ABSTRACT
After declaring themselves independent from the mother country, Americans had to construct a system of government to fulfil their dreams for a new nation and ensure longevity for the United States. The problems which were encountered during the period of the Articles of Confederation led many to believe that a different model of government was needed. The federal Constitution which emerged from this impulse for change was crucial to the survival of the fledgling republic. As John Murrin has argued, ‘people knew that without the Constitution there would be no America’.1 The document that emerged from the Philadelphia Convention for ratification by the states is still the framework which governs America today. The story of the making of the Constitution and the meanings the founders invested in it are therefore crucial to an understanding of American national identity. In many respects it created a framework for nationhood which ran ahead of an embryonic sense of nationalism. This chapter seeks to briefly explain why the Constitution was adopted and to probe what its supporters believed it would achieve. In its preamble, the text refers to ‘we the people’. The story of the American people was and is intimately connected to the development of the Constitution. One year after the Declaration of Independence, the Continental
Congress presented a document which created a union of the different states of the new American nation. Not until 1781 did all of these states accept and ratify the plans and therefore establish the Articles of Confederation. The new system of government had no executive at its head but Congress was granted the power to control diplomatic relations and requisition soldiers – vital during the continuing struggle with the British. Fear of central power concentrated in the hands of the few was writ large in the structure of the Articles, however. The states retained their own sovereignty and freedom and they continued
the crucial realms of commercial rights and taxation. The Articles could only be amended by a unanimous decision and any major decisions still required the approval of nine of the thirteen states. As Gordon Wood has summarised, ‘the Confederation resembled more an alliance among closely cooperating sovereign states than a single government – something not all that different from the present-day European Union’.2 The Articles of Confederation were inadequate as a device to build a nation and bind the states together under the aegis of an effective central government. The Articles conceded too much to individual state sovereignty. We must be careful, however, not to dismiss the Articles of Con-
federation as an attempt to construct a government for America that was always doomed to failure. The system was able to tie the states together with sufficient strength to defeat the British and ensure that the fledgling nation survived its infancy. Furthermore, it was under the Articles that the Northwest Ordinance was passed in 1784 which provided the future model for the admission of new territory and then states into the Union. With the benefit of considerable historical hindsight we can see considerable signs of health in the new nation and this should not be ignored. Nevertheless, progress in the organisation and settlement of the West is particularly significant because it was the only area of policy in which the national government could claim any real success. It was only in this area that Congress had power to act independently of the state governments.3 The Articles did not provide strong enough central governmental direction for the nation. There was an increasing feeling among many American leaders that the Articles of Confederation were inadequate and that government needed to be restructured if America was to prosper. By the middle of the 1780s oratory and writings were full of allusions to a critical period for America, of unease concerning impending crisis and turbulence. The war with Britain had been won but the American Revolution was about much more than breaking the yoke of colonial control. The Revolution brought with it an expectation that American society would be transformed. The difficulties of the 1780s were all the more troubling because these hopes were confronted by problems and fears.4
