Nation of Nations 3/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, and Stoff
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THE CHAPTER IN PERSPECTIVE

American rebels won their independence from Great Britain. Even so, in many ways the war heightened the existing divisions within American society. Such divisions, magnified by the strain of waging a long military conflict, returned to trouble the new republic. Added to older tensions over racial, ethnic, sectional, and religious diversity were a new set of difficulties arising from independent nationhood and the challenge of crafting a workable republican government.

OVERVIEW

The American Revolution did not create an American national identity. Perhaps only those who had served with the Continentals came to feel allegiance to a truly national institution, the army. But if the military learned to think in terms of loyalty to a national cause, most inhabitants of "these United States" and their political leaders did not. For a decade after independence, the revolutionaries were less committed to creating an American nation, a single national republic, than to organizing thirteen separate and loosely federated state republics.

Strong local loyalties to the states, not the Union, as well as the conviction that republics were not suited to large territories, determined the shape of the first state constitutions. These crucial early experiments in establishing a republican government maintained the basic structure of the old colonial governments, but altered dramatically the balance of power among the branches of government.

Popularly elected legislatures became the dominant force in the government, controlling not only weak executives but also the judiciary. Revolutionaries thus abandoned the British system of mixed government. They also departed from British practice by insisting on written state constitutions, a law superior to the government which defined the full scope of popular liberty.

While Americans lavished attention on their state constitutions, the national government received little attention. In fact, it took four years after 1777 for all the states to approve the Articles of Confederation. The Articles provided for a government by a national legislature, essentially a continuation of the Second Continental Congress. But they left the crucial power of the purse, as well as all final power to make and execute laws and control over undistributed western lands, entirely to the states.

Few leaders in the 1770s perceived the need for a defined distribution of power between the states and the national government. They gave more thought to federalism, the organization of a United States, only as the events of the postrevolutionary period revealed that neither the states nor the national government were equal to meeting international challenges and domestic dislocations.

Many conflicts arose from the expanding settlement of the West. That region confronted not only international difficulties but internal problems as well. As the British tried to lure Vermonters into Canada and the Spanish encouraged secession among southwesterners, some states squabbled over conflicting claims to western land.

An even more serious contest arose between "landless" and "landed" states--the latter claiming large western tracts under the terms of their old colonial charters. Only in 1781 when the last of the landed states, Virginia, finally ceded its charter rights to the national government, were the Articles of Confederation ratified.

The settlement of the West also triggered controversy by democratizing state legislatures, a development disdained by some conservatives. They warned that parochial western delegates lacked wealth, education, and a "larger view" of politics. Such fears of democratic excess shaped the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which withheld full self-government from these new territories until they had attained statehood. Even so, the Northwest Ordinance established an orderly way of incorporating the frontier into the federal system and outlawed slavery in the region.

In fact, northern laws abolishing slavery, along with an increase in manumissions in the upper South, swelled the growth of the free black community and altered its character. In the South as a whole, however, slavery continued to expand along with the cotton economy. There were more blacks enslaved in 1800 than in 1776. The emergence of slavery as the "peculiar institution" of the South during the early national period would dominate the political agenda by the mid-nineteenth century.

But during the Confederation era, contests over the west and battles over monetary policy held the center of political debate. Both the national and state governments proved even more powerless to redress postwar economic disruption than they had in coping with the problems posed by the frontier.

As political leaders struggled to shape new republican governments, ordinary Americans struggled to define a new republican society. Newly rich families came to demand and receive greater status; workers began to organize; some women claimed a right to greater political consideration, more freedom to divorce, and better educational opportunities; religious dissenters clamored for disestablishment. Yet white male revolutionaries stopped short of extending equality to the most unequal groups in American society, blacks and women. Their view of equality was essentially conservative, one that emphasized leveling the top of society by abolishing aristocratic privilege rather than raising up the lowest social groups.

In the mid-1780s the political crisis of the Confederation came to a head, prompted by the controversy over the Jay-Gardoqui treaty and Shays' Rebellion. The response was the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although the convention was charged only with revising the Articles of Confederation, it produced instead an entirely new frame of government establishing a truly national republic, the federal Constitution.

Based largely on James Madison's "Virginia Plan," the new Constitution provided for a separation of powers among a judiciary, a bicameral national legislature and a strong executive. A deadlock among the delegates over the issue of representation, one reflecting a deep rivalry between northern and southern states, was broken by a compromise which provided for equal representation of states in the upper house of Congress and representation proportional to population in the lower house, with a slave counting as three-fifths of a free person.

Most opponents of the Constitution, the Antifederalists, softened their objections when Federalists promised to add a bill of rights to the Constitution after ratification. By May of 1790, all of the states had accepted the Constitution. In doing so, they repudiated their earlier commitment to legislative supremacy, revised their former insistence upon state sovereignty, and rejected the improbability of a national republic.

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