Union and Democracy | Page 9

All the other recruits were dismissed. The inefficiency of Congress and its want of moral influence were self-confessed.
In his famous circular letter of 1783, Washington had spoken of the times as a period of "political probation." The moment had come for the United States to determine, said he, "whether they will be respectable and prosperous, or contemptible and miserable, as a nation." Three years had now passed and the period of probation seemed to have ended in the ruin of national hopes. The events of the years 1786 made a profound impression upon the minds of all responsible and conservative men. In undisguised alarm, Washington wrote: "There are combustibles in every State which a spark might set fire to.... I feel ... infinitely more than I can express to you, for the disorders which have arisen in these States. Good God! Who, besides a Tory, could have foreseen, or a Briton, predicted them?" Rightly or wrongly, men of the upper classes believed that the foundations of society were threatened and that the State Governments would fall a prey to the radical and unpropertied elements, unless a stronger Federal Government were created. "With this idea, they are thinking, very seriously," wrote an interested observer at the seat of Federal Government in New York, "in what manner to effect the most easy and natural change of the present form of the Federal Government to one more energetic, that will, at the same time, create respect, and secure properly life, liberty, and property. It is, therefore, not uncommon to hear the principles of government stated in common conversation. Emperors, kings, stadtholders, governors-general, with a senate or house of lords, and house of commons, are frequently the topics of conversation." There were those who frankly advocated a monarchical government as the only way of escape from the ills under which American society was laboring. There is reason to believe that a project was on foot to invite Prince Henry of Prussia to become the head of a new consolidated government. The influence of the Order of the Cincinnati was much feared by friends of republican institutions. Individually members of the order did not hesitate to express their impatience with popular government. What was to come out of this political chaos, no man could tell.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
The two most extensive histories dealing with the period of the Confederation are George Bancroft's History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America (2 vols., 1882) and G. T. Curtis's History of the Origin, Formation, and Adoption of the Constitution of the United States (2 vols., 1854). In the fourth volume of Hildreth's History of the United States (6 vols., 1849-52), a concise but rather dry account of the Confederation may be found. More entertaining is John Fiske's The Critical Period of American History, 1783-1789 (1888). Valuable information bearing on the social as well as the political history of the times is contained in the first volume of J. B. McMaster's History of the People of the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War (7 vols., 1883-1913). More recent histories of the period are A. C. McLaughlin's The Confederation and the Constitution, 1783-1789 (in The American Nation, vol. 10, 1905), and Edward Channing's History of the United States, vol. III (3 vols., 1905- ). A vigorous narrative of the exploits of the pioneers beyond the Alleghanies has been written by Theodore Roosevelt, Winning of the West (4 vols., 1889-96). A more restrained account of the beginnings of Western settlement is B. A. Hinsdale's The Old Northwest, the Beginnings of our Colonial System (1899).
CHAPTER II
THE MAKING OF THE CONSTITUTION
Notwithstanding the manifold differences between State and State in the Confederation, there were everywhere groups of men who confronted much the same economic conditions. Between the farmer who tilled his sterile hillside acres in the interior of New England and the cultivator of the richer soil of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, a greater identity of economic interests existed than the casual observer would have suspected. The feeling of hostility which circumstances bred in the followers of Daniel Shays toward the merchants of Boston was akin to that which the farmers of middle and western Pennsylvania harbored toward the aristocratic and wealthy classes of Philadelphia and the eastern counties. A similar antagonism appears between the yeomen of the uplands and the planters of the tidewater farther to the south, accentuated, no doubt, by religious and racial differences. The Scotch-Irish or German dissenter, who was treated with contempt as a foreigner and forced to support a church established by a State Government which discriminated against numbers and in favor of property, was not likely to feel kindly toward the tidewater aristocracy. Bad crops spelled disaster for these farmers, for they had incurred debt to purchase