After their victory in the American Revolution,
America’s leaders were leery about establishing a powerful centralized
government, fearful that such a government would only replace the
tyranny of King George III with a new form of tyranny. As a result,
the first U.S. constitution, the Articles of Confederation, created
a decentralized new government. The Articles established the United
States as a confederation of states—a system in which the states
were largely independent but were bound together by a weak national
congress.
Ultimately, the Articles of Confederation proved ineffective,
giving Congress little real power over the states, no means to enforce
its decisions, and, most critically, no power to levy taxes. As
a result, the federal government was left at the mercy of the states,
which often chose not to pay their taxes.
Sensing the need for change, delegates from nearly all
the states met in 1787 to
revise the Articles of Confederation but ended up drafting an entirely
new document: the Constitution. The Constitution created a new government
divided into three branches: legislative (Congress), executive (the
president), and judicial (headed by the Supreme Court). After much
debate, the delegates compromised on a two-house Congress, consisting
of an upper house (Senate) with equal representation for each state,
and a lower house (House of Representatives) with proportional representation
based on population. Congress also was given new abilities to levy
national taxes and control interstate commerce.
Although most states ratified the Constitution outright,
some, especially New York, had reservations. In response, Alexander Hamilton,
John Jay, and James Madison argued the case for the Constitution
in a series of essays called the Federalist Papers. These eighty-five
essays are now regarded as some of the most important writings in
American political thought.
However, many skeptics, or Anti-Federalists, remained
unconvinced, believing that a stronger government would endanger
the freedoms they had just won during the Revolution. As a compromise,
the framers of the Constitution promised to add a series of amendments
to guarantee important liberties. Sponsored by James Madison, the
first ten amendments became known as the Bill of Rights. Their liberties
secured, Anti-Federalists in the last remaining states grudgingly
voted for the Constitution.
The 1790s
were rocky for the United States: the new government functioned
well, but disputes arose about how the government should act in
situations in which the Constitution was vague. The foremost of
these disagreements involved the question of whether or not the
federal government had the right to found a national bank. “Strict
constructionists” such as Thomas Jefferson interpreted the Constitution
literally, believing that the document forbade everything it did
not expressly permit. “Loose constructionists” such as Alexander
Hamilton believed that the Constitution’s “elastic clause” permitted
everything the document did not expressly forbid—such
as the founding of a bank.
Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed often during George Washington’s
presidency, and eventually their ideas spread through the country
and coalesced into the nation’s first two political parties, the Hamiltonian
Federalists and the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans. Although
Washington begged Americans not to separate into dangerous political
factions—for he believed that factions and political parties would
destroy the republican spirit and tear the Union apart—the party
system developed. Indeed, Washington’s successor, the Federalist
John Adams, tried to ruin the opposition party with his 1798 Sedition
Act, which ultimately only made the Democratic-Republicans stronger.
When Adams’s bitter rival Jefferson was elected president
in 1800, many European
observers thought the American “experiment” in republicanism would
end. But when the transfer of power proved to be peaceful, many
Europeans, seeing that republicanism could be viable and stable,
began to believe the system might work for them too. The U.S. triumph
over Britain and success in establishing a stable government had
already encouraged the French to overthrow their own monarch in
the French Revolution of 1789.
Later, republicanism and democracy would spread beyond France to
Britain and the rest of Europe. Thus, the drafting of the Constitution and
the years that followed were enormously important in world history
as well as American history.
