Articles of Confederation, Part V: the Anomalous as Evolutionary, contd.

            The tacit desire for peaceful expansion through the consensual admission of additional territory embedded in the ninth of the Articles of Confederation becomes clearer still upon an examination of the text of Article XI. It declared, in full, that,

Canada acceding to this confederation, and adjoining in the measures of the United States, shall be admitted into, and entitled to all the advantages of this Union; but no other colony shall be admitted to the same, unless such admission be agreed to by nine States.

Consider first the specific words here used to describe the addition of new territory to the jurisdiction of the United States of America. Canada was not to be conquered, annexed, or taken; rather, it would accede – suggesting assent and agreement – or be admitted – i.e. welcomed – into the American republic. Other colonies – itself a fairly revealing phrase – would likewise be admitted to the union, presumably also with the consent of the inhabitants therein. In light of the manner by which most contemporary expansionist nations sought to enlarge their empires – Britain being perhaps the paramount example in the 18^th century world – this again presages a strikingly passive form of territorial enlargement. Indeed, the cited text of the Articles would seem to give voice to a rather peculiar form of national ambition. The architects of the first national government of the United States seemingly desired and intended their nation to grow and expand with the addition of new territories and populations. The existence of the aforesaid Article XI would seem rather difficult to explain otherwise. This same passage indicated, however, that national expansion was to result from the consent of those peoples and governments being added to the union of states. The American republic would not – in theory, at least – seek out prospects for its own enlargement and glorification as might a European empire, but rather simply clear the way for self-governing territories to join of their own accord. Whether or not the intervening centuries have borne out the sincerity of this conviction, it nevertheless represents an assertion of popular sovereignty – i.e. the importance of the consent of the governed – otherwise unheard of in the late 18^th century.

            Consider, also, the specific subject(s) of Article XI. Canada – i.e. British Quebec – had been an object of interest and agitation for authorities in Congress since before the Battles of Lexington and Concord – circa April, 1775 – and the beginning of armed hostilities between Great Britain and the united colonies. As the centrepiece of the French Empire in North America, Quebec had been a source of distrust, rivalry, and aggression for the inhabitants of British America since at least the 1640s. Over the course of the proceeding century, proxy wars between allied native tribes – the Iroquois and the Huron chief among them – clashes over access to the lucrative fur trade, and subsidiary conflicts of larger European struggles combined and overlapped, nurturing a climate of intense animosity between the English and French speaking populations of the North American continent. Rather than alleviate further cause for suspicion, however, the transformation of Quebec into a British colony in the aftermath of the Seven Years War (1754-1763) seemed only signal a shift in the nature of the threat it presented to the residents of Britain’s other American possessions. Once a source of military and economic insecurity, Quebec became – thanks to its religious and administrative traditions – a source of existential unease for those British Americans particularly concerned by what appeared to be the increasingly arbitrary decision-making of Parliament and the Crown. As confirmed by the terms of the Quebec Act (1774), the province was to remain Roman Catholic, French-speaking, and without any form of representative government.

Supporters of the campaign then being waged in the Thirteen Colonies in favor of representative government were accordingly fearful that the willingness of the British state to support the existence of such an alien regime within its American territories – in which a foreign church cooperated with a largely unchecked executive – augured poorly for their efforts. Thus seeking to neutralize both an ideological as well as strategic threat to their efforts – possession of Quebec effectively guaranteed British military control over the St. Lawrence River and provided access to the northern frontiers of states like New York, Massachusetts, and New Hampshire – the First and Second Continental Congress each sought to foment an uprising in the territory and encouraged the people thereof to join in the campaign of resistance against British rule. The resulting Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada – published October 26, 1774, May 29^th, 1775, and January 24^th, 1776, respectively – accordingly attempted to lay out, in moral, ideological, and practical terms, the case for Quebecois participation in the efforts then being undertaken by Congress and its adherents.

Published months apart as the conflict between the united colonies and Britain progressed from socio-political struggle to a de facto state of war, each of the letters – written by John Dickinson (1732-1808), John Jay (1745-1829), and James Wilson (1742-1798) – adopted a slightly different tack. “You […] have artfully been kept from discovering the unspeakable worth of that form [of government] you are now undoubtedly entitled [,]” the first declared, whereupon it then proceeded to explain at length the significance of the rights – denied to the people of Quebec and America alike – that its authors considered to be fundamental to law and government under the British Constitution. The second letter embraced a comparatively straightforward approach rooted in the evident immorality of British rule in Quebec. By the introduction of your present form of government,” it read,

Or rather present form of tyranny, you and your wives and your children are made slaves. You have nothing that you can call your own, and all the fruits of your labour and industry may be taken from you, whenever an avaritious governor and a rapacious council may incline to demand them […] Nay, the enjoyment of your very religion, on the present system, depends on a legislature in which you have no share, and over which you have no control [.]

Having perhaps realized the folly in attempting to motivate the people of Quebec to overthrow their present government by encouraging them to embrace a set of rights for which they possessed no cultural affinity, Congress – via the pen of John Jay – instead seemed to focus on drawing attention to the ills set to befall Quebec in the absence of those rights. Thus, rather than attempt explain the value of representative government or trial by jury, the second letter spoke of concepts and ideals whose importance were presumably self-evident – i.e. liberty, private property, and freedom of religion.

The third letter, published after Lexington and Concord, the beginning of the Siege of Boston (April, 1775 – March, 1776), and the launch of the Invasion of Canada (June, 1775 – October, 1776), was yet more blunt, effectively seeking to portray the enfolding of Quebec and its people into the American cause as a practical inevitability. Case in point, after noting the size and number of the American forces then either operating in Quebec or on their way to the same, the author – Wilson, in this case – then made known to his prospective audience that,

Your assistance in the support and preservation of American liberty affords us the most sensible satisfaction; and we flatter ourselves that you will seize with zeal and eagerness the favourable moment to co-operate in the success of so glorious an enterprise. And if more considerable forces should become requisite, they shall not fail being sent.

The last phrase of this passage is perhaps the most telling. So determined were the members of the Continental Congress to at long last sway the Quebecois to the cause of their revolution that they were willing to accompany their promises of liberty, justice, and representative government with the implicit threat of military domination. “If more considerable forces should become requisite,” Wilson wrote – i.e. if the people of Quebec make them requisite – “They shall not fail being sent.”  

That the Continental Congress went so far as to authorize an invasion of Quebec is likewise telling as to the importance Revolutionary authorities attached to the presence of such a territory along the span of their northern border. In British hands, Quebec represented a threat to the integrity of the United States of America, a staging area for an invasion of the same, and a source of encouragement to certain native tribes in American territory eager to vent their long-simmering frustrations upon vulnerable frontier communities. And while this was particularly true in the spring of 1775 – following the American capture of Fort Ticonderoga (May 10^th, 1775) and Fort Crown Point (May 12^th, 1775) at the southern tip of Lake Champlain – it would continue to be the case in any future context wherein the Thirteen Colonies – or their potential independent successors – remained at odds with Britain while Quebec remained loyal. The resulting invasion – approved in June, 1775 and launched the following September – was thus undertaken with both short-term and long-term objectives in mind. In the immediate, it was deemed necessary for Quebec to be captured as a means of alleviating the threat of a future British offensive originating in that territory. As it effectively connected Lake Champlain to Brooklyn, Queens, and Manhattan, New York’s Hudson Valley made for an especially attractive target whose defense was potentially paramount to the success of the American war effort. And if, in the fullness of time, an American occupation of Quebec brought about a revolution there was well, whereupon the territory opted to join the Continental Congress or otherwise severed ties with its colonial masters in Britain, this would certainly have proven a boon to the efforts and prospects of the united colonies in their ongoing contest with Parliament and the Crown.     

This is all to say that Quebec was of significant interest to the United States of America at the time the Articles of Confederation were created, and indeed had been for some time previously. In terms of resources, manpower, morale, and ideology – i.e. the overthrow of an unrepresentative colonial regime in favor of a revolutionary republic would have constituted a significant moral victory – Quebec offered the United States of America a great deal at a time when its prospects for still relatively uncertain. That Article XI was included in the final draft of the document in question – ratified by Congress in November, 1777 – over a year after the Invasion of Quebec concluded in a victorious British defence in October, 1776  very much speaks to the enduring nature of this perception. Though the Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada had met with hardly any response, and though a military expedition had ended in a disastrous defeat for the Continental Army and the capture of a significant number of American soldiers – notably including aforementioned Vermont founder Ethan Allen – the framers of the Articles still felt it probable enough that the people of Quebec would eventually desire to accede to the United States that they drafted a provision specifically to serve that purpose. Not only would Quebec – or Canada, as the text refers to it – be permitted to join the American confederation, becoming thereby entitled, “To all the advantages of this Union [,]” but it would be permitted to do so without the need for Congress to vote in its favor. In effect, the door was left open – Quebec could accede whenever it wanted to, without question, and with immediate effect. That the framers of the Articles believed this a likely outcome would quickly enough prove a rather naïve ambition. The implications of this belief for the future of the United States of America, however, were anything but.

            While the authors of the Articles of Confederation were likely responding in the main to the specific pressures that surrounded the Vermont controversy and to the strategic threat presented by a continued British presence in Quebec when they drafted the relevant clauses of the same, they must also have been aware that their efforts were potentially setting the tone for the kind of nation that the United States would become. Article IX was ostensibly intended to bring about a resolution to the longstanding dispute over property rights between the government of New York and the holders of the New Hampshire grants, though its logical end result would almost certainly be the admission of Vermont to the American union. Likewise, while the purpose of Article XI was essentially to secure the northern frontier of the United States from potential British invasion by providing a clear path for Quebec to take its place in Congress, the larger significance was also unspoken. By attempting to solve specific problems with specific solutions, the framers of the Articles were effectively giving rise to a general principle. The United States of America, formed via the voluntary ratification of a pact of union by a group of thirteen sovereign states, would seek to expand itself in this same spirit. New states would accede to the union as similarly sovereign entities – as Vermont most certainly was by 1777 – in accordance with the wishes of their inhabitants and – with the exception of Quebec – in accordance with the stated will of Congress.

            Not only did this rather tidy procedure represent– as mentioned previously – an exceedingly novel means by which a nation in the 18^th century was to undertake a process of territorial expansion, but its inclusion within the text of the Articles implies something rather revealing about the way that the men who crafted the first national charter of the United States of America conceived of their revolution, its results, and its future. Vermont, as aforesaid, was effectively an American state-in-waiting at the time the Articles were drafted and ratified during the late 1770s and early 1780s. Its adult inhabitants had all been born in what were by that point constituent states of the American union, its constitution was very much in keeping with those that had been drafted and ratified by these selfsame states, and its government had made repeated efforts to join the American union via petitions and requests addressed to Congress. There was, in consequence, no mystery as to the intentions of the people of Vermont as concerned the United States. They wanted their state to accede to the union, and there was doubtless little uncertainty that such an outcome would eventually come to pass. For the framers of the Articles to have crafted a provision intended to facilitate this end would therefore seem merely prudent on their part.       

        

            But Quebec was another matter. The majority of its inhabitants had been born the subjects of a foreign monarch, spoke a different language than the inhabitants of the United States, had little if any experience with representative government on the British model, and collectively showed no indication that they were either particularly displeased with their status as a British possession or particularly eager to become citizens of the nascent American union. Certainly there were a number of strategic reasons for contemporary American authorities to desire the de facto separation of Quebec from the larger British Empire – hence the authorization by Congress of an invasion of same in June, 1775. But in almost every other respect, British Canada may have been the neighboring jurisdiction least likely to fall under American control in the immediate future. Bearing this assessment in mind, one might fairly wonder why the framers of the Articles would draft a provision specifically to serve that end. Why, in short, waste the ink on something that was so unlikely to occur? The most credible answer – hopelessly idealistic though it may seem – is that the men who crafted the first governing charter of the United States of America genuinely believed that the success of their Revolution would inspire the Quebecois – among other colonial peoples – to throw off the British yoke and petition for membership in the Continental Congress.

By the time the Articles were drafted and then ratified, after all, the struggle between Great Britain and Congress had ceased to be a campaign of resistance intended by its instigators to reassert long-held legislative prerogatives. Rather, with the declaration of American independence in July, 1776, it had become an existential conflict between a hegemonic global empire and a nation that had emerged from within it. Accordingly, while the first and second Letters to the Inhabitants of Canada were published in an attempt to rouse a potential ally in the cause of protest and reform, the third was issued by a newly-independent nation seeking a partner in its struggle for self-determination. Congress was no longer asking the Quebecois to embrace the forms and traditions of British constitutional government, therefore, but rather to join in the American embrace of the abstract and the absolute – of the liberty, justice, and natural rights owed to every human being and memorialized by the great minds of the Enlightenment like the Baron de Montesquieu (1689-1755), John Locke (1632-1704), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778). With such lofty ideals firmly in mind, it doubtless seemed inconceivable to the men behind both the Letters and the Articles that a people should want to persist in living under an arbitrary, unrepresentative regime when liberty and brotherhood were theirs for the taking.

The Quebecois understandably took a different view of the situation. While the transition from being subjects of France to being subjects of Britain – circa 1763 – had doubtless been fraught with no small amount of tension and uncertainty, subsequent events did much to offer a sense of solace and security for these newfound citizens of the world’s most powerful transcontinental empire. The Quebec Act alone, by protecting the French language, the Roman Catholic Church, and French civil law while simultaneously increasing the size of the province threefold, represented a tremendous concession to the status quo at the same time it appeared to offer significant protection from Anglo-American territorial encroachment. And while the resulting provincial government was far less representative than those of Britain’s other North American dependencies – a subject of suspicion and consternation in the Thirteen Colonies – it was scarcely all that different from what the Quebecois were accustomed to as former citizens of New France. Thus appeased, comforted, and governed as they always had been, the people of what was now British Canada had hardly any reason to entertain the entreaties and protestations of their southern neighbors that true freedom yet eluded them.

That the framers of the Articles did not see this – perhaps could not see it – speaks powerfully to the depth of their convictions and the nature of their collective vision for the nascent American union. As the character of the government they created arguably attests, they were largely of a mind that principle was duty bound to triumph over pragmatism – indeed, must hold the needs of utility in check lest they become the only measure by which authority is justified. The Articles could have described a strong, king-like executive, a powerful legislature with wide-ranging responsibilities, and a judiciary with jurisdiction superior to that of every other court in the nation. This was not the case, of course. Effective though such a government might have been – and indeed proved to be – it would have been at odds with certain of the principles that had come to underpin the Revolution itself. Strong national governments were dangerous, often arbitrary, and could become easily alienated from the people they were supposed to serve. The history of the Anglo-American relationship attested to the validity of this perception, and the Articles were accordingly crafted in order to prejudice state over federal authority. Just so, while it would have doubtless presented a much easier path towards expansion if the United States under the Articles opted simply to replicate the European model of conquest and annexation, to do so would have violated the basic convictions upon which the American union had lately been founded.

The Thirteen Colonies each determined of their own accord to join and submit to the Continental Congress, and each in turn ratified the transformation of that initial union of British dependencies into a confederation of sovereign states. Theirs was accordingly a voluntary association in which the autonomy of individual members was not simply a recognized courtesy, but rather formed the philosophical cornerstone of their shared endeavor. For this federated union of states to extend anything less than the same right to the inhabitants of neighboring territories would therefore have effectively nullified the principles upon which they themselves had claimed their sovereignty. In consequence, the Articles of Confederation approached the subject of territorial expansion from the perspective that incorporation into the American union was contingent upon the voluntary accession of the relevant community. Not only did the authors thereof almost certainly believe that maintaining this policy would have little impact upon their nation’s prospects for growth – the prize to be gained being nothing less than liberty itself – but it would most definitely have aligned with their collective sense of what their Revolution was really about.

Granted, it would be hard to deny that American history subsequent to the drafting of the Articles of Confederation has been laden with examples of states acceding to the union in consequence of conquest, intrigue, or great power diplomacy. Louisiana and Florida, for example, were purchased from France and Spain without much consideration for the desires of their inhabitants, while California, New Mexico, Nevada, and Arizona were taken from Mexico essentially as spoils of war. That being said, however the land upon which various states claim their existence came into possession of the American republic, no state has every joined the union under less than voluntary circumstances. As law and precedent require it, every state must possess a constitution before it can become eligible for admission to the union, and every state must petition Congress for the receipt of that privilege, and Congress must approve every resulting application. There are, of course, very practical reasons why the residents of a United States territory would submit to this process. Statehood brings with it privileges, votes in Congress, and a voice in the affairs of the nation. But the fact remains that the initiative lies with the prospective citizens of the state in question. Congress does not write constitutions for the states, or admit them without a relevant expression of intent. In essence, rather than create something that did not previously exist, the government of the United States instead chooses to recognize the existence of a polity which its citizens have already created. Though brief, in large part specific to the context in which it was written, and long since superseded, Article XI represents the first germ of this exceedingly influential idea.