In June 2020, Elizabeth Stamp published an article in Architectural Digest called “18 of America’s Best Historic Homes to Visit,” giving a brief overview of each property. The estates were designed and/or owned by individuals such as architects, writers, and historical figures. In the introduction, Stamp states that “Whether you’re a fan of the founding fathers, a literature buff, or a connoisseur of the modernist masters, there are plenty of pedigreed properties to visit across the country. From 18^th-century plantations on the East Coast to 20^th-century mansions owned by California’s elite, America’s historic homes offer a look at the past while showcasing art, artifacts, and gardens that are as spectacular as the homes they accompany.” Number one on the list is Harriet Tubman National Historic Park, which is located in Auburn, New York. The African American female abolitionist purchased the home in the late 1850s from New York-born politician William Seward and as Stamp explains, “in 1896 she purchased 25 acres of adjacent land to create the Harriet Tubman Home for the Aged.” In 1903, she gave the property to the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and it became a national park in 2017. Number four is The Oaks in Tuskegee, Alabama. The home, completed in 1900, belonged to Booker T. Washington, on the Tuskegee campus, where he was the school’s first president. As Stamp points out, “The Queen Anne Revival-style house was built by students and local craftsmen and was the first residence in Macon County to be equipped with electricity and steam heating.” In 1974, the home, along with the George Washington Carver Museum, and the university grounds, became the Tuskegee Institute National Historical Site. Number five is Hearst Castle, which was designed by the architect Julia Morgan and William Randolph Hearst. Stamp gives a brief description of the 165-room estate with a view of the city of San Simeon that “showcases a magnificent collection of art and antiquities, as well as 123 acres of terraces, gardens, and pools, including the iconic Neptune Pool.” The property is now considered a California National State Park and museum “where visitors can explore different aspects of Hearst Castle’s history, from its art and architecture to its heyday as a retreat for Hollywood’s biggest names.”

Number six is Langston Hughes House in New York. According to Stamp, it is an “Italianate brownstone on East 127^th street in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood” where Hughes lived on the top floor and created his most iconic works. In 1982, it was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. Number eight is Monticello, in Charlottesville, Virginia. As Stamp points out, “Thomas Jefferson began construction on his plantation, Monticello, in 1769 and found inspiration in the work of Andrea Palladio, as well as ancient and Renaissance architecture….The 43-room estate is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site and museum, where visitors can view exhibitions about Jefferson, the estate, and the enslaved people who lived and worked there.” Number nine is Martin Luther King Jr. Birth Home, in Atlanta, Georgia. As Stamp explains, “Built in 1895, this Queen Anne-style home on Auburn Avenue in Atlanta was later purchased by Rev. Adam Daniel Williams. Williams’s daughter Christine and her husband, Michael King, would have three children there, including Michael Jr., who would later become known as Martin Luther King Jr.” After the Civil Rights leader was murdered in 1968, the home “was restored and turned into a museum.” In 2018, the property became a national historic park and is now owned by the National Park Foundation. Number twelve is The African Meeting House in Boston. Stamp gives an overview of the property: “The oldest surviving Black church in America…also known as First Independent Baptist Church and the African Baptist Church of Boston—was built in 1806 on Boston’s Beacon Hill. Many well-known abolitionists spoke at the meeting house, including Frederick Douglass, Sara Grimké, and William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the New England Anti-Slavery Society there in 1832.” The property is owned by the Museum of African American History. Number sixteen is Drayton Hall in Charleston, South Carolina. As Stamp explains, “Set on the Ashley River, Drayton Hall was founded in 1738 and is now the oldest unrestored plantation house in America. The house is the first example of Palladian architecture in the country and is displayed unfurnished to allow the original materials and architectural details to take center stage. Today the estate is a National Trust of Historic Preservation Site, and guests can tour the house and grounds, which includes one of the country’s oldest African-American cemeteries.”

Number eighteen is George Washington’s Mount Vernon, in Mount Vernon, Virgina. Built by Washington’s father in 1734, Stamp explains that “Washington expanded the house over 45 years, beginning in 1754, and transformed the one-and-a-half story house to a 21-room mansion. Most of the property has been restored, “including the outbuildings where enslaved men and women worked” and there is a museum that “showcases artifacts from Washington’s life and presidency.” According to Google AI, “Mount Vernon is the most popular historic estate in the United States,” bringing in over one million visitors a year. AI also explains that “The estate is privately owned and receives no funding from the government. Instead, it relies on ticket sales, retail and dining revenue, and donations from individuals, corporations, and foundations.” This seems odd, given the fact that George Washington is still considered to be the most important historical figure in American history, and given the fact that he had a large amount of influence on the creation of the United States federal government. However, there is a website called mountvernon.org which gives information about the property, and a YouTube page called George Washington’s Mount Vernon, which has 89.5K subscribers. There is a ten and a half minute video on the YouTube page called “Welcome to George Washington’s Mount Vernon,” which was very carefully constructed, narrated by a female voice, and gives a more detailed overview of the property.

According to the video, the property declined after Washington’s death in 1799 and “It took the efforts of a few patriotic women led in 1853 by Ann Pamela Cunningham to save and preserve it for future generations.” They formed a women’s group called the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for the Union who collectively raised money and bought the home—and they still own the property to this day. As the narrator explains, the home was restored to its 1799 condition; and it was a house that was meticulously designed and decorated by Washington and his wife Martha: “Each room was carefully decorated to display the wealth of a Virginia plantation and demonstrates George Washington’s vision for a new nation.” In other words, the Washingtons designed the house to be an example of distinct American sensibilities on an architectural, artistic, and economic level. They saw Mount Vernon as being the blueprints for how citizens of the new nation should live. The narrator goes into deeper detail about how the property functioned:

One of the remarkable aspects of Mount Vernon are the original outbuildings and gardens. These rare preserved structures and landscapes illustrate the daily activities that were vital for survival in the 18^th century. George Washington depended on enslaved labor his entire life. At Mount Vernon, he maintained a workforce of several hundred enslaved individuals, as well as hired indentured staff. We encourage you to learn about the people who worked and lived here.

What is problematic about the video is the way in which language is utilized to not only justify slavery, but to downplay the reality of the nature of slavery in general. For example, when the narrator talks about the restored buildings, she says that they “illustrate the daily activities that were vital for the survival in the 18^th century.” The problematic phrases are “daily activities” and “vital for survival.” Daily activities is essentially a euphemism for slave work that was performed on a plantation. “Daily activities” makes it sound like the work slaves did on the plantation was wholesome and safe and natural. “Vital for survival” is problematic because it suggests that the slave-run plantation was the only viable economical option in the 18^th century, and that is simply not true. Another problematic word used in the description is “workforce.” Workforce is not an appropriate word to use to describe slave work or indentured servitude. Workforce suggests something more modern, like a pool of people who work in a particular industry, or more generally speaking, a large amount of people who are employed or are seeking employment in any economy. Workforce also implies choice, to some degree. Slaves did not choose to be slaves, and although indentured servants could choose to become indentured servants, it was a choice that was based on economic survival—live in unbearable poverty or become a rich person’s servant. So, in reality, George Washington did not hire a workforce of individuals to run his plantation. He relied on slave labor and indentured servants to run his plantation. Slave labor consists of Black people who were captured and brought to the American colonies in the bottoms of ships and/or were born into the slavery system, were forced to work for no money—workforce also implies financial compensation—and were considered the property of the slaveowner. Indentured servants consisted of poor people who entered into work contracts with richer people for a variety of reasons a) as a way to get to America b) to work off a debt or c) to get out of poverty. The biggest disservice this video does to the true history of Mount Vernon is that it downplays the true nature of slavery with euphemistic terms while simultaneously trying to “softly” justify slavery as an economic necessity during Washington’s time, which it was not. It was the only option wealthy white men during that time wanted to utilize.

The video also gives a general layout of Mount Vernon and describes key areas. Again, it is clearly obvious how language is molded specifically to make slavery sound like a natural and necessary part of the 18^th century environment and for Washington’s Mount Vernon in particular:

To the north is the Upper Garden and Greenhouse. Washington designed this area to be both beautiful and useful, with plants for ornamentation and food production. As you proceed along the North Lane, you’ll discover examples of working and living quarters, including the enslaved quarters, blacksmith shop, and spinning house.

As you explore the structures of the South Lane, you’ll find George Washington’s magnificent stable yard. He was called the greatest horseman of the age and his stable yard speaks to the importance of animals on the estate. Keep a lookout for sheep, oxen, and hogs. Near the stable yard is the lower garden and orchard, where free and enslaved gardeners harvested much of the food enjoyed by Washington’s family and their guests.

After these descriptions, the narrator makes this proclamation: “Washington owned 8,000 acres of farmland on which he produced a variety of crops for consumption and sale.” The video makes it sound like George Washington farmed eight thousand acres of farmland all by himself even as the video had just gone out of its way to include enslaved peoples as part of the Mount Vernon landscape. That’s precisely because this video has one important goal to accomplish: to promote George Washington as an American Hero-Genius. The video wants people to understand that although the plantation was run by slaves, at the end of the day, Mount Vernon was really organized around one man—George Washington—who deserves credit for all of the work done on the property, slave-based or servant-based. This perspective is a perfect example of the primary economic setup of the 18^th century: White Male Patriarchy. Another way this perspective is enforced is through an event that is held on the property regularly called “the daily wreath-laying ceremonies”:

Since 1860, millions of people like you have come here to pay respect to our nation’s founding father. There is no more moving way to do so than at his final resting place….Washington’s tomb continues to be a sacred destination for world leaders and citizens alike. Today, you too can participate in this tradition by observing the daily wreath-laying ceremonies that celebrate Washington’s legacy.

The video makes it clear that participating in the wreath-laying ceremony is not only a way for visitors (from all over the world presumably) to respectfully honor the founding father, but that Washington’s tomb, which is located on the property, has spiritual importance. The video doesn’t explicitly elevate him to god-like status, but one gets the feeling that it would if it could.

Immediately following the description of the wreath-laying ceremony is a description of the slave memorial:

Nearby, you will also find the slave memorial and cemetery. This has been a burial ground for both those enslaved and freed African Americans connected to the community at Mount Vernon. The centerpiece is a memorial designed in 1983 by students from Howard University. It sits beside the 1929 marker, which is one of the earliest commemorations to enslaved individuals in the country. Guests are invited to participate in our daily memorial ceremony to honor those enslaved here.

There are a few things to point out here. The first is the use of language. The word “connected” is problematic. Obviously all African American slaves who worked on Washington’s plantation are “connected” to it through their labor. But the word itself is too euphemistic in the sense that “connected” implies choice. No African Americans chose to be “connected” to a planation through slave labor. The second word that is problematic is “community.” It makes the word “connected” become even more false because African American slaves weren’t “connected” to any “community” outside of the slave community. George and Martha Washington entertained a variety of guests at their estate, but it can be safe to say that African Americans weren’t permitted to be part of the social interactions that helped to make up the “community” at Mount Vernon. The second thing to point out is the fact that there are two memorials: a marker from 1929 set up by the Mount Vernon Ladies Association and a proper memorial designed by Howard University students in 1983. Howard University is a Black college. It took Black students to set up a proper memorial for slaves. And yet, the video brags that the 1929 marker was one of the “earliest commemorations to enslaved individuals in the country.” This needs to be put into perspective. It wasn’t until the early 20^th century that African American slaves were given any acknowledgement of their physical role in helping the United States function as a country. And the marker is, in all honesty, half-assed. It’s a cement slab laid on the ground. Here are the words etched into it: “In Memory of the Many Faithful Colored Servants of the Washington Family Buried at Mount Vernon From 1760 to 1860 Their Unidentified Graves Surround This Spot 1929.” And here are the words etched into the 1983 memorial, which is at eyelevel with the viewer: “In Memory of the Afro Americans Who Served as Slaves at Mount Vernon This Monument Marking Their Burial Ground Dedicated September 21, 1983 Mount Vernon Ladies Association.” The 1929 marker describes African American slaves as “faithful colored servants”—it doesn’t even acknowledge them as slaves. The 1983 marker corrects that mistake. There is also another marker briefly shown on the video that talks about the slave cemetery and this is what it says:

There are no records that document the number of enslaved or free African-Americans who are buried in this cemetery. From oral histories and a handful of visitor accounts, estimates range from 100-150 people. Among those individuals thought to be interred here is William Lee, George Washington’s personal servant during the Revolutionary War, who was granted freedom and an annuity in Washington’s will. In 2014, a multi-year archaeological survey began in order to better understand the cemetery’s size and organization, and to find out how many people were laid to rest on this hilltop. No human remains are disturbed in this process.

There are a few things to unpack here. The first has to do with time. Let’s take a look at the timeline that is being presented here by the video. In 1799, Washington died and his property fell to ruin. In 1853, a women’s group purchased and revived the property. Since 1860, millions of people have visited Mount Vernon. 64 years after African American slaves were freed, in 1929, a mediocre marker was set up to honor slaves. 54 years later, Black students from Howard University set up a proper memorial for African American slaves. 31 years later, in 2014, “a multi-year archeological survey began in order to better understand [italics mine] the cemetery’s size and organization, and to find out how many people were laid to rest [italics mine] on the hilltop.” This points to one of the biggest misconceptions in regards to American history: that slavery has been properly understood and accounted for. George Washington’s Mount Vernon is a perfect case study in terms of how slavery was simultaneously hidden and justified. Which brings in the second issue: the fact that there has to be an archeological survey to find out exactly how many African Americans were buried at Mount Vernon. This is utterly deplorable and it will become glaringly obvious why later in the review. George Washington was a meticulous journal/letter/essay writer. There are volumes of his papers that chronicle the Revolutionary War. And yet, it can’t be determined how many slaves were buried in Mount Vernon’s cemetery. Although the video tries so hard to paint Washington as a brilliant and heroic white masculine genius, at the end of the day, his tomb is located next to a cemetery with an unknown number of buried African Americans that he never bothered to keep track of in his personal papers.

Lastly, the video also showcases George Washington’s other pursuit: whiskey-making:

While there, tour the 16-sided barn, his clever invention for treading and filtering wheat. If you have time, consider a short ride to our fully operational distillery and gristmill….George Washington was one of the largest whiskey distillers in the country, and this legacy is carried on by our skilled trades people, who make and sell spirits from his original recipe.

Although in the current moment, according to the video, “skilled trades people” make and sell Washington’s whiskey, the video does not mention that slave labor was originally utilized to make the whiskey. According to Google AI, six slaves made whiskey at Mount Vernon: Hanson, Peter, Nat, Daniel, James, and Timothy. Google AI also refers to these men as “enslaved distillers.” It explains that in 1799, the year of Washington’s death, Mount Vernon was home to the largest distillery in the nation and it produced 11,000 gallons of whiskey. It also explains that these six men “performed the hot and tiring work of making whiskey from a combination of rye, corn, and malted barley.” So, let’s put this into perspective. What is now considered a specialized job performed by “skilled trades people” was once done by a group of enslaved Black men. To put this into a deeper perspective, essentially, six enslaved Black men ran the biggest whiskey distillery in the United States in 1799, but the video dishes out all the credit to Washington. To conclude, the video talks about the Donald W. Reynolds Museum, where “you’ll find immersive exhibits chronicling the life and impact of George Washington. The Revolutionary War 4D experience puts you in the heart of the battle and the Be Washington Theater allows you to measure your leadership skills against the man himself.” In addition to that, there is a restaurant called the Mount Vernon Inn Restaurant that serves Washington’s favorite meals which are also “unique to the tidewater region of Virginia.”  And in the final remarks, the video makes it utterly clear what it hopes visitors’ takeaway should be after visiting Mount Vernon: “Washington’s story is woven into the very fabric of our national identity. He united 13 colonies and helped to create a peaceful, civilian-led government.” Right after this statement is made, a painting is shown of a room full of white men, presumably the leaders of the American Revolution. The video continues, “As you journey to the early days of the American Republic, reflect on his [Washington’s] triumph over tyranny, his commitment to service, and be inspired by his example, to become a voice of leadership in your own community.” The following review aims to accomplish a higher task, which is to give readers a more focused-in and more authentic look at America in the 1780s, a time period that was coined by John Fiske as “The Critical Period,” when the American nation really began to take form.

From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History (University of Virginia Press, 2022) is a collection of essays put together by co-editors Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl that examine the state of America in its infancy from different vantage points. Bradburn, a former professor of history and director of graduate studies at Binghamton University, State University of New York (SUNY), is currently the president and CEO of George Washington’s Mount Vernon, and Pearl is an associate professor of history at Lycoming College. This excellent collection of essays gives readers a more detailed and nuanced understanding of what exactly was at stake for America in the 1780s. There are eight essays total, and this review will highlight a few of them in order to give readers a good understanding of how the essayists reimagine and interact with this particular moment in American history—and how their perspectives help to shed new light on the true nature of how the nation was formed and rebuilt in order to function as a cohesive whole rather than a collective of thirteen colonies. The essays draw from a landmark book published by John Fiske in 1888 called The Critical Period of the American History, 1783-1789. To begin, it’s important for readers to know a little bit about who Fiske was and what his aims were in order to better understand the context in which these essays were written.

John Fiske was both a historian and a philosopher who lectured at Harvard University and University College, London, and although he didn’t come up with the phrase critical period, the foundational book he wrote, according to the introduction, was largely based off of his philosophical ideas about man’s—or humanity’s—evolutionary development:

Fiske came to believe that America, not Europe, was the seat of progress and that the natural unfettered progression of man took place there. The Critical Period hammered home that central point. In the 1780s, Fiske argued, Americans went through stages of progress—oppression, anarchy, and modern stability. Thus, the Americans of the 1880s were the inheritors of a stable, healthy, and prosperous nation thanks to the heroic labors of ‘the founders’ who harnessed the revolutionary spirit, pushing through the quagmire of a disjointed and uninspired confederacy that threatened to tear asunder what little unity and commonality existed. According to Fiske, the America of the 1780s stood on the brink of collapse and could have wandered down the labyrinths of anarchy, perplexity, and ruin if not for the heroic efforts of the founders. It should be no surprise that he titled his most famous chapter ‘Drifting Toward Anarchy.’

The central theme of Fiske’s claim lies in this statement: “…the America of the 1780s stood on the brink of collapse and could have wandered down the labyrinths of anarchy, perplexity, and ruin if not for the heroic efforts of the founders.” From Fiske’s philosophical standpoint, America was the beacon of (male) human progress precisely because the founding fathers saved the nation from anarchy (chaos). Although Fiske’s interpretation of anarchy is unsurprisingly negative, what is even more important is the fact that he credits a small group of white men as being America’s true saviors in the late eighteenth century because they pushed for a centralized federal government which he viewed as the most evolved form of modern civilization. And although Fiske’s work has, for the most part, fallen into obscurity, his ideas about The Critical Period still serve as the philosophical and political premise for how people—American citizens in particular—understand how the American nation came to be. And although Fiske himself has been removed from the perspective he established, the introduction makes a strong case for why the Critical Period is an incredibly important aspect of American history:

By the turn of the twenty-first century, debate over the Critical Period seems to have ebbed. Because it is such a powerful shorthand for the postindependence, pre-Constitution United States, however, it merits a collective consideration. After all, during this period, an important war was won, constitutions and new ideas proliferated, territories and states were won and lost, new governments and institutions were constructed, laws were repealed and created, and everything seemed to be up for grabs. Those constitutions, institutions, laws, and ideas were debated, decried, and appraised. The United States first came into being as an independent country in this era—a new power on earth. People mobilized in adulation and protest; many even rebelled. Economies foundered and rebounded. Through it all, the very essence of life was fundamentally altered for the vast population who inhabited this new American world, whether for good or ill.

Interestingly enough, the essays in this collection are skeptical of Fiske’s perspective in the sense that they feel he overdramatized the American nation as being susceptible to anarchic ruin, which in all honesty, it was not. However, it becomes clear from a reader’s perspective why Fiske took this stance. Although not explicitly stated in the essays, Fiske’s positioning as a white male intellectual in the late nineteenth century colors his ideas about what he felt was at stake for the American nation at the time of its formation. His white male understanding of how human progress should look was reflected back to him by the nation that existed at that time. America had just come out of a civil war that (more than likely) firmly established, in Fiske’s mind, the necessity of a centralized government. And because he was highly influenced by Charles Darwin, he viewed the American union as the pinnacle of human evolutionary progress. And for him, the earliest traces of a modernized, centralized democratic world began with the founding of the American nation. The essays in this collection deal with pertinent topics of the 1780s—commerce, George Washington, slavery, the frontier, the creation of the states, American currency and finance, and fears of an aristocratic rebirth—but more importantly, these essays give readers a more balanced understanding of what was really at stake for America during this time: whether to function as a collective or a unified whole dominated by a centralized government. What should be at the forefront of readers’ minds while reading this review is the fact that the founding fathers pushed for a centralized government during this time because it suited their interests. As much as Fiske would’ve liked to believe in centralized democratic rule as the ultimate expression of (male) human progress, the truth that shines through albeit unintentionally from these essays is that America could’ve gone in any number of directions in terms of its political identity, but the one that was chosen best suited the financial interests of the men in leadership positions at the time. When read from this perspective, this collection of essays becomes even more interesting to read and interact with.

The first essay in the collection: “The Constitutional Consequence of Commercial Crisis: The Role of Trade Reconsidered in the Critical Period,” written by Dael A. Norwood, is probably the most important essay in the book because it flushes out a primary issue for American leaders at that time: the issue of commerce. This issue was not adequately addressed by Fiske or his peers: “The story of how Americans forged national sovereignty out of the near anarchy of the 1780s was the principal focus of Fiske’s 1888 analysis, but Fiske, like subsequent historians, downplayed the ways commerce informed contemporaries’ diagnosis of crisis and shaped their response to it.” This is key because it points to the inherent contradictions in Fiske’s ideas about what American leaders were actually concerned with immediately after the American Revolution. What Norwood’s essay investigates is the major role commerce played in the overall functioning of the nation. As Norwood points out early on in the essay, “U.S. sovereignty, at least as understood by key national leaders, was premised on recognition from other powers and observed in Americans’ ability to request and enforce treaty obligations, both within the bounds of the new republic and between the United States and foreign governments.” American leaders at the time connected sovereignty with the ability to conduct business on an internal and external level. Before continuing, it’s important for readers to understand how inaccurate Fiske’s usage of the term anarchy is on a philosophical level because it’s primarily being used here to describe chaos. Fiske interpreted the newly formed America as being on the verge of chaos in the 1780s, but what makes Norwood’s essay so important is that it debunks that idea entirely. The primary reason the American Revolution happened is because the white men who were in leadership positions at the time wanted to conduct business as an independent entity. For them, sovereignty had everything to do with commercial independence. Anarchy has more to do with establishing sovereignty through self-governance. They are two completely different concepts. The leaders at the time were not interested in chaos. They wanted to conduct their own business independently and they wanted to be recognized by other governmental powers as a legitimate business partner. This also required self-governance, but not on an individual level. The American leaders wanted to be able to govern themselves and the citizens they saw themselves as representing. Anarchy is concerned with self-governance on an individual level—each person governs themselves and no one person represents anyone else.

Norwood proves his point further by explaining that the specific kinds of treaties American leaders were interested in were commercial in nature: “…the treaties Americans sought to secure as the means and proofs of their sovereign power were, with few exceptions, neither military alliances nor peace conventions, but commercial agreements.” American leaders at the time wanted to conduct business with other entities on their own terms. That was their primary concern. Norwood also explains why these treaties were essential to achieving that aim: “Treaties would permit safe passage for American ships in international waters and provide the access to overseas markets that many revolutionaries considered necessary to the fiscal well-being of their new state. Trade would also quiet domestic political conflict.” What American leaders wanted was “access to overseas markets” that were “necessary to the fiscal well-being of their new state.” The American Revolution was not about cutting ties with an oppressive power and reinventing their economic situation. It was about forming an independent entity that could participate in the economic climate on its own terms. And in fact, Norwood explicitly makes this argument as well: “Commerce was a significant cause of the revolution.” However, that does not mean there were no philosophical principles behind this desire to achieve commercial sovereignty. Revolutionary leaders introduced something called The Model Treaty, which was written by John Adams and endorsed by the Continental Congress—the governing body that initially represented the thirteen colonies. As Norwood points out, the treaty

…maintained that the main objective of American diplomacy should be to avoid any ‘entangling’ with European powers and instead pursue only ‘Commerce, not Politicks, much less War’—a position maintained as a ‘guiding assumption of American foreign relations until the 1940s.’ These ideas were not formed in a vacuum. Rather, as Felix Gilbert has observed, they were ‘facets of the larger complex of enlightenment eighteenth-century thought.’ Just as the ideas of European philosophies informed American constitutional thought and republican discourse, so too did decades of Enlightenment writing about commerce as ‘a great instrument for bringing about a new age of peace’ influence Americans’ hopes for what their trade could accomplish.

The founding fathers saw commerce as another means through which they could bring about a more “enlightened” global civilization. Norwood elaborates

They thought that their independence wrought a major shift in the political economy of the Atlantic world, a significant shock to the ‘balance’ maintained by European empires and nations. Thomas Pownall, a former governor of Massachusetts, elaborated the case for anticipating changes in a pamphlet about the revolution’s effects. Following logic endorsed by Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and other key figures, Pownall argued American independence would hasten the end of shortsighted ‘monopolizing systems’ that governed commerce in the Atlantic and beyond….the United States could become, in Pownall’s formulation, ‘the Mediatrix of Peace, and of the polite business of the world.’

To put it another way, “…Americans would spread enlightened principles through trade.” To quickly return to Fiske’s claim of the nation coming to “near anarchic ruin,” it couldn’t be further from the truth. The American leaders at the time were primarily interested in enlightening the economic world through their “revolutionary example.” Their philosophy had nothing to do with Fiske’s inaccurate conception of anarchy, or actual anarchic philosophy.

However, Norwood points to one major pitfall in regards to this vision of enlightening the greater world through commerce: how it would be managed. For American leaders, commerce was not conceived of as needing to be backed by a governing power. In fact, commerce was seen as operating independent of government. The American leaders at the time naively believed that European powers in particular would accept commercial alliances with American traders based purely off of that relationship, but this was not the case. The leaders soon realized that without a “strong government” to back commerce, they would not be viewed as truly sovereign. The American economy suffered during the 1780s and Norwood gives the primary reason why:

Congress had removed restrictions on British shipping to American ports after the Shelburne ministry had made some promising noises during peace negotiations that suggested the final treaty would restore privileged access to British markets. However, as Congress’s action took force, the possibility of commercial reconciliation with the mother country abruptly ended. The proximate cause was the fall of Shelburne’s government in February 1783 and its replacement with a Fox-North coalition more sensitive to the political costs of commercial concessions to an independent United States. The ultimate cause lay in the widespread resumption of prewar mercantilist attitudes within the British ruling class. If for a flickering moment the desire for reconciliation and peace had given some of Britain’s leaders cause to consider exceptions to the Navigation Acts, that candle was extinguished by the summer of 1783.

The British government went through significant changes that caused them to revert to older ways of conducting business. The ruling class that took over was not interested in doing business with the newly independent American nation because it did not recognize it as a legitimate governing force. As Norwood explains further

The newly independent colonies, unable to ‘act as a nation,’ were not treaty-worthy partners in commerce; Americans would lack other options, so British merchants need not fear any competitors. The orders-in-council proclaimed on July 2, 1783, made this shift in thinking into policy, banning American ships from trade with British West Indian ports. By December, additional regulations barred American shipping between other British ports as well and required most U.S. goods to be either transshipped through metropolitan hubs or carried in British bottoms.

France also closed its West Indian ports to American ships and Spain closed most of its ports to American ships as well. As a result, American leaders learned quickly that what Norwood describes as “apolitical commerce” was not possible in the economic climate of the 1780s. In other words, they could not do business with these European powers without instituting some form of governmental support. Here is where the possibility of anarchy could have taken shape. And although this possibility is not discussed in the essay, it’s worth mentioning because the economic situation of the American nation in the 1780s did signal a crossroads in terms of how it would develop. Norwood briefly mentions two things that are somewhat connected and could have been considered as alternative options to dealing with European powers: the Native American peoples and something called autarky. An autarky is a society which is entirely self-sufficient and does not rely on foreign trade. It’s also important to note that in the essay, Norwood mentions that Thomas Jefferson flirted with the idea of autarky; in a letter to a Dutch correspondent, he made the claim that he wished his fellow citizens would “‘practice neither commerce nor navigation, but to stand with respect to Europe precisely on the footing of China. We should thus avoid wars, and all our citizens would be husbandmen.’” Husbandmen is a really important term here because that’s precisely what George Washington aspired to be. George Washington sought self-sufficiency through farming and husbandry at Mount Vernon. And although he utilized slave labor to do it, his goal was to be reliant on what he could grow and consume on his own property. How does this relate to Native Americans? Norwood briefly mentions how the new American nation’s poor relationship with indigenous peoples was another reason why it was struggling economically: “…white settlers’ invasion of the disputed lands in the Ohio and Mississippi watersheds increased tensions with native peoples—sparking bloody raiding warfare—and put stress on the national government’s legitimacy.” America was already expanding and it was creating severe problems with the indigenous peoples. It could be argued that Native Americans practiced something like autarky for centuries. Although Native Americans consists of multiple tribes and not all of them were on good terms, as a whole, they were self-sufficient and were not engaged in foreign trade on a widespread scale. It’s important to bring up that an anarchic inclination in the 1780s wouldn’t have looked like chaos as Fiske claimed. It would’ve looked something like this: important figures like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson cutting ties with European powers altogether and utilizing their estates to function as self-sufficient mini-communities where they would live in coexistence with indigenous tribes. However, because white dominant male thought at the time was primarily racist in nature, slavery was the chosen system in which men like Washington and Jefferson ran their estates, and Native Americans were seen as primitive, savage threats rather than helpful neighbors. It’s also important to understand that this reviewer is speculating about what an alternative version to creating a centralized government in order to do business with European powers (who had control of most of the world’s ports) would have looked like. Obviously autarky was never taken seriously. But the white men who were in charge at the time, Washington and Jefferson in particular, knew that self-sufficiency was possible in America because they were already practicing it to a certain extent. But instead, they made a choice to push for a centralized government because they wanted to participate in the economic climate of the time. They wanted access to all the ports so they could engage in trade just like the European powers did. Even John Adams’s suggestions for how to deal with the problems of commerce with Britain combined taking a stronger stance collectively in regards to foreign trade and engaging in autarkical pursuits:

His primary recommendation to Congress was, unsurprisingly, to demonstrate unity among the states by collectively striking back against British trade rules through a five percent duty on ‘West India Articles’ imported in British ships or American produce exported in them. But even Adams did not counsel government action alone. He still put stock in the power of private ventures, and advocated growing more West Indian products in the United States, to make the country more self-sufficient, or sending ‘ships immediately to China’ to outcompete and embarrass the British.

Norwood’s essay also talks about the struggle between Congress and the states in their attempts to consolidate national debt and establish credit. Early on (1780-1781), the Continental Congress attempted to “create a reliably financed and centrally managed national debt and thereby restore public credit,” but states were unreceptive. In 1783, a revised act was presented to the states to make another attempt to create a federally controlled debt program that “still asked states to accede to an impost of 5 percent ad valorem, but also devised a tariff of duties on selected consumables (the standard ‘luxury’ comestibles: spices, sugars, alcohols, teas, coffees, and cocoa). This new revenue measure came with safeguards for state power: states would appoint collectors, and the measure would expire after twenty-five years.” Norwood also makes it clear that the primary goal was to “fund debts and secure credit,” not to enforce a centralized governing power. But again, states were not receptive. However, the Pennsylvania legislature took things a step further:

The Pennsylvania legislature recommended that Congress be vested with powers for ‘regulating and controlling trade’ for the entire country, solving the revenue and foreign policy issues together. A congressional committee made up of Elbridge Gerry, Jacob Read, Hugh Williamson, Jeremiah Chase, and Jefferson came to similar conclusions. Noting that ‘the fortune of every Citizen is interested in the fate of commerce: for it is the constant source of industry and wealth; and the value of our produce and our land must never rise or fall in proportion to the prosperous or adverse state of trade,’ the members of the committee advised that Congress ‘be vested with powers competent the protection of commerce’ so the United States could secure ‘terms of equality in their commerce with foreign nations.’ In particular, they recommended that Congress ask the states to grant the national assembly the temporary power to issue embargoes against nonreciprocating nations and their citizens. Unless the United States had retaliatory power to compel reciprocal trade terms from foreign powers, the committee argued, its commerce would not just decline, but ‘eventually be annihilated.’ Seeking to prevent Britain’s ‘destructive’ and ‘unequal’ measures from ‘growing into system’—and over the objections of Rhode Island’s delegates—Congress passed resolutions on April 30, 1784, requesting new powers from states.

And yet still, the states were unreceptive. Norwood gives an explanation:

Part of the reason for the impasse lay in the states legislatures’ growing distrust of each other and the country’s low opinion of Congress….New York’s state tariffs upset neighboring states, whose trade, both domestic and foreign, was at a considerable disadvantage when it passed through New York City. In particular, New Jersey, lacking a major port of its own, suffered—and in retaliation, refused to supply Congress with requisitions until New York approved the congressional impost. Congress tried to intervene to resolve the conflict, but its delegations accomplished little. Unwilling to sacrifice its own revenues to the national treasury, the New York legislature dragged its feet, passing a ‘defective’ act that did not meet the terms of Congress’s request, only to reject an amended version in February 1787—killing through procedural means any possibility of an impost.

 At the same time, the most important New Yorker in the national government, Secretary of Foreign Affairs Jay, seemed to be protecting eastern states’ commercial interests by selling out frontiersmen in the South and West. In August 1786, Jay brought a draft treaty with Spain to Congress and recommended that the United States accept Spain’s closure of the Mississippi in exchange for access to Spanish ports in Europe and the West Indies. Delegates from the South met this suggestion with outraged disbelief, unable to understand how Jay could so callously disregard their constituents’ interests. South Carolina’s Charles Pinckney, in wide-ranging attack on the proposal, argued against the treaty on these merits but also condemned Jay’s negotiations itself, alleging that the appearance of sectional favoritism in the draft treaty would be sufficient to destroy any chances the states would grant Congress further powers over commerce.

States’ self-interests (New York in particular) prevented any attempt by Congress to consolidate and regulate debt and commerce. The inherent disunity between Congress and the states was in fact a major problem in the 1780s, but as Norwood points out:

The commercially informed route that the reform of the articles took institutionally challenges the argument proposed by Fiske and many subsequent historians that the focus on commercial regulations was a cover for deeper issues, and the ‘weightiest part of the business’ aimed at by reformers was ‘relegated to a subordinate clause.’ This argument misconstrues the importance of commerce to nationalist reformers. For them, commercial problems raised serious questions about the viability of the new republic’s fundamental institutions. If Congress, under the articles, could not arbitrate disputes between states, fund a revenue, or negotiate treaties with other powers, then how could the nation survive, much less prosper? Americans returned to these questions constantly during the 1780s, at closed-door meetings as well as in public debates.

Fiske’s claim that “the focus on commercial regulations was a cover for deeper issues” during the 1780s is debunked. As Norwood points out, “If Congress, under the articles, could not arbitrate disputes between states, fund a revenue, or negotiate treaties with other powers, then how could the nation survive, much less prosper?” The problem wasn’t that the new American nation was a chaotic mess on the brink of total destruction. The problem was that there was a power struggle between Congress and the states. American leaders needed to figure out if America was one cohesive body run by a centralized governing force or if it was a collective of thirteen states. In other words, they were trying to figure out how a modern government should operate. And this concern created a debate between two groups: federalists and antifederalists. For federalists—those who were in favor of a centralized governing force—the question of how commerce should be managed was at the center of this debate. As Norwood points out “Commerce was a core constitutional issue because it was a constitutive activity for the American revolutionary project and a defining feature of the new nation’s life as a polity.” For antifederalists—those who were in favor of maintaining the states’ power to govern themselves—were more concerned about the implications of instituting the Constitution than they were about commerce. Norwood explains how the Federalist essays (written collectively by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay) made arguments for a centralized government because “‘the enterprise and address of our merchants and navigators’ was leading Americans to capture a significant share of world trade. But this laudable success, Jay feared, could ‘invite hostility or insult’ from European powers and thus provide cause for war—a danger Jay thought could only be sensibly countered by a more centralized union and a strong navy, institutions that would be best organized by a more powerful federal government” and “Hamilton challenged Enlightenment theories about trade—commerce, history, showed, did not soften the manners of men but rather provided another arena for bloody-minded competition between neighboring states. American states would meet his fate, he predicted, unless they harnessed their energies together within a strong centralized confederacy.” These aggressive rhetorical arguments put forth by American leaders show that “the focus on commercial regulations” had more to do with their concerns about the implications of their influence as a new, independent, modern nation. Precisely because they were doing things differently than the European powers at the time, they were a threat, and they needed to be able to defend themselves as a nation with a central governing force. What American leaders in these particular Federalist essays that Norwood highlights were actually doing was using the issue of commerce to justify a more unified government.

What were the results of these debates about commerce? A drastic change in policy:

Just two days after the House of Representatives in the first federal Congress achieved a quorum in April 1789, it began debating a tariff. A few months later, the tariff, tonnage, and collection of acts had passed and together created a comprehensive American commercial system…By common consent among the new members of Congress, framing a national commercial policy became one of the most pressing agenda items for the federal legislature, since it would provide the national government with a stable revenue, American traders with protection against European systems of mercantilist regulation, and the United States with the recognized tools of sovereign authority.

And how did this affect the new American nation’s relationship with European powers? A drastic shift in trade affairs in the 1790s:

Treaties with Britain and Spain in 1794 and 1795 testified to those empires’ new willingness to deal with the United States as a coherent body and helped stabilize some areas of trade….It is also unclear whether the new government was a decisive factor in these new settlements; the onset of the wars of the French Revolution likely played as large a role in convincing the courts in Madrid and London of the need for treaties as any federal structuring. Meanwhile, the exigencies of a new global war boosted the volume of American trade to new heights in the 1790s and perhaps even shifted the nation’s economy onto a trajectory of significant continuous growth.

Although Norwood does point out that Britain and Spain were most likely considering other factors in their decision to do business with the independent American nation, its transformation into a more recognizable (legitimate) unified whole with a centralized governing force did give it more weight in the economic climate of the time. Norwood gives an apt description of what the Constitution really represented in a commercial sense: “Though in an important sense a ‘peace pact,’ the Constitution might be equally described as a customs union creating a defined domestic market. These two concepts of union were linked: for American revolutionaries, peace and prosperity, and the virtuous citizenry they would together create, depended on free-flowing commerce and the creation of a ‘union of interests’ among the new states—a convergence that they discovered over the course of the 1780s could not occur without the oversight and management of a stronger, centralized authority.” What the Constitution represented was the face of what a modern government looked like as the world entered the 19^th century, and it included the institution of a federal government. So really, what America went through during The Critical Period wasn’t a crisis teetering on the edge of  “anarchic chaos,” but rather, a transformation into a unified force that could conduct business internally and externally with European powers on its own terms:

Whether considered over the ruled lines of a ledger book in a countinghouse near New York’s ice-packed harbor; regarded through the shadow-streaked, wooded back acres of a frontier farm in Kentucky; or contemplated from the stuffy confines of a stifling meeting hall in Philadelphia, commerce and the production of commercial opportunity were core components of the still-diffuse concept known as the ‘United States of America’ in the 1780s. Commerce was a key part of the practical political economy of the early American nation-state, but also an important part of the theory of that state. In an integrated Atlantic world, and within an intermittently globalized economy, how could it be otherwise? During the 1780s, nationalist reformers saw commerce as a thread running through disparate political disputes—the friction between states, persistent fiscal instability, practical sovereignty in foreign affairs, even the frustration of the epochal promise of republican politics….This concern for commerce created an impetus for reform in the late 1780s and explains why commerce was so constitutionally consequential for the early American republic in the years after its founding. Anxious for their trade, Americans remade their state.

The second essay in the book, “America’s Court: George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the Critical Period,” was written by Douglas Bradburn and it’s almost as equally important as the first essay, primarily because it gives readers a much more accurate understanding of George Washington’s role in the creation of an American identity. The most obvious reasons for why Washington is such an important American figure is because he was the general of the American military during the American Revolution and America’s first president. But Bradburn gives a more nuanced reason of why Washington is so important and it has to do with the fact that once America became an independent nation, it “lacked a center of power, lacked political traditions and a distinctive national character, lacked an integrated financial system, lacked large and impressive public buildings and monuments, lacked biographies or histories of its founding and founding heroes, and perhaps most jarring for the many former Britons who made up the American citizenry, lacked even a true head of state.” George Washington filled the head of state role. And Mount Vernon became a physical location that citizens could identify as being distinctly American: “the home of the Washingtons helped a nation with no identity other than the memory of a long and brutal war begin the process of imagining a shared country after independence as the property became celebrated in poems, travel journals, and countless letters.” Additionally, Mount Vernon served as an important meeting spot on a governmental level:

…George Washington’s estate on the Potomac served as a surrogate court for the nation. Visited by diplomats, curious travelers, artists, and improvers, with resident historians and memoirists, Mount Vernon became an important center of conversation on the problems and possibilities of the young American republic. In agricultural reform, commercial development, diplomacy, and the support and patronage of literature and the arts, Mount Vernon played a leading role. Ultimately, Mount Vernon became the ideological and political center for the movement to reform the Articles of Confederation, a movement at once despairing and optimistic that would define the crisis of the ‘Critical Period,’ as well as prescribe the solution….While historians have recognized the significance of taverns, parades, sermons, the republic of letters, and the ‘public sphere’ in the creation of the American nation, they have missed the importance of this alternative and definitive creative space in the years following independence—America’s court on the Potomac.

Bradburn’s essay seeks to correct historians’ past mistake of undermining the role of Mount Vernon in being a key spot where America’s identity was cultivated. But Bradburn’s essay does something else albeit somewhat unintentionally: it explains to readers how Washington was set up by journalists, writers, poets, and educators to become the first cult figure for American culture. And he helped them do this through conscious action. And it began during the American Revolution:

From the beginning of the revolution, Washington had been promising to quit when the job was done, and by the fall of 1783, newspapers were reporting the impending event. Washington’s movements were closely followed, and his plans circulated widely….In resigning in such a way, he was ‘emulating the example’ of the ‘virtuous Roman General, who, victorious, left the tented field, covered with honor, and withdrew from public life, otium cum dignitate’—leisure with dignity’….By resigning, Washington immediately became, in the words of George III, ‘the greatest man in the world.’ To the true believers, he became a living example of ancient dignity and virtue—a modern version of something timeless, authentic, rare and heroic. Mount Vernon was where ‘the Great Man’ lived.

This reviewer is using cult figure to describe Washington because it more accurately represents the aims of writers at the time. In all honesty, Washington was just a general. He was not “famous.” His fame was created by writers who chose to highlight him because to them, he fit the role of a true American more than other American leaders did at the time. There was a collective obsession amongst those with the ability to influence the general public with turning Washington into a distinctly American figure. This obsession is what drove this collective of writers to make a strong push to elevate and immortalize Washington as an American hero in a classical sense. As Bradburn points out, “…Washington was already being compared with Cincinnatus of Rome and Timoleon of Greece (who kept the Greek colony of Syracuse free against the Carthaginians and retired to private life)—two exemplars of ancient virtue.” Because classical examples were the main sources of history and literature in Western white culture, those references were used to help create their cult figure. And Mount Vernon became a cult pad: “In every week of every year from 1784 until Washington assumed the presidency in New York, some reader of some newspaper or pamphlet almanac, or geography, or book of poems, could read a reference to George Washington’s Mount Vernon….American readers could regularly imagine and be reminded of the estate of the first citizen of the country [italics mine].”

But how did Washington aid in this collective pursuit to uplift him to cult status? Aside from the fact that he made the strategic move to retire once his general duties were complete, he had a close friend named David Humphreys who was his military aid, but he was also a poet. Bradburn’s essay is significant because he introduces readers to an American figure who the general American public is not familiar with, but is incredibly vital to understanding who Washington was. Bradburn elaborates:

Humphreys, George Washington’s friend and former aide-de-camp, who lived at Mount Vernon for extended periods in the 1780s, published a steady stream of verse and prose celebrating, describing, and enhancing Mount Vernon with powerful significance….For Humphreys, Mount Vernon serves the story of Washington’s generous service and retirement—and the greatness of the estate enhanced the original sacrifice. However, he also gave Washington an active political role at Mount Vernon: speaking to the people of America about the crisis of the 1780s. In ‘On the Happiness of America,’ Humphreys has Washington speaking at length to the American people, offering advice, emphasizing harmony, the rule of law, and payment of ‘honest debt.’…Washington implores his fellow citizens to ‘increase the fed’ral ties, support the laws, Guard public faith, revere religion’s cause.’

Humphreys was Washington’s biggest fan. And Washington allowed his biggest fan who was also a poet and a writer to live at Mount Vernon and write poetry celebrating the estate. Humphreys was essentially Washington’s poetic spokesperson—and he used his creative talents to help develop the cult of George Washington. And from the passage above, readers can see that Humphreys knew Washington very well, because he articulated his political ideas very clearly, “emphasizing harmony, the rule of law, and payment of ‘honest debt,’” and most importantly of all, his desire to “increase the fed’ral ties.” One could also argue that Mount Vernon marks the birthplace of American propaganda because according to Google AI, Humphreys was also the first presidential speechwriter—which means he wrote speeches specifically for Washington. Other writers that aided in this desire to turn Washington into an American cult figure were two men by the name of Noah Webster and Jedidiah Morse. Readers might be familiar with Webster, creator of the Webster’s dictionary, but he was much more than that. He was an educator. And this is key. Not only did Washington have a poet writing poems about him and Mount Vernon, one of the most famous American educators was writing descriptions of Mount Vernon. Jedidiah Morse was a geographer, a preacher, a textbook writer, and father to Samuel Morse, who developed Morse code. He published Humphreys’s anonymous biographical writings about Washington in American Geography. These were all influential men at the time, contributing to the creation of Washington’s cult figure status through educational means. According to Bradburn, “Both Morse and Webster believed the nation and a true national character could be cultivated with stories of America’s past and present, and they used their schoolbooks, dictionaries, geographies, and biological squibs to introduce the American citizenry to their own nation.” They were trying to create an American culture through education and elevating Washington as an American hero fit their aims.  

But Washington was more than just a figurehead. He was active in a variety of ways. According to Bradburn, Washington helped create the first multistate corporation, called the Potomac Navigation Company. The idea for the company came about in 1784 after Washington made a trip “to collect rents and investigate the status of his western properties, which included land both east and west of the Allegheny Mountains, including 30,000 acres bordering the east bank of the Ohio River.” Bradburn continues

Marred by poor weather, intractable squatters, and hostile Native Americans, Washington’s trip to his western lands made two facts clear. First, the people who lived on the other side of the mountains were only tenuously connected to the United States. Second, his own lands would never be worth much unless those lands could be connected with the East. In the last entry of his western journal, he wrote an elaborate explanation of the problem and outlined the solution. He turned the entry into a series of letters calling for a public effort to improve navigation of the Potomac River into the Ohio.

Washington saw two opportunities rolled into one: the opportunity to unify America further: “the people who lived on the other side of the mountains were only tenuously connected to the United States” and the opportunity of commerce—“his own lands would never be worth much unless those lands could be connected with the East.” As a result, “he [Washington] successfully lobbied both the Virginia and the Maryland legislatures to incorporate a public company that could raise the capital to cover investment; labor; and the creation of roads, sluices, dams, locks, and some bypass canals.” Another result of the project is that “Mount Vernon would become a visiting point for mechanics of all types—engineers and inventors of ‘useful’ improvements.” Additionally, the project itself was negotiated at Mount Vernon. Maryland and Virginia each appointed commissioners who met at Washington’s estate, where something called the “Mount Vernon Compact” was created. According to Bradburn, this is significant because it was “a diplomatic agreement between sovereign states,” and it “led directly to the movement for larger conventions at Annapolis and eventually Philadelphia. The road to a new Constitution began at Mount Vernon.” Washington actively made major changes to Mount Vernon itself:

He also redesigned the landscape of his estate, destroying the colonial order he had imposed and instituting a vision intended to reflect his new republican sensibilities. He leaned upon various tendencies of English and continental gardening and relied on pattern books and common practices, but he lived in an American environment, and his landscape, although evocative of some British trends, was wholly his own. Especially important were his extensive use of native plants and his desire to perfect an American landscape. He used very little ornamentation. There were no follies or flights of fancy at Mount Vernon.

However, Washington was not only concerned with the appearance of Mount Vernon, but its functionality. It was important to him that the estate functioned like a fully operational farm:

He wanted to transform Mount Vernon into a model for the future of the country. He hired an English farmer. In the 1780s, he expanded his experiments with various grains and grasses, implemented systemic crop rotation, widespread use of manure, close attention to breeding of stock, and the use of barns and pens for animals. He used the best implements and assistants, new barns and fences, even gifts of giant Spanish and Maltese donkeys to put his estate at the forefront of American farming techniques. Washington’s reputation as a farmer was supreme….His efforts in agricultural reform were well known across the country, and people came to see his estate and his techniques.

Washington was creating what he thought America should look like through his example. In regards to taste, he was intentionally interested in plainness, simplicity, and functionality as a way to disconnect from British style. And he was extremely nuanced in his desire to do this. Bradburn relays a story about how Washington talked with Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris about what he thought the presidential table should look like: “Morris agreed with Washington that it should not be extravagant, but should be ‘majestically plain, made to endure.’” This description was a direct reflection of how Washington was not only described (“Washington himself was often declared to be ‘majestic,’ but of course also ‘simple’ and ‘plain.’”), it was also how he saw himself. When thinking about Mount Vernon, readers should see it as a direct reflection of Washington’s identity and the identity he was attempting to create for America.

Mount Vernon was also significant for another key reason: in the 1780s, it held “the largest archive of revolutionary material available for scholars” and this was no accident. Bradburn elaborates:

In August 1783, twenty-eight volumes of Washington’s papers, including letters to Congress, orders and letters to various officers and foreigners, and private letters, were shipped to Mount Vernon in anticipation of Washington’s retirement. The collection represented an essential body of sources for the operations of the American army over the long conflict, and Washington, after receiving permission from the Congress, readily made his archive available to writers at his estate.

Essentially, anyone with an academic interest could come to Mount Vernon and access twenty-eight volumes of Washington’s papers. Let’s put this into perspective. Not only was Washington the general of the American Revolution and the first president of America, not only was his estate an example of American taste, Washington was also the primary historical source on the American Revolution. To be honest, this goes beyond cult status. Washington was literally embodying American history in its infancy. And again, this is intentional. Not only did Washington have the most detailed information about the American Revolution, he wanted scholars and writers to access the material. Bradburn gives an example:

William Gordon, author of one of the first complete histories of the American Revolution, spent over two weeks examining, copying, and researching in Washington’s papers. As he wrote enthusiastically to Horatio Gates, Washington gave him access to ‘thirty and three folio volumes of copied letters of the General’s, besides three volumes of private, seven volumes of general orders, and bundles upon bundles of letters to the General.’ Washington would eventually purchase two sets of Gordon’s history.

The reason why Washington would want writers to access this information is obvious even if not explicitly stated: he wanted to be immortalized. It’s also important for readers to understand that Mount Vernon is also more than likely the birthplace of American historical scholarship. This is significant because the information that exists there is entirely through the lens of Washington—how he experienced the American Revolution.. This is also where Humphreys comes in again:

Humphreys used Washington’s papers not only for his incomplete biography of Washington but also for his lengthy biography of General Israel Putnam. He finished the work at Mount Vernon in June of 1788 and mailed it to the Connecticut Society of Cincinnati, calling it ‘the first effort in Biography that has been made on this continent.’ Humphreys hoped that his effort would ‘prompt some more skillful hand to portray the illustrious group of patriots, sages, and heroes, who have guided our councils, fought our battles, and adorned the memorable epocha of independence.’

There was an immediate effort after the American Revolution to immortalize not just Washington, but “the illustrious group of patriots, sages, and heroes, who have guided our councils, fought our battles, and adorned the memorable epocha of independence.” Bradburn makes it clear himself that “Washington hoped to spur and encourage work on the history of the revolution.” Again, it has to be emphasized that this was the 1780s. The American Revolution had just happened and the country was not yet fully formed. And there was already an intentional desire to create the American nation through historical scholarship. Although this is speculation on the reviewer’s part, it seems highly likely that Washington’s extensive writings during the American Revolution were no accident. He was creating the history he wanted other writers to interpret for the rest of the American citizenry. And, it’s fair to say that those who control history control the collective perception of the past.

But Washington didn’t stop there. He also recognized the importance of American art and literature in the creation of an American identity. According to Bradburn, “Painters and sculptors worked regularly at the estate in the 1780s….These men and women would exploit the popularity of their subject and helped spread Washington’s image far and wide.” Mount Vernon is also significant because it became ground zero for the creation of Washington’s artistic image.  Washington was especially aware of the importance of poetry as an artistic medium that could distill history into something more consumable than scholarship could while also fulfilling the job of immortalizing historical figures. Bradburn elaborates

…Washington ruminated on the importance of the fine arts in the establishment of American greatness. Poets were the ‘priests and doorkeepers to the temples of Fame,’ and these, he noted, ‘are no vulgar functions.’ All great ages and great men have had their poets. Alexander, Washington noted, ‘lamented that,’ he had ‘no Homer,’ while Julius Caesar was ‘well known to have been a man of highly cultivated understanding and taste.’ Louis XVI and Queen Anne’s era were known for the greatness of the arts, he continued, and Washington himself wished to help launch a similar outbreak of American greatness. ‘Although we are yet in our cradle, as a nation,’ he wrote, it is clear that we can ‘refute (by incontestable facts) the doctrines of those who have asserted that every thing degenerates in America.’ So it can be shown in ‘the performances of our poets and painters,’ despite the lack of the many advantages ‘which operate powerfully among older nations.’ He meant the lack of leisure, luxury, wealth, and government, ‘for it is generally understood, that excellence in those sister arts has been the result of easy circumstances, public encouragements and an advanced stage of society.’ He was delighted to see that ‘the Critics in England…speak highly of the American poetical geniuses.’

Again, readers should take note of the references to classical historical figures (Homer, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar) and European monarchical leaders in France and Britain. It goes without saying that Washington wanted to see himself and America in the same company as those in the group above, who represented, in his opinion “an advanced stage of society.” And he primarily saw poetry as the means to getting there. Bradburn gives an example of Washington’s intense interest of poetry:

Perhaps the greatest poem published by an American in the 1780s was Joel Barlow’s ‘The Vision of Columbus,’ considered by critics at the time to be a work of genius. Washington obtained twenty copies, more copies than any other subscriber except the king of France, to whom the work was dedicated. Washington distributed these poems widely, sending them to France and giving them away to influential women in Philadelphia’s social and political world, including Elizabeth Willing Powell, Ann Allen Penn, Sarah Franklin Bache, and Elizabeth Meredith Clymer.

Understanding this side of Washington makes his friendship with Humphreys all the more clear—he wanted his Homer. Humphreys was also the one who coined the term “antifederalist” in a poem he wrote collectively with Barlow and another poet by the name of J Trumbull called “The Archianaid.” Poetry also played a significant role in communicating the political aims of those who wanted the American nation to take the desired direction toward federal rule.

And yet, there is one thing that Washington and Mount Vernon will never be known for: aiding the cause of emancipation. It is estimated that between 1784 and 1789, 579 people visited Mount Vernon, and most of them were of “polite society,” or as Washington described: “people of the first distinction.” And he kept track of these people by listing them in his diary. Mount Vernon was a physical place that people could travel to in order to connect with the newness of American sensibilities through Washington and his interpretation of American aesthetics. This is what Washington cared about the most: how he and his estate were regarded by high society. And because the nation’s capital was a bit transient, moving from Philadelphia to Annapolis, to Trenton and New York City, Mount Vernon represented stability and comfort in a physical sense. And yet, Bradburn points out this truth

In the representations of Mount Vernon circulating in newspapers, pamphlets, geographies, and published travel accounts in the 1780s, the enslaved men, women and children who made up the majority of the population of Mount Vernon and performed the hard work of keeping up the estate and farms, were almost never mentioned. The great estate stood as a symbol of freedom, contemplation, virtue, and reform, never as a typical plantation dependent on enslaved labor. Neither the poems nor the biographies and geographies mention the existence of slavery at Mount Vernon. This remarkable fact becomes even more surprising given that many authors were highly critical of the institution, both philosophically and morally.

Slavery was completely erased from the image of Mount Vernon. And slavery is what helped Mount Vernon function. Bradburn is right: it is curious that those who were “highly critical” of slavery would leave it out entirely. But what’s even more interesting is Washington’s attitude toward slavery, which is mostly inconclusive. According to Bradburn, “he hoped the institution [of slavery] could be ended in some manner ‘by legislation’ and according to Humphreys, he had “private regret over ‘the unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed’” and he also had a “desire to prepare his young slaves ‘for a destiny different from that in which they were born,’ hinting at a plan to free his slaves in his will.” But all in all, this attitude, compared to all of his ambitions to immortalize himself and Mount Vernon, seems passive and meager. However, according to Google AI, Washington did state in his will that all of his slaves were to be freed after his wife Martha’s death and he also set money aside to educate plantation slaves. Unfortunately, only one slave was freed immediately, most likely William Lee, and only half of his slaves were eventually emancipated. Bradburn also mentions Washington’s godson Ferdinando Fairfax, who wrote one of the earliest texts that dealt with the emancipation of American slaves, but there is no information about if his godson’s work had any impact on his attitude toward slavery. And although Google AI mentions that Washington’s decision to free his slaves after his wife’s death was “celebrated by abolitionists and African Americans,” in all honesty, and in retrospect, it’s a bit cowardly and in direct contradiction to Washington’s disposition in terms of how he handled all other aspects of his life. To leave the fate of enslaved individuals to be determined by a will completely bypasses the issue entirely. This is the message it really sends: “I don’t want to deal with it so I’ll let others handle it after I’m dead,” and it’s a message, that, at the end of the day, is self-centered and again, cowardly. It avoids accountability and responsibility entirely but still appears to be morally courageous because it shows that he did intend for his slaves to be free, but that freedom was contingent on his and his wife’s passing, and not fully guaranteed because not all of his slaves were freed. It’s essentially forcing others to make a moral decision for him that he couldn’t make himself. In reality, even if Washington “struggled” with the idea of slaves running Mount Vernon, his primary concerns were with uplifting himself as the first American historical figure and with guiding the new American nation toward centralized federal rule and he succeeded in those aims. The video of Washington’s Mount Vernon that was discussed in the introduction is a testament to that truth.  

The fifth essay, “‘Such a Spirit of Innovation’: The American Revolution and the Creation of States,” written by Christopher R. Pearl, is also highly significant because it refutes one of Fiske’s main claims about the American Revolution when he said that it was “the most conservative revolution known to history” and that “The basic forms of governance ‘all remained substantially unchanged.’” And yet, at the same time, “chaos ensued, embroiling states and its peoples in riots, rebellions, and newly exaggerated political rivalries.” He also made the claim that the only thing that really “saved” the new nation from collapse was the creation of the Constitution. However, Pearl puts forth three examples of colonies (New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Virginia) that went through extensive changes, and how those changes came about precisely because colonists demanded a new form of governance that they felt would suit their needs better, and in some cases they used physical pressure or what Fiske might call “chaos” in order to achieve it.  

Of the three states, New Hampshire is the most interesting because it serves as a perfect of example of how all three of the former colonies functioned under the royal system. Pearl elaborates:

Since 1717, a single family, the Wentworths, had controlled the colony’s executive branch. To perpetuate family control, the Wentworths directed political appointments and circumscribed the geographic limits of office holding. In 1740, for example, the majority of the twenty-five justices of the peace (JPs) in the colony lived in Portsmouth. A year later, the son of Governor John Wentworth, Benning Wentworth, came to power and furthered the dominance of the seaport by doubling the number of JPs there….Wentworth only appointed men who demonstrated their commitment to him and his interest, and most of those were related to him by marriage, if not by blood. Wentworth even appointed his own young sons and a ten-year-old nephew to significant positions.

The Wentworths also controlled the courts:

Until 1771, all legal business occurred in a tiny eastern corner of the colony, Portsmouth. The inferior courts and the high court convened in that port town, allowing the governor and his councilors to control colonial legal affairs. Governor appointees—often council members, friends, and relatives—manned the inferior courts for both civil and criminal proceedings. Similarly, the governor and his councilors staffed the high court, a court with both law and chancery powers. In all, law was a family affair. In 1772, during the administration of John Wentworth (Benning Wentworth’s nephew), the governor’s father sat on the high court’s bench along with five uncles and two cousins.

This was how New Hampshire operated as a colony. Additionally, the Wentworths’ commercial pursuits and religious affiliations further demonstrated the extent of their self-interest and dictator-like status:

The Wentworths made their money through land and the lucrative masts trade. Moreover, that family and its extended network supported the Anglican Church, guarded that establishment’s interest, and attempted to confine entrance into the ‘principal families’ who governed the province to that religious persuasion. Together, economics and religion proved a noxious mixture, especially since most of the population adhered to a congregational faith and, as small farmers, were at odds with the land and commercial interests of the colonial elite who controlled the courts.

As Pearl points out, the Wentworths’ interests were in complete opposition to the interests of the colonists they supposedly governed. What is also interesting for readers to understand is that the American Revolution didn’t happen overnight. It was something that had been building for years. The problems of colonial rule were already being pinpointed by citizens who were also articulating what changes they wanted to see implemented. As Pearl states, “Since its inception, New Hampshire had no county governments, allowing Portsmouth to control the legal and political affairs of the colony. By the 1760s, colonists demanded that the government create counties to grant representation in the legislature to excluded settlers and provide easier access to the law through local courts.” These issues were being identified by colonists at least a decade before the American Revolution began. And yet, “Prominent men in Portsmouth feared the incorporation of the areas outside the town into the governance of the province and actively worked to derail reforms.” It could easily be argued that one of the reasons the American Revolution happened was because the white men in leadership roles did not want to make major changes to the system in order to help govern people better because they did not want to give up their power. This is what caused the “chaos.” Pearl gives a description:

As early as 1774, nearly all authority in that colony was at an end, as colonists let loose their vengeance on all the symbols, offices, institutions, and men who had been a source of contention for so long. In December of that year, almost one-sixth of the adult white male population demonstrated their rejection of royal authority by sacking an imperial fortress and hauling ‘down the king’s colours.’ In addition, on the same day, thousands descended on Portsmouth and threatened the governor with their ‘cry about liberty.’ The colony, the governor complained, had succumbed to the ‘rage of the ruling multitude’ who ‘do not support the Magistrates.’ Less than a year later, the governor and all remaining vestiges of royal authority had been forcibly removed from the colony.

The most interesting aspect in regards to the American Revolution is that colonists knew exactly what changes they wanted to see implemented. When Fiske made the claim that governance, in a general sense, “all remained substantially unchanged,” this is simply not true. It’s because those who were governing refused to make changes that extensive changes happened as a result of colonists uprising. And they knew what they wanted, which was the opposite of chaos:

They wanted the government to reform the high court by separating its duties in law from chancery or equity. They requested new independent judges removed from ‘the Grants of this Government,’ new counties, new roads, and new local officers and administrative buildings to house legal records. Colonists also demanded equal political representation, annual rather than triennial elections, and the opening of the legislature’s doors so they can be ‘no longer SHUT against their CONSTITUENTS.’ In all, they requested an overhaul of the government and a radical reorientation of the relationship between the people and political power.

And because the white men in power did not make these changes, “In the back parts of the colony, inhabitants erected liberty poles, intimidated local magistrates, and ripped JPs from their slumbers and chased them out of town. In Portsmouth, hundreds gathered, taunted, threatened, and even assaulted loyal subjects of the king and the governor. The warning signs were everywhere.” These were the warning signs of a revolution. But that wasn’t all. Here is how the colonists handled governor Wentworth:

…a violent crowd descended on the governor’s mansion and leveled a cannon at his door. They wanted to frighten the governor and punish one of his ‘most useful magistrates,’ then dining at the mansion. Their tactic worked; the officer surrendered, and the governor fled to Fort William and Mary. By June 1775, the font of all sovereign power in the colony, a man who represented a family that dominated the government for almost a century, resided in a dilapidated fort ‘entirely cut off’ from the world.

And this is what New Hampshire looked like in the 1780s and 1790s:

By the late 1780s, the courts, particularly the superior court, began to garner respect and allegiance of the citizens. That court entered the 1790s at the apex of the state government and would remain, throughout the nineteenth century, the cornerstone of state authority. It and only it served as the foremost enforcer of state policy and shaped citizens’ daily lives by regulating their social and economic interactions.

Pennsylvania, the second example put forth by Pearl in the essay, was ruled in a similar fashion:

Although a proprietary colony, Pennsylvania had an executive and judicial structure similar to any other royal colony. The governors not only held their office at the proprietor’s discretion, but also the crown’s, and were to guard, with a vengeance, the ‘royal prerogative.’ The governor had the power to appoint judges who held their offices during royal pleasure. Judges received their commissions from ‘GEORGE the Second by the Grace of God’ to keep ‘our Peace’ in ‘our said Province’ as ‘our Justices.’

And much like New Hampshire, there was one family that enjoyed unchecked governing powers: the Allens. Pearl elaborates:

William Allen, whose daughter married a Penn, also held kinship ties to the longest-sitting governor in Pennsylvania, James Hamilton, and had important contacts in London. Through these connections, Allen was appointed the chief justice of the supreme court and JP for Northampton County. His son, Andrew Allen, served as the king’s attorney general, and his other son was a JP for Northampton County. Edward Shippen, an in-law of William Allen and a close friend of Hamilton, simultaneously held the positions of prothonotary, clerk of the orphans’ court, clerk of quarter sessions, recorder, deputy register, and JP for Lancaster County. His sons likewise held positions as prothonotaries, councilors, and judges.

As Pearl continues to explain, the situation in Pennsylvania was also a lot like New Hampshire’s in the sense that the population grew and the governing structure did not adjust to meet the needs of the colonists it supposedly was meant to serve. One could make the case, though, that “governance” is a loose term to describe how the royal system operated in the American colonies, which seemed to be more about maintaining titles, roles, positions of power, and ensuring that those ruling privileges were passed down through lineage. Again, much like with New Hampshire, tensions over the ineffectiveness of this “governing” system developed well before the American Revolution took place: “Factional disputes between the assembly and governor blocked attempts for reform of the judiciary in 1762, 1764, 1767, and 1773. Similarly, between 1710 and 1776, the crown vetoed six of eight laws that altered the structure of the courts because they impinged on the royal prerogative.”  And as Pearl points out, “By the late 1760s, both inhabitants and some officials complained that the government was ‘toothless and precarious,’ or more bluntly, that Pennsylvania had ‘no Government; at all.” To be fair, the royal system that was in place was more “chaotic” than what the American Revolution brought because it posed as a governing power, but did not effectively govern at all. Here is what the Pennsylvania government looked like after 1780:

…the legislature added another supreme court judge and three years later fixed their circuit further by establishing four circuit districts that ran all year around. In 1791, they increased the number of circuit districts to five and added district presidents answerable to the state executive. Each district, moreover, was separated into subdivisions for courts of oyer and terminer, courts of quarter sessions, courts of common pleas, and orphans’ courts. The district presidents directed and supervised the law enforcement and judicial affairs of each district. They controlled the direction of judges, justices, sheriffs, and coroners. They could issue writs of habeas corpus and certiorari, and they could mobilize the force of the district to put down internal unrest. Such changes, many thought, would ‘secure an efficient, safe and uniform administration of the laws’ and provide for ‘the good Order of Government.’

The story was much the same for Virginia: “The highest court in the colony refused to leave the comforts of Williamsburg while a self-perpetuating oligarchy ran the business of government in local spaces. By mid-century, societal transformations challenged this governing structure. The royal governor and powerful local oligarchies, fearing the loss of power, refused to restructure the legal system.” Although, what is interesting about Virginia is the fact that the growing population really exposed how inefficient the royal system was in terms of how judicial issues were handled:

In the early eighteenth century, the courts could sit all day to handle county administration and their caseloads. By mid-century, however, the population drastically increased and economic exchanges became more complex. The number of cases before the courts swelled, and it took at least four or five days and numerous sessions to settle legal business. Feeling the strain of attendance, local judges shirked their duties, making it difficult for the courts to maintain a quorum. The first day of a court session would often start with a full bench, but by the second day, the number of judges dwindled and the courts ground to a halt. Between 1746 and 1751, for example, the local court in Lunenburg County skipped almost half of its meetings.

What readers should take note of here is that, because the workload became so big for the handful of judges in power, they chose not to do their jobs rather than fix the problem. This created chaos. And as early as 1746, colonists petitioned for “the creation of quarterly courts and legally binding penalties for justices who failed to clear the dockets.” All they really wanted were more regular court sessions and penalties for judges who refused to do their jobs. On top of that, even more extensive suggestions were offered up by colonists. As Pearl explains:

Some colonists demanded salaried judges who would consistently attend court. Others pushed for new counties to make judicial jurisdictions smaller and increase the number of justices. Still others demanded the removal of courts, prisons, and judges to more central geographic locations. Regarding of such plans, reforms were not forthcoming. Local justices, many of whom held seats in the House of Burgesses, fought against reforms they thought threatened their positions of authority.

Since no reforms were forthcoming, uprising became the best option:

In March 1771, colonists in Richmond County, reeling from a poor economy and angered by a legal system that did not have their interest at heart, offered ‘an Insult of the most Extravagant Nature’ by plastering the magistrates’ bench ‘with Tar and Dung.’ Similarly, just a few years earlier in London County, inhabitants had ‘set up in the courthouse in the chair of the judge’ a ‘dead and stinking hog with a most scandalous libel in his mouth greatly reflecting on the said court and the officers thereof.’

And here is what the Virginia judicial system looked like after 1780:

By 1788, then, the state of Virginia, in both form and function, looked nothing like its colonial predecessor. The two-tiered judiciary had been replaced with three high courts and eighteen district courts staffed by state judges that took away from the power and authority that local magistrates and county courts had wielded for over a century. It was through such reforms that state judges, now powerfully backed by a formidable judicial structure, could claim such ideas as judicial independence, and, importantly, judicial review.

There are three important takeaways from these examples. The first takeaway is that the most common request from colonists can be summed up in this way: they wanted more government and more efficiency. The second takeaway is that their request required extensive governmental transformations and the ruling elite at the time refused to undergo the necessary changes because they were primarily interested in maintaining power. The third takeaway is this: the uprising of colonists helped stimulate a revolution that forced these governmental changes to happen. What readers also need to understand is what the term “revolution” really means in this sense. It means massive governmental transformation or to put it in other words the creation of a modern government. “Revolution,” in this sense, does not mean tearing the system down entirely or rethinking collective existence. In a basic sense, it means taking a house that looks pretty but isn’t really functional and renovating it so that it functions like a true house. It doesn’t mean tearing the house down and rebuilding an entirely new structure. Although the American Revolution wasn’t as radical as it could’ve been, what it did do is set in motion the creation of the modern government that still operates in the current moment. Pearl gives a good explanation of what American leaders were after in terms of how a government should operate:

…the new states, over the course of the 1770s, 1780s, and 1790s, created laws and inaugurated reforms establishing institutions and officers of state that would function like, as Thomas Jefferson argued, ‘mere machines.’ Jefferson’s use of the word ‘machines’ highlights the transformation of the state in the revolution. Such an idea denotes a mechanical impersonalism that differed greatly from the colonial world. Monarchal conceit prized personal fealties and connections. Colonial offices represented persons and personalities. However, machines are not persons, and in the postindependence states, revolutionaries declared that impersonal offices and institutions should be created and should rule. At the same time, localities, with all of their directiveness in law and identity, with their leading families and clientele, faded away as the state rose in power through the initiatives and republican reformers.

To describe it in other words, American leaders put into practice what the colonists wanted: governments that would not only run their states, but a centralized government that would run the country in much the same way—like a machine. It’s important to point out that there is nothing anarchic about this particular revolution. As Pearl concisely explains, the aim of the American Revolution was to bring about “a transformation from colony to state.” The American Revolution also resulted in a movement to institute a government that more efficiently served the people it ruled over. In that sense, it was “conservative” but not in the way that Fiske meant. It was conservative in the sense that the revolution was more about establishing unity and efficiency at the state level and instituting a central governing force that would reinforce a standardized, machine-like ruling system. Chaos happened at two points: the first was when the ruling elite refused to make adjustments to an ineffective royal system of government to better suit the colonists it was supposed to serve and the second was when a power struggle erupted between the states and the federalists who wanted to implement a centralized governing power. The American Revolution actually brought massive changes to the governing system that was in place, and those changes successfully brought about more governmental power.

The sixth essay in the book, “Something from Nothing? Currency and Finance in the Critical Period,” written by Hannah Farber, addresses a major topic that rarely gets discussed when talking about the American Revolution: how finances were handled. She also takes it a step further and discusses the various currencies that were developed by states in The Critical Period and how those currencies posed a threat to the federalist agenda of instituting centralized rule. However, this review will primarily highlight a historical figure that readers should know about: a man by the name of Robert Morris. He was the superintendent of finance during the American Revolution. In other words, he was the man who was responsible for gathering and managing all the funds for the United States. Farber, in her essay, exposes Fiske’s contradictory attitude when it comes to how Morris managed to create wealth all on his own and how states attempted to generate their own wealth through the creation of state currencies:

John Fiske’s discussion of American finance in the ‘Critical Period’ features two successive passages that offer, if not outright contradiction of one another, then certainly a dilemma for the reader to consider. In the first passage, Fiske unreservedly celebrates the ‘brilliant’ and ‘heroic’ efforts of Robert Morris in financing the American war effort and establishing the Bank of North America. Morris’s financial ingenuity, in Fiske’s retelling, enabled Americans to win their war for independence. By 1784, however, frustrated by the ‘weak and disorderly Confederation,’ Morris apparently decided that ‘the task of creating wealth out of nothing had become too arduous and too thankless to be endured’ and resigned from his position as superintendent of finance of the United States. In short, in this passage, Fiske characterizes the process of creating wealth out of nothing as a praiseworthy and unique accomplishment.

In the very next paragraph, however, Fiske condemns a different ‘something out of nothing’ project with language as strong as that with which he praised the efforts of Morris. The target of his condemnation in this passage is the movement among a number of American state legislatures in the mid-1780s to create paper money. Fiske describes this movement as a ‘craze for fictitious wealth,’ comparing it to both a delusion and a contagion disease. Thus while Morris’s efforts to create ‘wealth out of nothing’ were apparently praiseworthy, patriotic, and successful, those of state legislatures were lunacy.

What Farber is debunking is the idea that it’s acceptable to generate wealth when it’s for the good of the “nation” but unacceptable to attempt to generate wealth at the state level. As Farber points out, it makes perfect sense that Fiske would take this stance, being “a northerner writing in the aftermath of the Civil War and the restoration of the U.S. gold standard.” And it’s no surprise that he would uplift Morris as an American financial whiz. As Farber points out, there are two camps when it comes to Morris: “His critics—then as now—believed he was primarily out to line his pockets” and “His financially minded biographers, by contrast…tend to celebrate him as an entrepreneurial figure who both presaged and made possible the wealth and might of the United States.” They believed that “what Morris made out of nothing was justified because it was for the benefit of the nation, which was no delusion, but a very real polity recently emerged from nothing and bound for a prosperous future in its own.” However, states were very real polities as well—but were seen as “less legit” because for each state to generate its own wealth is counterproductive to those looking to set up a financially strong centralized governing force. And yet, Farber takes up an interesting stance in her essay, one that sees both attempts (Morris’s and the states’) to generated wealth as “complex maintenance projects,” because, at the end of the day, both groups were essentially doing the same thing—creating wealth.

Farber goes into depth about how exactly Morris went about creating wealth from “nothing”:

…the ‘nothing’ was not actually nothing—it was a lot of different things, put together. While even Morris himself claimed that he built the finances of the independent United States out of his own financial self, this was far from the whole story. What the ‘self’ entailed was a set of relationships, represented by the credits and debits recorded in his account books and by his membership in a specific socially and financially interconnected mercantile community. Morris’s financial self also entailed a significant degree of expertise: an understanding of mercantile practices and technologies that could only have grown out of Morris’s long experience as a trader and insurer. Much of the actual work Morris did to create ‘new’ American wealth actually involved maintaining the value of existing financial assets of various kinds, applying existing knowledge, and engaging existing personal and commercial relationships…

What does this mean, exactly? A little background information is needed here. Robert Morris’s father worked as a shipping agent and then made money in the tobacco trade. When Morris was fifteen, his father sent him to Philadelphia to live with a friend of his (Charles Greenway) who arranged for him to become an apprentice at a shipping and banking firm owned by a man named Charles Willing. Not long after that, Morris’s father died and left his estate to him. Meanwhile, Morris moved up the ladder at the shipping firm. According to Wikipedia, “Morris traveled to Caribbean ports to expand the firm’s business, and he gained a knowledge of trading and the various currencies used to exchange goods.” During this time, he also became good friends with Willing’s son, Thomas, who was his peer. After his father died, Thomas inherited the shipping firm and made Morris his partner. At the age of twenty-three, Morris became part owner of Willing Morris & Company. What did this company do? According to Google AI, it was “primarily involved in exporting goods like flour, lumber, and tobacco to Europe, while importing items like sugar, molasses, and sometimes slaves from the West Indies and Africa.” During the American Revolution, Morris used his connections through his shipping firm to fund the war. Farber explains how Morris was able to do this:

Like other merchants of this period, Morris would have assessed his capital by reviewing the set of obligations recorded on his balance sheets. Many of his most significant assets consisted of the debts that his overseas trading partners owed him. In preparation for the political rupture with Great Britan, Morris actually deepened these debt relationships. In the fall of 1775, as the formal end of trade between Britain and America approached, Morris sent large quantities of grain to England, to the Continent, and to his Mediterranean markets. Another way of putting this, equally logical according to the bookkeeping of the time, was that Morris made a major effort to acquire debt from these British and continental firms, thus deepening his relationships with overseas commercial contacts at a time when political separation appeared to be on the horizon. These debts acquired from foreign private parties were very much part of the ‘nothing’ from which Morris constructed his own and the United States’ accounts.

But that’s not all. Morris did something else: he used his company to act in the interests of the American government:

…he often characterized his purchases on behalf of the United States as the purchases of his own firm, Willing and Morris. For the most part, the internal accounts of Willing and Morris were kept separately from those of the United States, but Morris also purchased government supplies on his personal account when the situation required. It is in this light that we should understand Morris’s stipulation that he would serve as superintendent of finance only if he could continue to retain his private business connections. Preserving Morris’s personal credit connections (and those of his merchant house) was a project that could not, according to prevailing custom as well as wartime necessity, be disentangled from his financing of the war. Public political rupture required ongoing private obligation.

Farber also explains another beneficial aspect to Morris’s company: maritime insurance:

Marine insurance was a type of financial practice that required not only comprehensive knowledge of effective mercantile procedure, but rigorous enforcement of that procedure. For as merchant customers well understood, if shipmasters could not prove that they had followed proper mercantile practice before, during, or after a shipping loss, or if their paperwork did not meet broadly agreed-upon standards, the insurers would not be liable for the loss. Comprehensive knowledge of proper mercantile procedure, as well as related experience with the legality of various kinds of trade (a key concern of insurers throughout the long eighteenth century), would have enabled Morris to perform his work on the Pennsylvania Committee of Safety, smuggling contraband on behalf of the rebelling colonies. Thorough knowledge of proper and legal mercantile procedure would have provided Morris and his collaborators with knowledge of how to circumvent it properly.

Because Morris was involved in the maritime insurance industry, he also used his knowledge of that industry to acquire supplies for the American Revolution “under the radar.” Additionally, he conducted business using French bills, which “were redeemable only in Paris, and their value fluctuated according to Americans’ perceptions of their worth. Morris’s ability to purchase on behalf of the war effort, then, depended on his ability to maintain the French bills’ value in the American market.” What Farber makes clear about Morris is that he was far from an “individual actor” in terms of generating wealth “from nothing.” Fiske and other historians, who have chosen to highlight him as an American hero, have flattened out the complexities involved in exactly how Morris went about achieving the task of funding the American Revolution. The truth of the matter is that he was participating in the commercial climate of the time in order to obtain funds for the war. Without that relationship to other businesses and without his knowledge of how to get around regulations in order to smuggle supplies and weapons, it would have been very difficult for the American Revolutionary War to happen at all. In other words, Morris was using the very economic climate American leaders wanted to participate in independently of Britain in order to fund the war and to make this dream a reality. His good reputation in terms of commerce allowed him to pull the strings to get whatever was needed for the war effort.

While Fiske praised Morris for creating wealth “out of nothing”—which he did not do, he simultaneously shamed states for inventing money “out of nothing”—which they did not do, either. Farber explains that one of the reasons these states created paper money was because of the massive war debt they accumulated. In the case of Pennsylvania, the northern state “issued 50,000 pounds in land-backed ‘bills of credit’ through its state loan offices in 1785. At the loan offices, Pennsylvania residents received these bills, quite literally, as loans; in exchange for the bills, they mortgaged their land to the state, creating an ongoing financial relationship.” New York “emitted 20,000 pounds in bills of credit in the mid-1780s, similarly linking its bills of credit to land.” As did Rhode Island, who issued $500,000 in paper money. North Carolina’s paper money was backed by tobacco; they printed “100,000 pounds in paper money in 1783, then another 100,000 pounds in 1785.” As Farber also points out, states accepted the paper money they printed as a payment for taxes, so the paper money was primarily made for the use of its citizens. And so, an important factor with these state currencies is that their legitimacy came from their own citizens. Farber elaborates:

The paper money issue in Rhode Island became contentious not because of any inherent value or lack of value in the bills themselves, but because the state had legally required its inhabitants to accept the bills, and they resisted this forced relationship. By contrast, Pennsylvania paper money circulated relatively successfully because its citizens were generally willing to accept the paper as legal tender for their private debts. Citizens of Georgia, for their part, were required to pledge that they would accept paper money as legal tender at face value—this ritual action aimed to bind the new emissions into existing economic relationships among citizens….the question of how paper currencies would be anchored to the states’ peoples was in all cases a significant one, and it had a great deal to do with whether the emissions were successful or not.

However, the issue of state currencies brings us back to the same issue that has appeared more than once in this review: the issue of state power versus the creation of a centralized governing force. State currencies were really a problem because they went against the aims of American leaders who were attempting to create a federal government. So, it’s no surprise when Farber explains that “Thomas Paine emerged in 1786 as a paper money opponent and an ardent supporter of the Bank of North America at a time when the bank was facing public condemnation for resisting the emission of paper money in Pennsylvania.” She goes on to explain why

He identified Morris’s Bank of North America as the product of a deal made in specific, dire wartime circumstances, between a group of private ‘patriotic individuals’ and the state. The ‘individuals furnished and risked the money, and the aid which the Government contributed was that of incorporating them.’ It was the course of historical events (the ‘distress of the times,’ in Paine’s telling) that had legitimized this contract between private citizens and government, and that had, interestingly, authorized a new kind of citizen-state relationship—one that was routed through the relatively novel institution of the joint-stock corporation.

The truth: it went against what American leaders at the time were trying to create: a unified nation with a centralized governing force. Paine understood that state currencies helped establish a connection between those states and their citizens that would be difficult to break if left to develop. State currencies had to be immediately delegitimized in favor of a strong federal government with its own currency. Like he pointed out in the passage above, the Bank of North America had to be created due to “dire wartime circumstances, between a group of private ‘patriotic individuals’ and the state.” Note: patriotic individuals. The American Revolution was the exception. And what was the ultimate goal of the American Revolution for people like Paine? To create an independent, unified nation that “patriotic” citizens could rely on financially. States were attempting to do the same thing: legitimize themselves to their citizens through the creation of currency so that a relationship could develop that would add value to the money and add value to the state itself. Farber puts the issue of state currencies into a more realistic perspective:

It is more productive to envision the paper money issued in the mid-1780s as a ‘something’ that emerged out of a powerful and evolving set of existing financial, personal, and institutional relationships, in and around the American states. Such an approach makes it easier, if we believe that paper money is a political project, to understand the specific kinds of political power involved in the creation of paper money. It also makes it easier to identify the similarities between the paper money movements and other financial projects of the day, including Morris’s own.

In other words, what Morris did during the American Revolution wasn’t all that different from what the states were doing with paper currencies. But Morris was praised, because he was doing it for the benefit of America and the states were criticized for doing it because it was for the benefit of each state—not a unified whole. And this is key, here, because The Critical Period, in all honesty, is really about how American leaders pushed for the creation of a nation rather than a collective of thirteen states.

In Peter Marshall’s 1991 groundbreaking book, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, he gives a solid definition of anarchism: “All anarchists reject the legitimacy of external government and of the State, and condemn imposed political authority, hierarchy and domination. They seek to establish the condition of anarchy, that is to say, a decentralized and self-regulating society consisting of a federation of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals. The ultimate goal of anarchism is to create a free society which allows all human beings to realize their full potential.” It’s important for readers to know that Marshall is a British writer with an extensive knowledge of British history. Much of his understanding of anarchism is rooted in what history has shown humanity about how ruling systems not only function, but dictate how humanity functions as a result of those ruling systems. From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History is an essential read for those who want a better understanding of what the American Revolution actually meant for American leaders and citizens and how the 1780s was crucial in developing the creation of a modern government. As Johann N. Neem points out in the epilogue: “The nation itself was thus one of the most important outgrowths of the Constitution. Most free settlers prior to 1776 considered themselves to be provincial Britons. Like other postcolonial societies, after the revolution, Americans continued to look to Britain as a cultural example. It would take time for Americans to come to see themselves as a distinct nationality and to develop their own cultural traditions and feelings of national belonging.” One of the goals of the American Revolution was for the thirteen former colonies to unify into a cohesive consciousness that recognized itself as a fully functioning nation operating independent of Great Britain. Neem elaborates further:

The United States could never have survived without national sentiments. National identity were the walls that would keep the roof above Americans’ heads. But those sentiments required not just rituals, but institutions. Far from a failing, therefore, the reemergence of political parties was an essential element in the new government’s success. Parties built one of the walls holding up the American roof by connecting Americans to the national government. The very existence of the new national regime made necessary the formation of national political coalitions to elect like-minded leaders with shared policy goals. This, in turn, required mobilizing citizens. As parties formed to gain national office, and as party leaders and partisan editors reached out to voters, they transformed a federal union into an American nation.

Neem is exactly right. If one wants to form a nation, one needs institutions, political parties, and political coalitions to influence citizens into buying into that nation’s governing system. The primary way this occurs is through implementing democracy where citizens “elect like-minded leaders with shared policy goals.” This book is not just about the creation of modern government, but also the creation of modern democracy. Through reading this book, readers should not only be able to understand the route American leaders and citizens took to creating a centralized governing force and a national consciousness, they should also realize that it was not a true revolution. To return to Marshall’s definition, a true revolution would’ve looked something like this: “a decentralized and self-regulating society consisting of a federation of voluntary associations of free and equal individuals” who would be able to “realize their full potential.” That did not happen. Anarchism, as Marshall describes, is what an authentic revolution would’ve brought with it, not Fiske’s negative and uninformed understanding of it. This book also is valuable because of the way scholars rightfully debunk one of the landmark thinkers (Fiske) who influenced how American educators framed the 1780s for generations. According to the introduction:

On the publication of Fiske’s book [1888], reviewers raved about its ‘sterling historical value.’ Fiske, they thought, ‘proved his assertions.’ Soon, the Journal of Education, a standard and important publication for teachers even today, deemed The Critical Period the third most important book for teachers to read behind only William Shakespeare’s Hamlet and a collection of works by Joseph Addison. Nor did Fiske’s work lose its importance with time; a new and cheaper version was published in 1902, making it widely available. Like before, the Journal of Education ran review articles deeming it ‘a masterpiece, a book every teacher should read.’ As late as 1941, people still claimed that ‘no American historian was ever more successful in unraveling the tangled skein of history and reweaving it into a pattern bright and clear.’

This error needed to be corrected and From Independence to the U.S. Constitution does just that, giving readers a chance to reeducate themselves about the American Revolution and The Critical Period that followed it, while simultaneously helping to enlighten readers further about how they see themselves in the relationship between citizens and ruling systems (whether American or otherwise), how they contribute to or resist that dynamic, and finally, how they can shift the future toward a reality where all of humanity can experience its “full potential.”

February 17, 2025