XPost: alt.history

On Mon, 24 Jan 2022 07:21:16 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard <jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com> wrote:

Excerpt

Yet a brief ten years later, Americans ended up scrapping these
Articles of Confederation and creating a totally new and powerful
national government in its place. We are apt to assume that the
transformation was inevitable, but we should not. It was a momentous
change, and one not at all anticipated in 1776. The new government
adopted in 1787–88 was not a stronger league of friendship with a few
new powers added to the Congress. It was a radically new government altogether—one that utterly transformed the structure of central
authority and greatly diminished the power of the several states. The Constitution of 1787 created a national republic in its own right,
with a bicameral legislature, a single executive, and an independent
supreme court—a government spanning half a continent that, unlike the Confederation, was designed to bypass the states and operate directly
on individuals. It created in fact what a decade earlier had seemed theoretically impossible and virtually inconceivable.

Something awful had to have happened in the decade since independence
for so many Americans to change their minds so dramatically about what
kind of central government they would impose on themselves. What could
have happened? What could have compelled Americans to put aside their
earlier fears of far-removed political power and create such a strong
national government? Today we take the Constitution and a powerful
national government so much for granted that we can scarcely doubt its preordained creation. But perhaps we ought to wonder more why the
Constitution needed to be created at all.

Nineteenth-century Americans tended to explain the Constitution in
heroic terms. John Fiske, in a book published in 1888 for the
centennial celebration of the Constitution, The Critical Period of
American History, summed up this nineteenth-century thinking. “It is
not to much to say,” he wrote, “that the period of five years
following the peace of 1783 was the most critical moment in all the
history of the American people.” And he made this extraordinary claim
in the wake of the Civil War.

Fiske pictured the 1780s as a time of chaos and anarchy, with the
country’s finances near ruin. The Confederation government was
collapsing and the various state governments, beset by debtor and
paper money advocates who were pressing creditor and commercial
interests to the wall, were flying off in separate directions. It was
a desperate situation retrieved only at the eleventh hour by the
high-minded intervention of the founding fathers. These few great
framers saved the country from disaster.

The problem with this dominant nineteenth-century interpretation is
that there does not appear to have been any near collapse of the
economy or any breakdown in society. There was no anarchy, no serious
financial crisis, and apparently no real “critical period” after all.

Historical studies of the twentieth century tended to minimize the
critical nature of the 1780s. Things seem not to have been as bad as
John Fiske and the supporters of the Constitution, or the Federalists,
as they called themselves, pictured them. This was the thrust of the
work of the twentieth-century Progressive and neo-Progressive historians—beginning with Charles Beard at the start of the century
and continuing into the final decades of the century with Merrill
Jensen, and his students James Ferguson and Jackson Turner Main.
“Clearly,” wrote Ferguson, “it was not the era of public bankruptcy
and currency depreciation that historians used to depict.” Both the Confederation and the state governments had done much to stabilize
finances in the aftermath of the Revolution. The states had already
begun assuming payment of the public debt, and the deficits were not
really that serious. To be sure, there was economic dislocation and
disruption, but there was no breakdown of the economy. There was a
depression in 1784–85, but by 1786 the country was coming out of it,
and many of the Federalists were aware of the returning prosperity.
The commercial outlook was far from bleak. It’s true that Americans
were outside the mercantile protections of the British Empire, but
they were freely trading with each other and were reaching out to
ports throughout the world—to the West Indies and Spanish America, to
the continent of Europe, to Alaska, to Russia, and even to China.

Contrary to Fiske’s assessment, the 1780s were actually a time of
great excitement and elevation of spirit. The country was bursting
with energy and enterprise, and people were multiplying at a dizzying
rate and were on the move in search of opportunities. They were
spilling over the mountains into the newly acquired western
territories with astonishing rapidity. Kentucky, which had virtually
no white inhabitants at the time of independence, by 1780 already had
20,000 settlers.

Despite a slackening of immigration from abroad and the loss of tens
of thousands of British loyalists, the population grew as never before
or since. In fact, the 1780s experienced the fastest rate of
demographic growth of any decade in all of American history. Men and
women were marrying earlier and thus having more children—a measure of
the high expectations and exuberance of the period. “There is not upon
the face of the earth a body of people more happy or rising into
consequence with more rapid stride, than the Inhabitants of the United
States of America,” secretary of the Congress Charles Thomson told
Thomas Jefferson in 1786. “Population is encreasing, new houses
building, new settlements forming, and new manufactures establishing
with a rapidity beyond conception.” Where did all the talk of crisis
come from? “If we are undone,” declared a bewildered South Carolinian, “we are the most splendidly ruined of any nation in the universe.”

There were economic problems, of course, “but,” wrote historian
Merrill Jensen, “there is no evidence of stagnation and decay in the 1780s.” In fact, said Jensen, “the period was one of extraordinary growth.” It seems that the bulk of the society was seeking to fulfill
the promise of the Revolution, and countless Americans were taking the
pursuit of happiness seriously.

If all this is true, and the evidence is overwhelming that it is, then
why did Americans create the Constitution? If the Confederation was
not doing too bad a job of governing and commercial conditions in the
1780s were not actually desperate, why did something as extraordinary
as the Constitution have to be created?

Gordon S. Wood, Power and Liberty: Constitutionalism in the American
Revolution (Oxford University Press: New York, NY, 2021), 56-59.

(reformatted for legibility)


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Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk

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