had to rank as a very close second.

Since literally the founding of Jamestown.

The risk of indian raids was something not terribly far from the minds of the colonists, especially those who lived along the frontiers.

Let us not forget that Pontiacs rebellion had acted as an early primer for the imperial crisis.

Two years earlier, Jefferson had included in the Declaration of Independence that accusation that the British had excited those merciless indian savages to attack the inhabitants along the frontier.

Lieutenant governor Henry Hamilton.

Although the expedition against Detroit was the largest, it was hardly the only ongoing battle against the Indians.

The year before, Bunt was interrogated and held until he managed to escape from his captivity.

In June of that same year.

Some months later, Boone would find himself fighting against the Shawnee, who had laid siege to the town of Boonesborough.

Of course, even without frontier action from Boone or up in Detroit, indian affairs remained at the forefront of discussion within the United States.

The entire deal the year before over J.

McCray had been a huge nationwide story.

Despite the fact that there were tribes that did actively fight with the Americans.

If Congress was in need of an emotional appeal of just why everybody should keep fighting the British, they had been provided ample reason.

If the British were willing to give the Americans the very thing that they had begun fighting for, Congress was now actively trying to justify the continuation of the war by appealing to the deepest fears of the population.

No longer was the fight about getting those same rights as british citizens because Lord north was willing to give them that.

Rather, Congress had pivoted, and now the fight was about the fact that the British had gone too far.

They had proven themselves unworthy to be the leaders of a civilized people.

Well, rhetoric is one thing.

Congress was still very worried that the states may be tempted to ditch the union and unilaterally reconcile with Great Britain.

It was therefore critical that not only did the Carlisle commission need to be roundly rejected, they also needed to take steps to suppress the information from spreading further to the public, who may well be ready for the war to be over, arriving in early June.

So several weeks after the address by Congress, there had been ample time for the Americans to consider their course of action and do everything that they could to ensure that the commissioners mission was all but dead on arrival.

Resistance to the commission began at the very top with George Washington, who refused to allow the commissioners passage to Philadelphia.

Instead, the commissioners were forced to send their proposed peace offering in the form of a packet of letters to Washington with the request that he send it down the line to Philadelphia.

Washington agreed and sent the proposal along to Congress, where it was received on June 13.

When Lawrence attempted to read the commissioners letters in Congress, New Yorks Gouverneur Morris quickly objected on the somewhat flimsy basis that the letters were an insult to americas closest and only ally in the French.

The rest of Congress agreed, and the reading of the letters halted.

The very fact that the Congress was unwilling to even allow the letters to be read aloud provides us with a pretty clear indication of just how damaging they believed the piece offered to be.

Of course, it is not as though the decision to stop reading the letters really hid anything substantial from the delegates.

They had known for weeks what the outline of the offer was.

However, in the role of political theater, they all understood the necessity for them to play their roles.

When the peace delegation had initially departed London, they had been instructed that they were to avoid making appeals directly to the public unless it became absolutely necessary.

Although north was hoping that the states would decide to break away from the union, he understood that appeals to the public directly could potentially backfire, thus further entrenching the Americans.

North recognized that there was a fine line that needed to be walked here between treating with the United States as a whole, while also recognizing the political power of the individual states as separate entities.

Proper diplomacy required that the delegation walk.

That tightrope of utilizing both avenues without going so far as to offend the other appeals directly to the public risked alienating both Congress and the states alike.

However, as the commission arrived and found that their mission was already crippled, appealing directly to the public went from being the last resort to being the only available option.

Congress now found themselves in a position where more than just convincing the states that sticking with the cause was a worthwhile endeavor, they needed to control the narrative and prevent the public from attempting to influence events.

In response to this risk, Congress appointed three men, William Henry Daytona, Richard Henry Lee, and Samuel Adams, to come up with a solution to this unwelcome problem.

The solution of the commissioners was to put in place controls to stop correspondence between the delegation and, indeed, Britain and the public at large.

This plan took the form of a recommendation that the Congress and the states take all the necessary action to intercept and interrupt such troubling correspondence between the British and the Americans.

The three men on the committee had been veterans of the imperial crisis.

They understood the power of controlling the narrative.

We have seen this time and time again as well.

We have talked previously about how news presses had long been at the forefront of making sure that the narrative of what the Americans were doing was crystal clear.

There could be no mistake or misinterpretation because it was so critical for the Americans to control the story that the public was hearing.

In the case of Samuel Adams, think back to the episodes in the aftermath of the Boston massacre.

So were talking about episode 4.17 where we discussed tau the acquittals in the trials after the massacre were largely irrelevant because Adams and the sons of liberty were able to maintain tight control over the narrative of what had happened here.

The Americans were falling back to tactics that had long been so effective and powerful.

For them, however, this particular decision also meant that, when taken to its extreme, the federal government had just given itself power to potentially examine and prohibit the spreading of private correspondence.

Congress was aware of the potential ramifications of such an order, and indeed one would imagine that at least some of the delegates understood the hypocrisy in the act.

Imagine for a moment if the British had passed the same order to potentially inspect private correspondence during the imperial crisis.

To say that such an action would have been deeply unpopular is an understatement.

Richard Henry Lee would justify the groups action by explaining that the peace delegation was prostituting their power by attempting to appeal to the individual states and in fact, the public at large.

Rather than dealing directly through Congress, Congress did indeed make their recommendations to the states as well as to Washington, and encouraged them to take actions to prevent the circulation and spreading of such material, despite the obvious intrusion to privacy that it presented.

Over the course of the next several months, there would be a strong push in the american papers to justify the continued war and to establish that american independence was inevitable.

Congress sent the letters back to the Carlisle commission and bluntly laid out that an acknowledgement of sovereignty was the prerequisite to any peace negotiation.

Although the Carlisle commission had been granted broad powers to bring the war to a close in acknowledgment of sovereignty was the one thing that they were expressly forbidden from offering.

It was during this flurry of writing that Thomas Paine would publish his 6th american crisis paper.

Paine would open the letter saying that there is a dignity in the warm passions of a whig, which is never to be found in the cold malice of a Tory.

In the one nature is only heated, in the other she is poisoned.

The instant the former has it in its power to punish, he feels a disposition to forgive, but the canine venom of the latter knows no relief but revenge.

This general distinction will, I believe, apply in all cases and suits as well the meridian of England as America.

As though he were personally trying to tie all the themes of our episode today together.

Paine would continue by stating, what sorts of men or Christians must you suppose the Americans to be who, after seeing their most humble petitions, insultingly rejected the most grievous laws passed to distress them in every quarter, an undeclared war let loose upon them, and Indians and Negroes invited to the slaughter, who, after seeing their kinsmen murdered, their fellow citizens, starved to death in prisons, and their houses and property destroyed and burned.

Paine goes on this way for quite a while before asking the central question of after all of these things, all of these abuses, why on earth would the United States accept the british proposal?

With the british evacuation from Philadelphia and Congresss refusal to meet with the commission, it essentially meant the end for that commission.

With the french alliance now in place, the British were negotiating from a place of weakness, whereas Congress, despite their dubious authority to make such demands, were at something of a high point for their own strength during the war.

Although the Carlisle commission had been effectively shut down by the end of June, they did continue in the coming months to attempt to challenge congressional authority by publicly questioning their treaty making power.

In October, the commission made a final plea to anybody who would listen, making promises of peace and blessings, pardons to those who would lay down their arms, and a return to prosperity.

They likewise promised a whole train of evils should the Americans reject the peace overture.

Insinuating that everything was on the table when it came to defeating the Americans and the French, they once again made unambiguously clear that a recognition of independence was not going to happen.

This final threat went nowhere.

With a final unsuccessful Salvo, the Carlisle commission found itself completely defeated.

With the delegation leaving in November, this entire ordeal over the Carlisle commission had led to the unintended consequence of expanding the power of the federal government.

Although true that there was no official federal government just yet, the articles of confederation still being stuck in limbo, the actions of Congress had done much to establish itself as the primary authority in the country.

All of this had forced Congress into an uncomfortable position.

There was very real fear that individual states could break away.

Although Congress had, in theory, just expanded their own power, there was still serious questions on if Congress actually had the ability to compel the sovereign states to take any action.

The articles of confederation were still hanging out there in limbo, waiting for ratification, which means that the authority of Congress was still not exactly clear.

Ultimately, such actions were always going to depend on the states, because Congress lacked meaningful police powers and were relying on the states to enforce any act which they should pass.

This means that Congress was dependent upon the states to legitimize their own authority.

Although the Carlisle commission failed to produce a peace agreement, it does much for us to establish where everybody stood.

Unfortunately for the peace delegation, for Congress, negotiations were going to be predicated on a recognition of the sovereignty of the United States.

This was the one thing that the delegation simply could not give.

However, despite the apparent confidence of Congress, this entire affair illustrates the continued concern of Congress about the limits of their own power and authority.

It likewise shone a light on the very real risks to unity that remained for the young nation.

Finally, we saw their attempts to justify their continuation of the war, despite the british concessions, where Congress would point their emotional pleas at exploiting the populations fear of the enslaved peoples and the native tribes.

Next time we are going to return to the fighting.

With the British pulling out of Philadelphia and retreating towards New York, Washington decided that it was an ample time to take a shot at the british army.

Until then, I hope you all have a wonderful two weeks.

I hope that you are staying healthy and that you are staying safe, and I will see you back here next time for the Battle of Monmouth.