A meeting in Annapolis over questions of commerce would begin to lay the foundation for the future Constitutional Convention.

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

Episode 5.7, the Annapolis Convention.

We have spent the first six episodes of this season discussing just how the national government of the United States had become so ineffective that it was essentially rendered non existent.

This week, we are going to continue along with that theme.

As the wheels begin to fall off.

Beginning with this episode, we are going to start moving towards the ultimate question.

Just what exactly was everybody going to do about it?

One of the most defining aspects of the confederation was the relationship between the states.

It is important to remember that up until the imperial crisis, the union between the colonies was not exactly strong.

They were competing entities that had little interest in helping each other out.

In certain situations, there was a degree of cooperation.

Even going back to the 17th century, we had seen the New England League form for the purpose of common defense.

Sure enough, in matters of war, the colonies would band together, often more out of self preservation than anything else.

But beyond that, they were competitors.

The imperial crisis forced the colonies to reconsider that relationship.

And now that independence had come along, they had to grapple with an entirely new reality.

We have talked at lengths about the failure of the states to pass that critical impost.

States were printing their own currency, which just further degraded the economy as a whole.

Even worse, there was no sense of control over interstate commerce.

In fact, the states had gone so far as to set up tariffs between themselves.

This not only proved to be confusing to anybody trying to move goods across the country, but it likewise hurt the economy.

New York, for example, a major port, then, as it is now, passed heavy duties on goods that passed through the port.

Per historian Carol Birkin, the situation was at one point so crushing that New Jersey and Connecticut were talking about dramatic options, including an all out assault on New York.

Although this tension between the states was something that had been present throughout the entire confederation period, the fight over American access to the Mississippi proved to be the event that really exposed just how deep and dangerous these rifts really were.

And as we are going to see both today and in future episodes far beyond.

The core problem here was that the proposed treaty exposed deep sectional divides.

Everybody was shifting away from the question of national politics under the confederation government and to the prospect of smaller regional confederations replacing the United States.

Entirely.

The fallout over the treaty saw the United States essentially split into three factions of states, all with different motivations based upon their regional needs.

Out in those western territories, the closure of the Mississippi was nearing an apocalyptic event.

For many of those who had moved west following the end of the Revolution, their success was predicated upon the use of the river.

Denying them that was to deny them the right to make a living.

Even before the closure of the river, there had been complaints that the Spanish were gouging the Americans attempting to sell goods in New Orleans.

Now, with the closure of the river, that valuable market was simply cut off from American trade.

Further complicating things was that the despite the fact that the Continental army was all but non existent at this point, there were direct threats from those Western settlers being made toward Spanish garrisons.

Congress could not afford a war, literally.

They had no money to pay for it.

Yet for many Western settlers, there was not much of a choice.

They had staked their futures on the west, and the loss over the use of the Mississippi completely changed the equation for them between the south and the North.

The divide came down between what each group was getting out of it.

More specifically, it was a manifestation of the anger over the fact that the north was deriving a massive benefit from the proposed deal, whereas the south was being left empty handed.

It brought into question everything that they had fought for during the Revolution.

In a letter between James Madison and James Monroe, the former wrote that this treaty was an example of the majority plundering the minority.

Even former die hard revolutionaries like Patrick Henry stood staunchly opposed to the treaty.

Henry helped encourage and organize Western resistance to the proposal.

According to historian George Van Cleave, this situation was so troubling to Henry that he found himself not only open to the idea of the Union being dissolved, but more generally becoming opposed to the idea that there should ever be a strong Union of the States.

The most tangible benefit of the treaty was going to be in the north and especially in New England.

However, even with Massachusetts distracted, there were those who were busily trying to prevent Congress from backtracking.

Rufus King managed to get a rule passed which required that 12 states, each with enough delegates present to make a quorum, be present before any act could be reconsidered.

A rule like that being passed by King basically meant that nothing could ever be reconsidered, ever.

There simply were never going to be enough people present to make it work.

So, just two months before the Constitutional Convention, Virginia would quietly send their own delegates to negotiate with the Spanish minister Gardaquai.

Not that they got any further.

The Spanish had dug in their heels and were not planning on budging.

Being quite blunt about the matter, Gardokoi told the Virginians that he knew their Congress was not going to be entering into any kind of a treaty and that he was well aware that the Confederation was likely going to collapse.

The French were likewise aware of the growing rifts inside of the United States, issuing their own instructions that the French ministers were not to get involved and were to take a position of indifference towards any potential collapse of the Union.

If the relationships between the states were breaking down, things were not a whole lot better at a more local level.

All throughout the country, there were a whole lot of aggrieved people who had decided that they wanted to take matters into their own hands.

These episodes often surrounded questions over debt collection, something which was a very touchy subject and, and one that has been a tinderbox for a while now.

We have talked in previous episodes about backhanded ways that states had attempted to provide debt relief through the currency system itself.

Now, a few minutes ago, I had made mention that Massachusetts had become distracted over their western lands.

The cause of that distraction is because a guy named Daniel Shays was busy leading an uprising in western Massachusetts.

Despite the fact that this was by far the biggest uprising during this period, we are not going to talk about it today.

Instead, next time we are going to dedicate an entire episode to Shays rebellion and exactly what it meant for the country.

So today we're going to put Daniel Shays aside and we're going to look at a handful of the other uprisings.

We have already talked extensively about the state of the economy and the fact that the United States was all but flat broke.

With the impost having failed and Congress unable to directly tax all they could really do is requisition funds from the states, which was akin to saying pretty please send money.

The states themselves carried their own war debts as well, that they were having to grapple with, as the economies of the individual states were oftentimes not a whole lot better than the national economy as a whole.

The consequence of this is that the states were forced to tax at a unsustainably high rate in order to keep the lights on.

Now, none of this is anything new.

We have talked extensively about all of these things before.

We have also talked about the fights that took place throughout the country as the leadership support between the creditors and the debtors often vacillated.

It is out of this that we see some of the states taking the action of requiring that the virtually worthless continental money be treated as legal tender.

Debtors who paid in the otherwise worthless currency saw massive savings on their debt as they could just shovel the script in the direction of the creditors.

For more wealthy Americans, this currency manipulation meant that the European creditors were unwilling to offer loans to American citizens.

This, of course makes sense.

The entire purpose of making a loan is to receive a return on your investment, most generally in the form of interest.

However, if the government of the United States or one of the individual states was going to come around and force you to accept repayment in worthless paper currency, well, that was probably not a wise investment.

Even prominent Americans like James Madison, James Monroe and Gouverneur Morris felt the crunch from this.

The men were all interested in buying up large swaths of Western lands with the intention of flipping them later for a tidy profit.

The problem was that without the assistance of European capital, they were unable to afford the large quantities of land that they were interested in buying.

As frustrating as this must have been, it was not from this group that the real outpouring of inger came.

Was James Madison aggravated that he was being stymied in his ability to speculate in the West?

Of course he was.

However, James Madison being frustrated posed little danger to public order, for some more drastic actions were required.

We have talked previously and even some today about the efforts of the states to provide debt relief.

This was primarily accomplished by forcing those creditors to accept that paper currency that had been devalued to the point of being nearly worthless.

These actions did not simply manifest in a vacuum.

Rather, the prevailing theory amongst the struggling farmers is that this response came because of a fear of a growing insurgency.

There were a whole lot of farmers throughout the states who had been hit very hard by the surging taxes.

These people they weren't looking to speculate.

They were simply looking to survive for another year.

For them, the excessive taxes meant that they may not be able to remain solvent.

It meant losing their homes and their families, ending up destitute.

It meant debtor's prison.

It meant losing everything.

The solution for many of these farmers was not based through petitions for relief from the government, but but instead through direct action.

The most common way to collect on an outstanding debt when the payer was trapped was for the sheriff to go out, collect the property, and bring it to the courthouse to auction it off.

This really is not all that much different from how foreclosed properties are dealt with today.

Unsurprisingly, the seizures, or I guess we'll call it reacquisitions, were often quite violent.

Historian Woody Holton writes about these violent actions to protect property, explaining that in one case in Pennsylvania, the debtors and the taxpayers literally constructed barricades to block the road.

If the local officials couldn't get to the property, they couldn't seize it.

In another incident, it was Hazika Mayhem, the guy who built all those tall towers to terrorize British forts during the war, who was the subject of such a seizure.

Per Holten, Mayhem forced the sheriff to literally eat the writ.

Yet another incident in South Carolina saw Judge John Grimkey get to work one morning to prepare for a long docket of creditor suits against debtors.

His morning, however, was interrupted when thousands of people showed up to the courthouse and made their way inside.

One of the protesters then took the action of reading out the names of the jurors who were going to hear the suits, just to make sure that all of the angry townspeople were well aware who was going to be responsible for the seizure of their property.

Gribke, obviously not thrilled about these developments, went ahead and ordered that the man reading out the names be arrested, asking the grand jury for their help to get him into custody.

The grand jurors, looking at that large, menacing crowd, decided that helping with the arrest did not sound like a good time.

For a moment, this entire thing looked like it was going to turn from threatening to violent.

When finally the protesters backed down.

However, they achieved their end as the jurors who had their names announced failed to show up the next day.

This scene, as dramatic as it was, was not a unique occurrence.

This, of course, had that devastating effect on credit markets and plunged the country further into economic turmoil.

As mentioned a moment ago, shutting down the courts in order to jam up debtors auctions was not a unique event to any single state.

More than anything this week, I want to make it clear that this is something that occurred with enough regularity that state assemblies were forced to give into their aggrieved constituents demands, more or less feeling as though they were being forced to do so at gunpoint.

In our next episode, we are going to give far more attention to these tax protests when we look at Shays rebellion and its aftermath.

By the spring of that year, the country had become insolvent.

The board of treasury warned that the confederation was at risk of complete collapse.

This conclusion had been reached by a committee chaired by Rufus King.

The committee concluded that in what must have been surprising to absolutely nobody, the requisition system was completely shot.

The national government needed to be able to tax if it had any hope of survival.

In a letter from Arthur Lee to Samuel Adams at this same time, he wrote that it had been two months since the last time that their government had received any kind of a payment.

You would think that being told that the government was going bankrupt and was going to default on both domestic and foreign loans unless an impost was granted would be enough to get the states to do something to stave off disaster.

Yet that was not the case.

Both New York and now Pennsylvania stood opposed to the impost.

There would be no saving the government.

Of course, this was only one of the headaches that was threatening the stability of the United States.

The J Treaty over the use of the Mississippi loomed over everything and had shown the deep sectionalism plaguing the states.

At the same time, the Americans were dealing with a blatant violation of the peace treaty with the British, who continued to maintain posts within the ceded western lands.

The British argued that the continued occupation was a response to the failure of the Americans to pay debts that they had agreed to during the peace.

Although the continued occupation of these forts was frustrating, realistically, there was little the confederation could do about it.

John Adams, who is the acting American minister to Great Britain, demanded that the British surrender these forts, to which the British government declined.

Unfortunately, for the Americans, this was really the only trick they had in their bag.

Sure, it was a violation of the Treaty of Paris and an outright insult to the sovereignty of the United States, but really, what options did the United States have?

Any actual attempt to evict the British was going to spark a war.

The country was, as we just discussed, insolvent.

So the prospect of raising an army was out of the question.

Once again, the United States proved incapable of projecting power even into its own territory.

If the United States was failing to project power into their own territories, their ability to do the same abroad was virtually nil.

The specific problem came in the Mediterranean, which at the time was controlled largely by the Barbary pirates.

For the major European powers, this was not really a huge issue, more than it being a pebble in their collective shoe.

During the colonial era, the United States enjoyed the protection afforded by the Royal Navy.

Unsurprisingly, now that the United States had declared independence, the Royal Navy was no longer interested in providing such protections.

Absent a effective naval response to dissuade the pirates from harassing the American merchants, there was a second option.

You could pay off Tripoli for protection, which, as you have probably surmised by this point, was a problem, since paying off anybody requires money, something which the now insolvent United States was in very short supply of.

With Americans literally being held captive in Algiers and the Congress unable to pay the ransom, this proved to not only be a major diplomatic embarrassment, but likewise put the ability of the United States to trade in the Mediterranean at serious risk.

The government couldn't pay its bills, could not project power into its own territories, let alone abroad, and was quickly becoming overwhelmed by sectional divides.

During the middle part of the year, it was Charles Pinckney from South Carolina who became the first to make the suggestion that Congress should hold a convention to address reforms to the Confederation.

Now, you might think that in a moment of such serious national emergency, you know, the collapse of the government, that there would be all sorts of fiery rhetoric in Congress.

Surely those sectional divides were enough to get the congressional delegates all riled up.

Except that is not what happened.

In fact, with the government in mortal danger of imminent collapse, everybody in Congress seems to have just given up.

The problem was so serious that simply reaching a quorum became distressingly difficult.

The need for reform was readily apparent.

About a year before, Pinckney called for a National Convention, a much smaller conference took place between Virginia and Maryland to address some trade concerns between the two states.

The conference hosted by George Washington at Mount Vernon saw the two states agree to open up the Potomac for commerce between all the states, while agreeing to split the cost on a handful of other matters.

Although this particular conference is not all that noteworthy, it did provide the backdrop for what would come.

The conference at Mount Vernon sparked interest between the other states who had similar issues to work out.

Interstate commerce in the new nation was a complicated and ineffective affair at the best of times for the nationalists, that group that was seeking a more robust federal government, this provided them with an opportunity, if the states could agree, to streamline interstate commerce.

It would be a boon for the federal government while hopefully proving beneficial to the greater overall economy.

There is some truth to the idea that some people were hoping that the Annapolis Convention might become a more in depth investigation into the failures of the Confederation government.

James Madison wrote to James Monroe that he hoped that Annapolis might prove to be a first step towards greater reform.

Not that he was exactly hoping that the Annapolis Convention would be that defining moment, but rather he hoped that if it went well, it might open the door for future meetings that could yield greater results.

In this light, the Annapolis Convention is often portrayed as the event before the event, the thing that led directly to the Constitutional Convention the following year.

This is very much how I learned about the Convention.

However, during my work on this episode, I found myself deeply intrigued by the work of historian George Van Cleave.

We are going to spend the rest of today looking at the actual results and the legacy of the Annapolis convention.

In episode 5.9, we are going to come back to the question of exactly how the Philadelphia Convention came to be.

I would be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to recommend Van Cleave's book.

I have relied on it very heavily during this entire round of episodes on the Confederation government, and we'll be leaning especially heavy on it as we look at just how the Constitutional Convention came to exist.

So this begs the if the importance of the Annapolis Convention is overstated, what was the actual influence from that September meeting?

From the moment that the Convention began on September 12, it was abundantly clear that nothing substantial was going to result from it.

The issue was that the absenteeism that had plagued Congress for the last year followed directly into the conference.

Only 12 people ended up showing up.

Only three states were represented.

Two other states did send delegates along, but not enough to reach a quorum.

New England was completely absent from the convention, and in the South, Virginia was the only state to send a delegation.

Which makes sense considering that it may have been Madison's idea in the first place, although it is worth noting here that there is at least some question about if it was Madison's idea and exactly how much he supported it.

Part of the problem was that for many, they saw the Convention as a chance for the nationalists to attempt to seize more power for the national government.

Although the scope was limited to discussing commerce questions, everybody saw through that and understood the grander implications of such a meeting.

Unsurprisingly, those who did attend, men like Alexander Hamilton and John Dickinson, were avowed nationalists.

Really, the only thing to come out of the convention when it concluded just two days after it began, was that the commerce issues could not be dealt with unless the myriad of other problems with the Confederation be addressed as well.

Nothing about this outcome was surprising.

James Madison's letter to Monroe all but openly stated that he assumed that this was going to be the end result.

This begs the obvious question.

Interestingly, if you look at the chatter going on about the Convention, one of the most obvious things that jumps out is the deep suspicion about those pushing the Convention.

It is telling that there are letters from Massachusetts congressmen who claim that the real purpose of Annapolis was to prevent the strengthening of commerce powers.

Among those who believed this was Rufus King, who believed that the Southern states were always going to be opposed to such a growth over commerce powers in order to preserve their own economic advantages to the detriment of everybody else.

This gets us right back to those deep sectional divides that appeared following the Mississippi river crisis and the proposed treaty.

From John Jay here, you can clearly see those animosities spilling into other areas.

These sectional battles were substantial.

There were nationalists all over the country, in all of the states.

It seems to follow that Annapolis could have, at a minimum, been some kind of a nationalist retreat.

However, these sectional divides meant that nobody really trusted the intentions of anybody else.

Making matters even worse is that people understood that the convention was moribund before it even began.

Everybody understood that nothing was going to be accomplished when it came to commerce power, that the other issues of the Confederation just loomed too large to allow for that to happen in a group where distrust ran rampant.

Having such a clear ulterior motive for the convention did little to convince anybody that the convention was being conducted in good faith.

This brings us ultimately to the most interesting question of all.

Considering the sectional divides, opposition to creating a stronger national government, and that widespread distrust, how exactly is it possible that just eight months after Annapolis it was possible to get the states to gather in Philadelphia to discuss the future of the Articles of Confederation and more specifically, if those Articles even had a future?

This is a topic that we are going to explore in depth in episode 5.9.

The reason that we are not going to touch on it next time is because that while everybody was sitting down in Annapolis, events in Western Massachusetts were about to shake everybody to the core.

Next time we are going to spend our episode in Western Massachusetts and learn exactly what it was that had Daniel Shayes so ticked off and what exactly he was planning to do about it.

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 as we examine Shay's Rebellion.

Sa.