Economic and Foreign Policy
Problems
|
T |
he Revolution was followed
by a severe economic depression in 1784 and 1785. To raise revenue, many states
imposed charges on goods from other states. By the mid-1780s, Connecticut was
levying heavier duties on goods from Massachusetts than on those from Britain.
The national government was
on the verge of bankruptcy. The Dutch and French would lend money only at
exorbitant interest rates. A shortage of hard currency made it difficult to
conduct commercial transactions. Inflated paper money issued by the individual
states was virtually worthless. Many of the new nation’s infant industries were
swamped by a flood of British imports.
Economic problems were
especially pronounced in the South. Planters lost about 60,000 slaves during
the Revolution, including about 25,000 in South Carolina and 5,000 in Georgia.
New British trade regulations prohibited the sale of many American agricultural
products in the British West Indies, which had been one of the South’s leading
markets.
Lacking the protection of
the British flag, sailors were seized from American ships by North African
corsairs and sold into slavery. In 1785, Algerian pirates boarded an American
merchant ship sailing off the coast of Portugal, seized its 21 member crew, and
enslaved them for 21 years. Over the next 8 years, a hundred more Americans
became captives.
Meanwhile, Britain refused to
evacuate its military posts in Detroit, Otswego, N.Y., and elsewhere in the old
Northwest because the states refused to restore loyalist property that had been
confiscated during the Revolution. At the same time, Spain refused to recognize
American claims to territory between the Ohio River and Florida and in 1784
closed the Mississippi River to American trade. Spanish authorities secretly
conspired with westerners (including the famous frontiersman Daniel Boone) to
acquire the area that would become Kentucky and Tennessee.