Chapter Overview

The Revolution did not create a national identity. Most inhabitants of "these United States" were less committed to creating a single national republic than to organizing thirteen separate and loosely federated state republics. 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 influenced the drafting of 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. 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.

Eagerly writing state constitutions, Amricans largely ignored national government. Not until 1781 did all the states approve the Articles of Confederation. These provided essentially for a continuation of the Second Continental Congress but left the crucial powers entirely to the states. Few leaders even perceived a need to define how power between the states and the national government should be distributed.

The Temptations of Peace

Domestic turmoil and foreign threats forced American leaders to rethink this question of national versus state power. 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.

The settlement of the West also triggered controversy by democratizing state legislatures. Fears of democratic excess shaped the landmark Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which withheld full self-government from these new territories until statehood. Even so, the Ordinance established an orderly way of incorporating the frontier into the federal system and outlawed slavery there.

Northern laws abolishing slavery and an increase in manumissions in the upper South, swelled the growth of the free black community and altered its character. However, slavery continued to expand along with the cotton economy. Contests over the west were aggravated by battles over monetary policy. National and state governments proved as powerless to redress postwar economic disruption as they had in coping with 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. 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 blacks and women. Their view of equality emphasized leveling the top 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. Instead of revising the Articles of Confederation, it produced an entirely new frame of government the Federal Constitution.

The 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 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 a strong central government would become corrupt and arbitrary. Federalists promised to add a bill of rights to the Constitution after ratification. In accepting the Constitution, the states 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.