In January 1781, “the continental army was experiencing another abominable winter … mutiny erupted among Pennsylvania and new Jersey troops, who had not been paid for more than a year and protested the eternal shortages of clothing, shoes, horses, wagons, meat, flour, and gunpowder. Many wanted to return home at the separation of their three-year enlistments but were prevented from doing so by their officers. So demoralized were these troops that some officers feared they might even defect to the British. On February 4, Hamilton wrote to Lauren’s that ‘we uncivilly compelled them to an unconditional surrender and hanged their most incendiary leaders” (Chernow 151).
Hamilton continued to stew about the Articles of Confederation, which had been ratified belatedly by the last state on February 27, 1781. Hamilton thought this loose framework a prescription for rigor mortis. There was no federal judiciary, no guiding executive, no national taxing power, and no direct power over people as individuals, only as citizens of the states. In Congress, each state had one vote, and nine of the thirteen states had to concur to take significant actions. The Articles of confederation promised little more than a fragile alliance of thirteen miniature republics (157 Chernow).
“People continued to identify their states as their ‘countries,’ and most outside the military had never traveled more than a day’s journey from their homes. But the Revolution itself, especially the Continental Army, had been a potent instrument for fusing the states together and forging an American character. During the war, a sense of national unity seeped imperceptibly into the minds of many American diplomats, administrators, congressmen, and above all, the nucleus of officers gathered around Washington. These men had gotten many dismaying glimpses of the shortcoming of the Articles of Confederation, and many later emerges as confirmed advocates of a tight-knit union of the states (Chernow 157).
(Connor 196-199) Proscribed by Governor Martin and outlawed by Sir Henry Clinton, Harnett was the most shining mark upon which Craige could display his zeal in his mater’s cause. His first expedition after occupying Wilmington as organized for the capture of Harnett. Warned of his danger, Harnett attempted flight. He carried with him a considerable sum of public money which had been entrusted for the purchase of military supplies and clothing, and this he succeeded in conveying to a place of safely. But he himself, suddenly seized with a paroxysm of the gout, was compelled to seek relief at the home of friend, Colonel James Spicer in Onslow county, about thirty-two miles from Wilmington. Craige having learned through a spy sent a detachment to arrest him. Tortured with pain and utterly helpless, his hands and feet tightly bound, he was strapped across the back of a trooper’s horse, and thus taken into Wilmington. The sight made a profound impression on those who beheld it.
An interested spectator was Armand John DeRossett, a boy of fourteen years, afterwards a well-known physician. His granddaughter refers to the incident in these words: ‘One horrible recollection that remained with grandpa as long as he lived, was the sight of Cornelius Harnett (the idolized patriot of the Cape Fear), ‘brought through the town, thrown across a horse like a sack of meal,’ by a squadron of Craige’s marauders … driven before them, he had fallen in his tracks from exhaustion and in an unconscious state, was thus inhumanly treated.” At Wilmington, by Craig’s orders he was thrown into a roofless blockhouse where he was exposed to all the inclemencies of the winter season. His strength gave way rapidly and it soon became evident that his end was near. Then Whigs and Tories alike prayed Craige for a relaxation of his severity, and the British commander yielded so far as to grant his dying prisoner a parole within the limits of town.
But this clemency came too late. On April 18th, 1781, with his own hand, Harnett wrote his will in these words: “I give, devise and bequeath to my dear, beloved wife Mary, all my estate, real, personal, and mixed, of what nature or kind soever, to her, her heirs and assigns forever;’ to which he added this codicil: I, Cornelius Harnett, having executed the within written will, think it not improper to add that, as I have ever considered expensive funerals as ostentatious folly it is my earnest request (and from my present circumstance now doubly necessary) that I may be buried with the utmost frugality.
His last moments are thus described by Hooper: Aware that his disease must terminate fatally, he declined the advice of his physicians, but thankfully received their kind and friendly attentions. He died at Maynard three days after Lord Cornwallis left for Yorktown.
The epitaph which appears above his grave from Pope’s Essay on Man: “Slave to no sect, he took no private road/ But looked through nature up to Nature’s God.”
His body lies buried in the northeast corner of St. James churchyard in the city of Wilmington.
In States Rights in North Carolina, “The General Assembly in 1782 passed an act of wholesale confiscation of the property of a long list of Loyalists, beginning with Governors Tyron and Martin and including all who were prominent as royal sympathizers. The treaty of peace between England and the Untied States in 1784 was careful to provide for rights of return to all fugitive Loyalists and for a restitution of their property. But North Carolina was in no more conciliatory mood toward the defeated Tories in 1784 than in 1782. The victors were unwilling to give up the large amount of confiscated property (page 458).
“Hamilton delivered a systematic critique of the current political structure… the dynamics of revolution differed from those of peacetime government; the postwar world had to be infused with a new spirit, respectful of authority, or anarchy would reign: “An extreme jealousy of power is the attendant of all popular revolutions and has seldom been without its evils. It is to this source we are to trace many of the fatal mistakes which have so deeply endangered the common cause, particular that defect which will be the object of these remarks, a want of power in Congress.” Where revolutions by their nature resisted excess government power, the opposite situation could be equally hazardous. “As too much powers leads to despotism, too little leads to anarchy, and both eventually to the ruin of the people’” (Chernow 158).
Unless the central government’s hand was strengthened asserted Hamilton, the states would amass progressively more power until the union disintegrated into secessionist movements, smaller confederacies, or civil war. He especially feared that populous states would indulge in separatist designs and take advantage of commercial rivalries or boundary disputes as pretext to wage war against smaller states. (Chernow 158).
However, “… problems only worsened after November 30, 1782, when American peace commissioners signed a provisional peace treaty with Great Britain, sapping incentives for further unity. Local leaders such as Sam Adams in Massachusetts and Patrick Henry in Virginia eloquently asserted the sovereignty of the states. So magnetic as the allure of state governments that many members of Congress stayed home, making it difficult to muster quorums (174 Chernow).
Francis Clayton took possession of Poplar Grove, including the banks of Figure Eight Island as a reward for his betrayal. Maynard was renamed Hilton in 1784. These “neutral figures” to the Common Cause had a brief affair. When Clayton was discovered as a traitor, the 640 acres, or one square mile, of Poplar Grove was reclaimed and offered for sale to James Foy, Jr., son of Captain James Foy, and the family like all the planters descended from the Whigs of the Revolutionary War between her & new Bern were steadfast Unionists, and very well aware that their entire fortunes and legacies was on the backs of … descended bloodlines of these families imported into Charlestown and the Chesapeake bay from Barbados and Jamaica rum & sugar, the empire of the English, French and Spanish.
Land owner, plantation owner, merchant, slave trader, Scotch Irish, classical education, diplomat, negotiator, leader of the Stamp Act rebellion, yet puts down the Regulator movement, then drafts the Halifax Resolves, sending others to sign the Declaration of Independence, but the first to read them in the colony of North Carolina. He becomes a Federalist, the common cause is the cause of Union.
On May 31, 1905 at an address delivered by the Honorable Henry Sherman Boutell: Poets make many of our national heroes; and Massachusetts, my native State, has furnished the nation with most of our Revolutionary heroes; not because North Carolina and the other State of the Old Thirteen had no heroes, but because Massachusetts had the poets (Smith 406).
Oh, but indeed, North Carolina had the most emphatic poet of all – Cornelius Harnett, Jr.
Archiblad Maclaine Hooper will say of Harnett: “He practiced all the duties of a kind and charitable and elegant hospitality … easy in manner, affable, courteous, with a fine taste for letters and a genius for music, he was always an interesting, sometimes fascinating, companion. He had read extensively for one engaged so much in the bustle of the world, and he read with a critical eye and inquisitive mind. In conversation, he was never voluble. The tongue, an unruly member in most men, was in him nicely regulated by a sound and discriminating judgment … for what was wanting in continuity or fullness of expression, was supplied by a glance of his eye, the movement of his hand, and the impressiveness of his pause. Occasionally, too, he would impart animation by a characteristic smile of such peculiar sweetness and benignity as enlivened every mind and cheered every bosom within this sphere of its radiance (Connor 203).