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.The Americans had to scratch60 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THtogether what forces they could, using state militias and privateers asmuch as if not more than the Continental Army and Navy.They also had to scratch together a means of paying for the war.Thatwas not easy, especially as there was, in a very real sense, no nationalgovernment.The thirteen states, having thrown off British control, werenot willing to cede much of their new-gained sovereignty to a centralgovernment.The Second Continental Congress had no power to tax.Instead it had to estimate its revenue needs and then call on the states toprovide the money.With their own war efforts to fund, few did, andonly about 6 percent of total revenues came from taxes.The rest had to come from borrowing, some from wealthy Americanscommitted to the cause, but mostly from France and Holland, who wereboth, of course, far more interested in humbling Britain than in helpingthe Americans.Along with money, they also supplied about 60 percentof the gunpowder used by American forces, as they did most of the uni-forms and firearms.Even the British, quite unintentionally, providedmuch military matériel for the American forces.During the course of thewar, American privateers seized some two thousand British vessels,worth, together with their cargoes, some 18 million pounds.Beyond borrowing, the only source of revenue was the printing press.Beginning in 1775 the Continental Congress issued negotiable bills ofcredit, called continentals.By the end of 1779 it had issued bills with aface value of no less than $225 million, a huge sum relative to the size ofthe American economy at that time.This ballooning of the money sup-ply (made still worse by states and even counties doing the same)inevitably caused a huge inflation.Prices doubled in 1776 and doubledagain the next year and the next.From early 1779 to early 1781, pricesrose nearly tenfold.Congress tried to stem the spiral by revaluing thecontinentals already in circulation at 2.5 percent of their face value.Theyquickly depreciated into near worthlessness.The phrase  not worth acontinental would be part of the American lexicon for more than a hun-dred years.The American Revolution61Many farmers had no choice but to accept quartermaster and com-missary certificates which also circulated as money at whatevervalue the requisitioning officers chose to place on them at the time theyforcibly purchased supplies.Fortunately, the British sometimes actedeven more arbitrarily, seizing livestock and grain as spoils of war.And because the Continental Congress had no experience in admin-istering a large bureaucracy (the quartermaster s department of the Con-tinental Congress had more than three thousand employees at onepoint), chaos, corruption, and inefficiency reigned.Only when RobertMorris, a highly successful Philadelphia merchant, took charge in 1781did some semblance of order come to government procurement andfinances.Most important, Morris was able to arrange financing to allow Wash-ington to move the Continental Army from New York State to York-town, Virginia.There, with the French fleet acting as the stopper in theentrance to the Chesapeake Bay, cutting off relief, Lord Cornwallis wasforced to surrender the main British army in North America.If the British war effort was to continue, London would have to raise,equip, and transport a new army.With the national debt increasingrapidly (it was already well over 200 million pounds at this point), therewas little political support for doing so.The British began negotiating apeace treaty that resulted in formal recognition by Great Britain ofAmerican independence in 1783.The United States had won by not losing.BUT IT HAD PAI D A FEARFU L PRICE.Much of the Carolinas and partsof Virginia had been devastated by British troops destroying farms andplantations.Large numbers of slaves were taken by the British as well.The British blockade had seriously disrupted commerce, as had Britishoccupation of some of the major ports.New York was occupied by British forces from the fall of 1776 to62 AN E M P I R E O F WEAL THNovember 25, 1783 (celebrated as Evacuation Day in New York for ahundred years).That is the longest period of time in which a city in theWestern world has been held by an occupying power in modern times.During the occupation, two fires had broken out that destroyed half thebuildings in Manhattan.The city s population had fallen by half in theseyears.Many of the city s merchant elite, hopelessly compromised bydealing with the British, evacuated with them.And the coming of peace also brought British commercial retaliation.The British West Indies, previously a huge market for American food-stuffs and lumber, were closed to American ships.Favorable tariff treat-ment, such as for indigo, ended.But Britain remained by far the largest customer for American goodsand the largest exporter to the United States.British merchants, anxiousto reestablish their position in the lucrative American market, offeredgenerous terms.And with the end of the war, the American economysoon began to recover, if patchily.South Carolina remained largelymired in depression, while the mercantile economies of the MiddleAtlantic states rebounded.And if markets such as the British West Indieswere lost (temporarily, it turned out), new ones opened up.NorthernEurope, closed by the British Navigation Acts, now welcomed Americanproducts.Foreign goods that previously had to come through Britaincould now come directly at lower cost.And the Far East, once the zeal-ously guarded monopoly of the British East India Company, opened upto American merchants.In 1784 the Empress of China cleared New Yorkharbor, bound for the Orient, the first ship in what would be a growingarmada.It carried a cargo of furs and ginseng root much prized inChina as a cure-all that was bartered for tea, silks, china and porcelain,exotic plants and birds, and other luxury goods.When it returned fifteenmonths later, it disposed of its cargo at a profit of between $30,000 and$40,000.New York City itself recovered from its devastation at the hands ofthe British with astonishing speed.By the end of the decade its popula-The American Revolution63tion had not only recovered but reached new highs, thirty-three thou-sand in the census of 1790.BUT I F TH E COU NTRY S ECONOMY was slowly recovering, its financeswere not.The states had finally agreed to a basic frame of government,the Articles of Confederation, in 1781, to replace the ad hoc administra-tion of the Second Continental Congress.But it proved woefully inade-quate to the job at hand.Most power was still vested in Congress, whosemembers were appointed by the state governments and served at theirpleasure [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]