until Congress was given direct jurisdiction over the states’ western lands. Here we encounter the first distortion in America’s constitutional myth.

Sorry, it is the “states’ western lands” which were mythical. For one thing, the British Crown still claimed them during the war. For another, the states had no business “claiming” them anyway, since they constituted merely a vast unsettled wilderness from which they merely hoped, eventually, some kind of benefit. They amounted to the same level of reality as my ‘claim’ on Copernicus crater on the moon.

They encouraged a plot among Washington’s officers, and a military coup loomed on the horizon. I don’t remember reading that Morris and his cronies “encouraged” this plot, and anyway the primary reason this plot ever got off the ground was the failure to pay the army appropriately.

Unfortunately, the war-induced nationalisation of the Northwest lands had shifted the burden of policing that territory from the states to a national force of some kind. The states never had policed the territory in any sense worthy of the name. The reason they agreed to the nationalization of the lands were that they recognized a real problem with their control of the areas.

Once Congress had repudiated its paper money, there should have been no obstacle to repudiating the debt as well…Of the remainder, $12 million were claims of the Continental Army for back pay, or of other public officials..

Ugh, this is terrible . Since Congress did one moderately wretched thing that was forced upon them by a series of stupid earlier choices, they should have compounded the evil with a truly atrociously evil choice to repudiate a just debt to its own soldiers??? This would have ensured another revolt.

As you can see, this article is full of half-truths, colored truths, innuendo, blatant ex-post-facto assumptions about acceptable options, etc. This is not careful work.