VI
The republican Revolution had transforming effects everywhere. It shook up traditional hierarchies, cut people loose from their customary ties as never before, and brought authority of all sorts into question. To be sure, there was no immediate collapse of the social order, and no abrupt and wholesale destruction of familiar social institutions. But everywhere there were alterations in the way people related to government, to the economy, and to one another. Many of these changes were the accelerations of deeply rooted forces long in motion. But others were the recent and direct results of the Revolution itself.
One sudden effect of the Revolution was the departure of tens of thousands of loyalists—or Tories, as the patriots called them. The loyalists may have numbered close to half a million, or 20 percent of white Americans. Nearly 20,000 of them fought for the crown in regiments of His Majesty’s army, and thousands of others served in local loyalist militia bodies. As many as 60,000 to 80,000 loyalists, it is estimated, left America for Canada and Great Britain during the Revolution, although many of these returned after the war and were reintegrated into American society. Although the loyalists came from all ranks and occupations of the society, a large proportion of them belonged to the upper political and social levels. Many had been officeholders and overseas merchants involved with government contracting; in the North, most were Anglicans. Their regional distribution was likewise uneven. The loyalists were a tiny minority in New England and Virginia; but in western frontier areas, where hostility to eastern oppression went back to pre-Revolutionary times, they were numerous. The loyalists also made up a considerable part of the population in the regions of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and the Deep South, where the British army offered them protection. Their flight, displacement, and retirements created a vacuum at the top that was rapidly filled by patriots. The effects were widespread. Crown and Tory property and lands valued at millions of pounds were confiscated by the Revolutionary governments and almost immediately thrown onto the market. The resulting speculation contributed to the sudden rise and fall of fortunes during the Revolutionary years.
The South suffered the greatest disruptions from the war. Not only did it lose its established markets for its tobacco and other staple crops, but the British freed tens of thousands of its slaves to fight for the crown. At the end of the war the British settled these former slaves in Canada, the West Indies, and other parts of the world. Indeed, the British army was perhaps the greatest single instrument of emancipation in America until the Civil War. But these dislocations only speeded up an agricultural diversification that had begun before the Revolution. The Upper South in particular recovered rapidly. Tobacco production in the 1780s equaled prewar levels, involving, however, many new participants and new marketing arrangements.
Although the war had devastating effects on particular sections and individuals, its overall results were stimulating. Merchants who had previously been on the fringes of economic activity found new opportunities at the center of things. In Massachusetts, provincial families like the Higginsons, Cabots, and Lowells quickly moved into Boston to form the basis for a new Massachusetts elite. By the end of the war many, like Governor James Bowdoin of Massachusetts, could “scarcely see any other than new faces,” a change, he said, almost as “remarkable as the revolution itself.” The same mobility was duplicated less notably but no less importantly elsewhere. New merchants pushed out in all directions in search of new markets, not only into the once restricted colonial areas of the West Indies and South America, but throughout Europe and even as far away as China.
Postwar trade with Great Britain quickly reached its earlier levels. By the 1780s, aggregate figures suggest an amazing recovery of commerce. Yet gross statistics do not do justice to the extent of change that was involved. In all the states there were new sources of supply, new commercial patterns, and new and increased numbers of participants in the market. The wartime collapse of British imports had encouraged domestic manufacturing; and although the purchase of British goods resumed with the return of peace, societies were formed to promote protective legislation for American manufacturing. Although exports abroad soon surpassed their prewar levels, they now represented a smaller part of America’s total economic activity. Already people were beginning to turn inward—toward trading with one another instead of abroad; a remarkable spread of internal commerce would soon generate demands for new roads and canals. In these changing circumstances, towns without hinterlands to exploit began a relative decline. A city like Newport, Rhode Island, had been a flourishing colonial port; but lacking an inland area for supply and marketing, it now rapidly slipped into commercial insignificance.
The Revolutionary War itself was at once both a disruptive and a creative force, and it touched nearly everyone one way or another. Like all wars, it destroyed familiar channels of trade and produced new sources of wealth. During the eight long years of the war, perhaps as many as 200,000 men bore arms at one time or another in the Continental Army and state militias. All these soldiers had to be clothed, fed, housed, armed, and moved about. Thomas Paine did not realize the half of it when he wrote in 1776 that “the necessities of an army create a new trade.” The inexhaustible needs of three armies—the British and French as well as the American—for everything from blankets and wagons to meat and rum brought into being hosts of new manufacturing and entrepreneurial interests and made market farmers out of husbandmen who before had scarcely ever traded out of their neighborhoods. At the same time military purchasing agents became the breeding grounds for both petty entrepreneurs and powerful postwar capitalists like Robert Morris of Pennsylvania and Jeremiah Wadsworth of Connecticut, who were in charge of congressional financing and contracting.
Because the Revolutionary states were reluctant to tax their citizens, and because the Congress did not have the legal authority to tax, the American governments had to rely on borrowing to pay for all the goods they needed for the war effort. But borrowing could scarcely raise the needed sums. Both the Congress and the state governments therefore resorted to the extensive printing of paper currency. These bills of credit, which the governments promised to redeem at some future date, were given to citizens in return for supplies and services.
The currency that was issued by the congressional and state governments eventually totaled nearly $400 million in paper value and led to a socially disintegrating inflation. By 1781, $167 of congressional paper was worth only $1 in specie (gold and silver), and the depreciation of the states’ bills was nearly as bad. While creditors, wage-earners, and those on relatively fixed incomes were hurt by this inflation, many of those who were most active in the economy—those who were buying and selling goods rapidly—were able to profit. These circulating government bills enabled countless commodity farmers and traders to break out of a simple barter or personal-book-account economy and to specialize and participate more independently and impersonally in the market than they had in the past. In the end, the Revolution released latent economic energies that set America on a course of rapid commercial development rarely matched by any country in the history of the world.