Episode Details

There were thirteen United States — and to the rest of the world, there were thirteen nations. This is the story of what that cost. In 1785, pirates out of Algiers seized two American ships and enslaved their crews, and the United States could do nothing to free them: no navy, no money, no power to answer. In London, John Adams sought a commercial treaty with Britain and was quietly refused, because Britain had grasped the essential thing about the new republic — that a treaty with Congress bound nothing, since Congress could not make its own states keep it. And at home, those states taxed and undercut one another like the rival nations they had become, while the one power that might have given America leverage abroad — a national authority over commerce — stayed splintered thirteen ways. This is the episode where the case for a stronger government stops being a theory and becomes a bill coming due, written in closed ports, empty coffers, and the chains of American sailors their own country could not reach. George Washington saw it plainly: thirteen sovereignties pulling against each other would soon bring ruin on the whole.