Hi,
My question is twofold:
Philadelphia, Princeton, Anapolis, Trenton and New York were all “meeting places” of Congress or “capitals” of the US following the American War of Independence/Revolutionary War (1775-1783) (wikipedia link below cites: 1765 and 1783??)
Which dates for the beginning and ending of hostilities are correct? (1775-1783) or (1765 and 1783)?
Were the cities cited above “meeting places” or “capitals”? George C. Herring is his “From Colony to Superpower” calls them “meeting places” (p. 35). Elsewhere I’ve seen them referred to as capitals.
The war effectively ended in 1781 with the Colonial victory at Yorktown. However, it officially ended in 1783 with the signing of the* Treaty of Paris.
*Well, “a”. There are dozens of Treaties of Paris.
As for when the conflict began, you’re going to have to decide when the battles changed from individual insurrections to a deliberate campaign to gain independence from the British, and whether you want to count the various colonial efforts before the founding of the Continental Army in 1775.
Language should be precise enough to distinguish the word “capital” as in the location of a state government, from the phrase “meeting place” which could be literally anywhere two or more people meet, including a cow pasture.
Of Congress. The question referred to the meeting place of Congress. Which was the entire federal government at the time, so wherever it met was the seat of the government, and thus the capital, to the extent that it’s meaningful to speak of a capital under such circumstances.
Didn’t Congress meet in various places to appease the various states? They all wanted the prestige of hosting the nation’s Congress. That became an issue when they sought a permanent capital location. Two different states contributed land for the US Capital.
Saying the war started in 1765 is really stretching it. That was the year the Stamp Act was passed and that pushed public opinion towards eventual independence. But being a major step along the path towards war isn’t the same as being the start of the war.
No, that was later. The Continental Congress decamped from Philadelphia at two different times, for two different reasons:
First, from September 1777 through June 1778, they were chased out by the British.
Second, in June 1783, they were chased out by the American army, and the government of Pennsylvania refused to intervene.
By 1783, nobody liked the Continental Congress. They were deadbeats. They owed everybody (especially soldiers) money, but had no means of raising money. Service in the Congress carried little prestige, and it had trouble raising a quorum even to ratify the very favorable peace treaty with Great Britain which ended the Revolutionary War.
Congress became a wandering minstrel show, settling wherever the local authorities would tolerate them and promise minimal protection. They moved to Princeton, then Annapolis, then Trenton, and finally settled in New York. This is why the framers of the Constitution provided for federal control of the capital district, so they would not be dependent on state authorities for protection.
After 1789 Congress had money, and attitudes changed. In 1791 Philadelphia welcomed Congress back, and would have been happy to house it forever, but politics dictated a more Southern capital between Maryland and Virginia.
They might have been effectively capitals without being officially designated capitals. That’s a distinction that may sometimes be worth making, but at other times too minor or technical a point to contribute to the discussion.
The itinerant Continental Congress had a short stint in York, Pa., too. It never formally designated the towns or cities in which it met as “capitals,” as such - that came later, by the local tourism bureaus.
Congress in its official business never used the word “capital”. You can read a typical discussion in the journal of April 25, 1784 which discusses the dream of a “permanent residence” or a “federal town” but ends with an unexciting resolution that
I have no idea whether representatives ever referred to their meeting place as a “capital” in private correspondence. I doubt it; capitals are more of an obsession now than then.
That’s not unusual. London is not established as the capital of England or the United Kingdom in any written instrument, it’s just the seat of government. Similarly, Bonn was the capital of West Germany by law, but Berlin is the capital of Germany merely by convention.
If you define as the opening of the war the first time colonists fired on British troops to enforce/win local rights and customs, then its 1765 and the Conococheague Valley (or Black Boys) Uprising in Pennsylvania. The short version is that some licensed traders were using military stores to hide illegal goods (under Pennsylvania law) for the Indian trade and get them to the western regions (Fort Pitt and Fort Ligonier). Over 8-10 months there was a fair amount of bloodshed and it led to a really rotten John Wayne movie called “Allegheny Uprising”.
