• MAKING THE REVOLUTION

• CONSTITUTION

• 1. Abandoning the Articles
• 2. Creating a New Constitution
• 3. Promoting the Constitution
• 4. Opposing the Constitution
• 5. Adding a Bill of Rights
• 6. Inaugurating a Government
• 7. Portraying the Founders
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CONSTITUTION: 1787-1791

1. Abandoning the Articles

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The "job" of Congress under the Articles of Confederation was to win the Revolutionary War, but the Commander in Chief himself knew that the nation's victory was achieved despite Congress. Not that it lacked conviction and ability among its members—what it lacked was power. Thrown together as a wartime government, the Articles created only a "firm league of friendship" among the states that jealously guarded their power and gave Congress short tether. After all, in 1776 the states had no intention of creating their own despotic Parliament. The Articles assigned Congress duties without risking tyranny, but it soon became apparent that this translated as the age-old bind: responsibility without authority. Win the war—but you can't tax the states to pay for it. Deal with European nations and the Indians—but you can't ratify treaties. Maximize commerce and trade—but you can't interfere with states' trade with each other and with nations. With Washington's leadership and the unifying goal of victory, the "united states" had won their war, but without this motivational glue the "league of friendship" proved insufficient to sustain and develop the new nation.

A collapsing postwar economy brought the lesson home—rampant inflation, plummeting farm and business income, bankruptcies and farm foreclosures, reduced export trade, no national system of coining or printing money, and a staggering war debt that Congress could not make the states pay. If the new nation did not honor its war debts to European lenders, its standing among nations would be nil. No way to start a country. More threatening was the internal danger of revolt as debt-strapped legislatures levied taxes on debt-strapped merchants and farmers facing impoverishment, a situation set to explode. Farmers' revolts in New England, especially Shays's Rebellion in western Massachusetts, raised the long-feared spectre of anarchy and mob rule, but Congress could do nothing, unable to compel the states to send militia units to quell the uprisings. The crises escalated—frontier Indian raids, state rivalries over river commerce, a bitter tug-of-war over control of the western territories—and a Congress powerless to act. The thirteen "united states" were not yet the "United States."

• Founders on the defects of the Articles of Confederation, correspondence selections, 1780-1787. The Articles were "neither fit for war nor peace," wrote Alexander Hamilton, for they hobbled the fragile new nation that was struggling to defeat Britain despite its flimsy internal cohesion. What was wrong? What could fix it? Presented here are the thoughts of eight revered Patriots—George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert Morris, Henry Lee, and Henry Knox—from their correspondence in the last years of the war to the eve of the Constitutional Convention. How were their observations and recommendations reflected in the 1787 Constitution that replaced the unmourned Articles of Confederation? How would Anti-Federalists have answered the concerns of these eight men, all Federalists who supported the new Constitution? (8 pp.)





• James Madison, "Vices of the Political System of the United States," memorandum, 1787. Finally in 1786 the states agreed to meet as a whole and correct the "defects in the present Confederation." It was time to start over—and a road map was provided by James Madison, a member of the Virginia legislature, a former delegate to the Continental Congress, and a political theorist extraordinaire. As historian Jack Rakove aptly states, thirty-six-year-old Madison "was not so much a member of the generation that made the Revolution as he was of the generation that the Revolution made."2 On the eve of the Constitutional Convention, Madison composed a memorandum for George Washington, head of the Virginia delegation, listing twelve principal "vices" of the Articles. The first eight itemized the generally accepted weaknesses of the national government (i.e., Congress), and the last four specified defects of the states' laws—their multiplicity, mutability, injustice, and impotence. "The drafting of this memorandum," writes Rakove, "was essential to Madison's self-assigned task of formulating a working agenda that would allow the coming convention to hit the ground running."3 And that it did. Madison's "working agenda" spawned the Virginia Plan of Government that, with its emphasis on a strong national government in a federal system of checks and balances, provided the foundation of the U.S. Constitution. A challenging document it is, but one valued by Constitutional scholars and worth study. As Rakove stresses, "Vices" is a "truly remarkable as well as historic document. For one thing, it marks one of those rare moments in the history of political thought where one can actually glimpse a creative thinker at work, not by reading the final published version of his ideas, but by catching him at an earlier point, exploring a problem in the privacy of his study."4 (7 pp.)

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