ABSTRACT
This chapter surveys the European history and colonial political experience upon which the Founders drew when tensions with England forced them to ask what social, political, and economic systems would serve their interests and protect their individual rights and liberties. It describes their initial fumblings with state constitutions and the Articles of Confederation before turning to a more detailed consideration of the Constitutional Convention of 1787. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, traditionalists argued that social order required hierarchy and privilege while new voices proclaimed choice and opportunity for more, if never all, people. Francis Bacon believed that science, discovery, and invention work to the eternal benefit of human society. English politics in the half-century following Bacon’s death in 1626 seemed to mock this vision of peace and progress. The political implications of the social and economic growth of the colonies were masked for a time by the presence of the French in Canada.
