Nation of Nations Concise 2/e Davidson, Gienapp, Heyrman, Lytle, & Stoff
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The American Revolution did not create an American national identity. Most inhabitants of "these United States" and their political leaders were less committed to creating an American nation (a single national republic) than to organizing thirteen separate and loosely federated state republics. But a sense of crisis grew as various political entities and social groups began to fragment.

Republican Experiments

The conviction that republics were not suited to large territories pointed attention to drafting the first state constitutions. These crucial early experiments in establishing 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 rejected British mixed government in favor of separation of powers. They also insisted their state constitutions be written down, a specified code separate from and superior to the government.

While Americans eagerly wrote state constitutions, they largely ignored national government. Not until 1781 did all the states approve the first framework for a national structure: the Articles of Confederation. The Articles provided essentially for 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 western lands, entirely to the states. Few leaders in the 1770s even perceived a need to define how power between the states and the national government should be distributed.

The Temptations of Peace

What forced American leaders in the 1780s to rethink this question of national versus state power were both domestic turmoil and foreign threats. Expanding settlement of the West led to both international difficulties and internal problems. 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. 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. Such fears of democratic excess shaped the landmark 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 by outlawing slavery in the region, it changed the potential for sectional conflict from East-West to North-South.

In addition, 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. Contests over the west were aggravated by battles over monetary policy; both 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.

Republican Society

As political leaders struggled to shape new republican governments, ordinary Americans sought to create a new republican society based on the ideal of equality. Although inequalities of wealth continued, some once-humbler families gained wealth through various enterprises. Craft workers and laborers sought more respect. Women won better educational opportunities. States with official churches gradually "disestablished" them. Yet revolutionaries stopped short of extending equality to the most unequal groups in American society, blacks and women. Their view of equality emphasized leveling the top of society by abolishing aristocratic privilege rather than raising up the lowest social groups.

From Confederation to Constitution

In the mid-1780s the political crisis of the Confederation came to a head, prompted by the controversy over a proposed treaty with Spain and a farmers' rebellion in Massachusetts.. 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 separation of powers among a two-house national legislature, a strong executive and a judiciary. 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.

Opponents of the Constitution, the Anti-Federalists, feared that such a strong central government would become corrupt and arbitrary. To undercut their objections, 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, rejected the improbability of a national republic, and admitted that most people's behavior reflected interest rather than virtue.

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