6 Making War and Republican Governments

1776–1789

In March 1775, a month before fighting broke out at Lexington and Concord, Edmund Burke, a member of Parliament, advocated conciliation before the House of Commons. Having witnessed the colonists’ deep-rooted devotion to liberty, he thought it better to make peace than to postpone the inevitability of independence. Parliament passed the Massachusetts Government Act in 1774 in response to the Tea Party, revoking its charter, but the colonists were undaunted and protests persisted. Many in Parliament and even many Loyalists in the colonies assumed a strong hand would force colonists back into the fold, but Burke knew better.

The sources in this chapter tell the story of a revolutionary people awakening to the meaning of their rights. A “democratical” spirit touched not only those who had long enjoyed political power, like the male citizens of Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, but also women and enslaved people, many of whom began to draw on a revolutionary rhetoric. Even after the Revolution, this spirit framed arguments about citizenship and equity. Shays’s Rebellion, defended in one of the sources included here, used the language of revolution to aid poor farmers facing economic collapse in the 1780s. The new Constitution, drafted in 1787, responded to these crises and, as James Madison stated, balanced conflicting interests, preserving liberties yet ensuring a stable political order.