The drums of victory echoed at Yorktown, signaling a brand new day for America. But as some tales suggest, the British band played “The World Upside Down”—a song that perfectly captured the profound uncertainty of what came next for the newly independent states. What kind of nation would America become? Would this hard-won freedom truly belong to everyone? Our American Stories welcomes back Hillsdale College professor Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope, as we explore the crucial, often complicated, questions that immediately followed the American Revolution.
Beyond the battlefield, the struggle for a unified America was just beginning. From defining who would truly rule at home, to confronting the glaring paradox of slavery in a land built on liberty, the founding fathers wrestled with immense challenges. Join us as we journey through these pivotal early moments of our nation’s story, understanding the diverse visions and hopeful aspirations that shaped the very foundation of American self-governance and continue to inspire us today. Discover more about the challenges of the American Revolution and the birth of a new nation on Our American Stories.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
00:00:47 Speaker 2: I want to talk for a minute at the outset here about the song that we sometimes say was played by that band in Yorktown after America’s great victory: that song called “The World Upside Down,” a British song. The idea was that the British Army band played this tune when they surrendered. It was the custom that the British Army would play an American or French tune, but supposedly Washington refused that; insisted that they play a British march. That’s the way the tale is told. A lot of people think it never happened, but it’s a wonderful story, and sometimes perpetuating these kinds of stories is important.
00:01:29 Speaker 3: It was an English ballad. It was written in…
00:01:32 Speaker 2: …response to the efforts of Parliament in the 1640s to not exactly ban the celebration of Christmas.
00:01:40 Speaker 3: …but to make it into an extremely…
000:01:42 Speaker 2: …solemn occasion. So, without the festivities, without the gifts, without all the finery and, you know, glorious excess that tends to go with Christmas in, certainly, the English-speaking world, much of the rest of the world. And it didn’t go over well. This song arose. The first stanza of it: “Listen to me and you shall hear news hath not been this thousand year since Harold Caesar and many more you never heard the like before. Holy days are despised, new fashions are devised, Old Christmas is kicked out of town. Yet let’s be content and the times lament. You see, the world turned upside down.” A sort of pro-Christmas song. But it’s ironic. Turning the world upside down didn’t really solve some of the fundamental issues facing the nation, some of which were even visible in the war itself. Not everybody was on board for the idea of a revolution or independence, and many who did fight didn’t really see it as a full-scale revolution that would include a revolution within colonial society. Some people say the Revolutionary War was a civil war, our first civil war. It’s a complicated thing. What was the American Revolution? What was the war really about? One historian, Carl Becker, said the war was the war about home rule. He asked the question, “Was the war about home rule or about who would rule at home?” Let me unpack that. “Home rule” means: would the Americans rule themselves as opposed to being ruled by the British? “Who would rule at home” meant: which Americans would rule?
00:03:40 Speaker 3: …at home under home rule?
00:03:42 Speaker 2: Would it be the same elite classes that were connected to the imperial regime? Would it be the lawyers, would it be the doctors, the professional class, or would it include ordinary Americans? One point needs to be made again and again about the Revolution itself is: it wasn’t an elite movement. It required the active support, beginning with the boycotts. It was something that appealed to the people. Thomas Paine didn’t write just for the elites. He wrote for the common man as well. So the victory, which is a victory for equality in the language of the Declaration of Independence, would seem to mean maybe those who would rule at home would be a wider and more diverse cast of characters, not just the elite. That’s one complexity, of course. Another complexity is the institution of slavery. When you undertake a revolution that’s about freedom, how do you justify the perpetuation—even protection—of an institution that is the antithesis of freedom? And that the revolutionaries themselves used the language “slave” to accuse the British of being tyrants. “They would reduce us to slavery,” they said it again and again. So it wasn’t as if they didn’t know what slavery was. They just didn’t see it as applying to this uncomfortably settled institution in some parts of the country. So what would a revolutionary, a new American government look like? Recall: the wonderful, admirable, magnificent Declaration of Independence does declare independence, but it doesn’t declare what’s coming next. It leaves a lot of things up in the air. It leaves just how much of a union was this…
00:05:52 Speaker 3: …union going to be? It leaves that up in the air.
00:05:55 Speaker 2: So what would self-rule look like? What would a new government look like? These were questions, said: now had to be answered. It had to be done. So, a couple of things that the Founders—who are very diverse in their opinions—don’t get, the good… Let me be… using the term “Founders” deceive you, just thinking they all…
00:06:14 Speaker 3: …agreed about everything.
000:06:15 Speaker 2: They didn’t. But they tended to agree on a couple of things that self-rule meant: Virtuous citizens were necessary for civic life to flourish. You had to have people who did the right thing, not because they were coerced into doing so, but because it sprang from a sense of what was right, of what was virtuous that had been inculcated in them from the start. Indeed, a virtuous citizenry. It was thought that America had a sufficiently virtuous citizenry to be self-governed. Second thing is that size was an important consideration: size and scale. This had always been the view of theorists of republican government, going back to ancient times, going back to Aristotle, and in modernity, the very influential Montesquieu, French political theorist, read by many of the Founders. A republic couldn’t be big because it couldn’t depart too far from the model of face-to-face institutions with strong interpersonal relationships between people who knew one another and could deliberate together. Aristotle and Montesquieu both set a limit to the size that…
00:07:43 Speaker 3: …a political entity could be.
00:07:46 Speaker 2: …if it was going to be a republic, if it was going to be self-governing, and that bigger than that, you were really taking your chance, and chances were, the chances weren’t going to work out too well for you.
00:07:58 Speaker 3: So, how to do that?
00:08:01 Speaker 2: How to organize a self-governing entity with virtuous citizens on a sufficiently targeted scale…
00:08:12 Speaker 3: That was the problem.
00:08:14 Speaker 2: How to do that? There was also something they all agreed about: concentration of power was a danger. A giant continental republic that was completely consolidated was not going to work.
00:08:28 Speaker 3: It’s what they were rebelling against.
00:08:31 Speaker 4: Literally. And you’re listening to Hillsdale College professor Bill McLay tell one heck of a story about our own country. And my goodness, some of the themes, some of…
00:08:47 Speaker 1: …the battles still resonate today. I love those questions he asked: “Was the war about home rule or who would rule at home?” And of course, this whole idea of the concentration of power in one place… And my goodness, are we still having that battle? Some people want Washington to be the center of power; others want the state capitals to be the centers of power. And that dialogue, that disagreement that was happening then, well, it’s still happening now. When we come back, more of the remarkable story of us, “The Story of America” series, here on Our American Stories. And we return to our American Stories and the next installment of our series about us, “The Story of America” series, with Professor Bill McLay, author of Land of Hope and the terrific Young Readers Edition, which you can get at Amazon or all the usual suspects, and I urge you to do just that. When we last left off, the Founders were concerned about a concentration of power being the guiding force of their new nation. It’s what they were rebelling against, after all. Let’s return to the story. Here again is Bill McLay.
00:10:21 Speaker 2: Obviously, it would be important to keep a lot of power in the states.
00:10:27 Speaker 3: This was vitally important to all…
00:10:29 Speaker 2: …of the Founders, or nearly all of them. Nothing else would be acceptable at that time. So what came after the Revolution, but before the Constitution, was something called the Articles of Confederation. The Articles were adopted from the outset. They were never formally ratified during the Revolutionary War, but it was sort of understood that they were in effect, and they had a very clear statement. Let me read you Article II of the Articles of Confederation: “Each state retains its sovereignty, freedom, and independence, and every power, jurisdiction, and right, which is not by this confederation delegated to the United States in Congress assembled.”
00:11:22 Speaker 3: That’s pretty strong.
00:11:25 Speaker 2: Notice that we use the word “confederation.” It’s not by this confederation delegated to…
00:11:30 Speaker 3: …the United States in Congress assembled.
00:11:33 Speaker 2: You know, your association with the word “confederation” may go with the Confederacy of the Old South, the rebellious side in the Civil War, but the word has a more general meaning of a very loose federation—not a precise meaning, but a very loose confederation. So they’ll say states are sovereign, every power, jurisdiction, and right, not branded specifically enumerated, delegated to the United States—theirs, the states. So that’s a pretty strong endorsement of the idea that we’re not going to have a big, consolidated nation-state, a modern nation-state such as we would have if we had a king, and the structure of the Articles reflected this. Every state in the Congress had a single vote, so to get anything done, you needed to have either unanimous vote or a supermajority. It needed to be overwhelmingly popular and acceptable to all concerned. This shows just how concerned they were about centralized power taking hold. And I will say this for them: how smart they were to understand that they couldn’t just depend on people’s sentiments. It had to be present and firmly rooted in the structure of the law.
00:12:58 Speaker 3: …itself, built the law.
00:13:00 Speaker 2: In a way that ensured that the states would have the bulk of the power. It did mean that Congress wasn’t able to do much of anything in terms of foreign policy, in terms of internal trade, in terms of taxation, in terms of a lot of other things—raising the revenues to run a full-blown national government. The Articles were pretty inadequate. But I do want to be fair and mention one thing that the Congress did under the Articles of Confederation that was surpassingly good, and that was the Northwest Ordinance.
00:13:37 Speaker 3: It forbade the importation…
00:13:39 Speaker 2: …of the institution of slavery in the northwestern states. Now, “Northwest” at that time meant, you know, Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio, Indiana—that part of the country. So, you may know there’s a university in Chicago called Northwestern, and it gets its name from that.
00:13:56 Speaker 3: …notion of the “Old Northwest.”
00:13:59 Speaker 2: It did many other things. In abolished primogeniture—the inheritance of a deceased father going to the eldest son. In entirety, that was abolished. What that meant is that America, right off the bat, was going to…
00:14:16 Speaker 3: …be more widely distributed. You weren’t going to have great…
00:14:20 Speaker 2: …estates in which the eldest son presided over the greatest estate, and the other sons were left…
00:14:25 Speaker 3: …to kind of join the clergy or the army, or to do what they…
00:14:29 Speaker 2: …could, as in the countries of Europe. No, everybody was going to get an equal share—roughly equal, some part of the inheritance—and that was going to lead to diffusion of wealth, diffusion of social condition, rough equality, rough equality. I think almost as important was the method that it established for the creation of new states. This is often an issue in expansion. How do you bring in new parts without them being treated as conquered provinces or having a lesser status? The Northwest Ordinance was really, really very, very, very good about this. This created something Daniel Boorstin, the historian, called the “art of state” plan. The western lands would be able to enter the Union on terms exactly equal to those of the existing states.
00:15:25 Speaker 3: They wouldn’t be like colonial dependencies.
00:15:28 Speaker 2: They would enter the Union on the same terms as everybody else.
00:15:31 Speaker 3: This is really quite brilliant. We take it for granted. And something else to mention…
00:15:38 Speaker 2: I mentioned the importance of a virtuous citizenry. The Northwest Ordinance explicitly sets aside public lands for educational institutions and makes the following statement about them: “Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.” It’s interesting: the Founders saw religion, morality, and knowledge all going together.
00:16:11 Speaker 3: So, there’s some good things about the Articles of Confederation. But it was…
00:16:16 Speaker 2: …wanting in other respects. The British had refused to withdraw from the military posts they had in the Northwest, despite the fact that the Treaty of Paris…
00:16:32 Speaker 3: …commanded them to do so.
00:16:33 Speaker 2: The treaty that had ended the Revolution. The Spanish had control of the Mississippi River, the lifeline of the central—what would be central then—western states.
00:16:46 Speaker 3: It was going to be very important.
00:16:48 Speaker 2: …that a hostile power not be in control of the Mississippi and, specifically, the city of New Orleans. So all this obviously needed to be taken care of. The British needed to be moved out. The Spanish needed to be persuaded to abandon control…
00:17:03 Speaker 3: …of the Mississippi. But we didn’t have a government that could do it.
00:17:07 Speaker 2: We didn’t have a government that could engage in effective diplomacy, and there were other problems. There was an economic fallout from the war. The British had been, you know, our great trading partners. The British restricted American imports and dumped low-price goods on our markets, which made life very difficult for the often quite fledgling enterprises. And Americans were trying to produce, to run their own businesses, to do their own manufacturing and production.
00:17:43 Speaker 3: So, if you dump cheap goods, that just drives people out of business.
00:17:48 Speaker 2: If you restrict American imports, that drives people out of business. There was a real, serious economic depression, lots of debt accrued related to fight the war. The debts had to be repaid. The American Patriot soldiers were often not paid, particularly towards the end of the war, in actual cash, but through extensions of credit or by money that was simply printed without currency backing, without precious metal backing—two things that bankers don’t like and worried would make the economy worse. But there were these debtors. Many of the Patriots were men who had left their farms, left their families, left their property, which was encumbered by a mortgage. These debtors needed relief. They were having their land taken away from them through foreclosures being executed by bankers who didn’t go to war.
00:18:52 Speaker 3: So, this is a situation that is just…
00:18:55 Speaker 2: …tailor-made for a high degree of tension and possible revolutionary or rebellious sentiment. All of these things led to a growing perception that the Articles of Confederation were not going to be adequate to govern the new nation. Reform was not just desirable, but imperative, and had to happen. George Washington himself was particularly alarmed and feared for the…
00:19:25 Speaker 3: …new nation’s future.
00:19:28 Speaker 2: So even as Washington was writing about his fears, there was a group of…
00:19:35 Speaker 3: …individuals led by his…
00:19:38 Speaker 2: …brilliant young aide, Alexander Hamilton, who were seeing about forming a constitutional convention—would examine the constitution that was framed under the…
00:19:58 Speaker 3: …under the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation.
00:20:01 Speaker 1: Had a terrific job by the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monty Montgomery himself, the Hillsdale College graduate, and also a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay, “The Story of Us, The Story of America” series here on Our American Stories.
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