Advocates of Centralization

• Weak and unpopular though the Confederation was, it had for a time satisfied a great many— probably a majority—of the people.

• They believed they had fought the Revolutionary War to avert the danger of what they considered remote and tyrannical authority; now they wanted to keep political power centered in the states, where they could carefully and closely control it.

• People who were owed money wanted to stop the states from issuing paper money, which would lower the value of what they received in payment.

• Investors in Confederation securities wanted the government to fund the debt and thus enhance the value of their securities.

• Large property owners looked for protection from the threat of mobs,

• By 1786, these diverse demands had grown so powerful that the issue was no longer whether the Confederation should be changed but how drastic the changes should be.

• Even the defenders of the existing system reluctantly came to agree that the government needed strengthening at its weakest point—its lack of power to tax.

A Divided Convention

• Fifty-five men, representing all the states except Rhode Island, attended one or more sessions of the convention that sat in the Philadelphia State House from May to September 1787.

• These “Founding Fathers,” as they would later become known, were relatively young; their average age was forty-four, and only one delegate (Benjamin Franklin, then eighty-one) was of advanced age.

• They were well educated by the standards of their time.

• Most represented the great propertied interests of the country, and many feared what one of them called the “turbulence and follies” of democracy.

• Yet all were also products of the American Revolution and retained the Revolutionary suspicion of concentrated power.

• The convention unanimously chose Washington to preside over its sessions and then closed its business to the public and the press.

• The members then ruled that each state delegation would have a single vote. Major decisions would not require unanimity, as they did in Congress, but only a simple majority.

• The Virginia Plan (as it came to be known) called for a new national legislature consisting of two houses.

• In the lower house, the states would be represented in proportion to their population; thus the largest state (Virginia) would have about ten times as many representatives as the smallest (Delaware).

• Members of the upper house were to be elected by the lower house under no rigid system of representation; thus some of the smaller states might at times have no members in the upper house.

• Would the states be equally represented in the upper house, or would the large states have more members than the small ones?

• Would slaves (who could not vote) be counted as part of the population in determining the size of a state’s representation in Congress, or were they to be considered simple property?

• Delegates from states with large and apparently permanent slave populations— especially those from South Carolina—wanted to have it both ways.

• They argued that slaves should be considered persons in determining representation.

• But they wanted slaves to be considered property if the new government were to levy taxes on each state on the basis of population

Compromise

• Finally, on July 2, the convention agreed to create a “grand committee,” with a single delegate from each state (and with Franklin as chairman), to resolve the disagreements

• The committee produced a proposal that became the basis of the “Great Compromise.”

• Its most important achievement was resolving the difficult problem of representation

• Each slave would count as three-fifths of a free person in determining the basis for both representation and direct taxation.

• The three-fifths formula was based on the false assumption that a slave was three-fifths as productive as a free worker and thus contributed only three-fifths as much wealth to the state

• Over the next few weeks, the convention agreed to another important compromise on the explosive issue of slavery.

• The representatives of the southern states feared that the power to regulate trade might interfere with their agrarian economy, which relied heavily on sales abroad, and with slavery.

• In response, the convention agreed that the new legislature would not be permitted to tax exports;

• Congress would also be forbidden to impose a duty of more than $10 head-on imported slaves, and it would have no authority to stop the slave trade for twenty-year

The Constitution of 1787

• Many people contributed to the creation of the American Constitution, but the single most important of them was James Madison—the most creative political thinker of his generation

• The question of sovereignty had been one of the chief sources of friction between the colonies and Great Britain, and it continued to trouble Americans as they attempted to create their own government.

• Resolving the problem of sovereignty made possible one of the distinctive features of the Constitution—its distribution of powers between the national and state governments.

• It was, Madison wrote at the time, “in strictness, neither a national nor a federal Constitution, but a composition of both.

• In addition to solving the question of sovereignty, the Constitution produced a solution to a problem troubling to Americans: the problem of concentrated authority

• On September 17, 1787, thirty-nine delegates signed the Constitution, doubtless sharing the feelings that Benjamin Franklin expressed at the end: “Thus I consent, Sir, to this Constitution, because I expect no better, and because I am not sure it is not the best.”

The Limits of the Constitution

• The Constitution of 1789 was a document that established a democratic republic for white people, mostly white men.

• Indians and African Americans, the two largest population groups sharing the lands of the United States with Anglo-Americans, enjoyed virtually none of the rights and privileges provided to the white population.

Federalists and Anti-Federalists

• The Constitution specified that the new government would come into existence among the ratifying states when any nine of the thirteen had ratified it.

• Supporters of the Constitution had a number of advantages. They were better organized than their opponents, and they had the support of the two most eminent men in America, Franklin, and Washington

• The Federalists called their critics “Antifederalists,” implying that their rivals had nothing to offer except opposition and chaos.

• But the Antifederalists had serious and intelligent arguments of their own.

• They presented themselves as the defenders of the true principles of the Revolution.

• The Constitution, they believed, would betray those principles by establishing a strong, potentially tyrannical, center of power in the new national government.

• The “federal” government, they claimed, would increase taxes, obliterate the states, wield dictatorial powers, favor the “well-born” over the common people, and put an end to individual liberty.

• But their biggest complaint was that the Constitution lacked a bill of rights, a concern that revealed one of the most important sources of their opposition: a basic mistrust of human nature and of the capacity of human beings to wield power.

• The Anti-Federalists argued that any government that centralized authority would inevitably produce despotism.

• Their demand for a bill of rights was a product of this belief: no government could be trusted to protect the liberties of its citizens; only by enumerating the natural rights of the people could there be any assurance that those rights would be preserved.

Completing the Structure

• The first elections under the Constitution took place in the early months of 1789.

• George Washington had presided at the Constitutional Convention, and many delegates who had favored ratification did so only because they expected him to preside over the new government as well.

• Washington received the votes of all the presidential electors. John Adams, a leading Federalist, became vice president

• The first Congress served in many ways almost as a continuation of the Constitutional Convention, because its principal responsibility was filling in the various gaps in the Constitution.

• Its most important task was drafting a bill of rights.

• By early 1789, even Madison had come to agree that some sort of bill of rights was essential to legitimize the new government in the eyes of its opponents.

• Congress approved twelve amendments on September 25, 1789; ten of them were ratified by the states by the end of 1791.

• What we know as the Bill of Rights is the first ten amendments to the Constitution.

• Nine of them placed limitations on Congress by forbidding it to infringe on certain basic rights: freedom of religion, speech, and the press; immunity from arbitrary arrest; trial by jury; and others.

• The Tenth Amendment reserved to the states all powers except those specifically withheld from them or delegated to the federal government.

• The Constitution referred indirectly to executive departments but did not specify what or how many there should be.

• The first Congress created three such departments—state, treasury, and war—and also established the offices of the attorney general and the postmaster general. To the office of the secretary of the treasury

6.2: Federalists and Republicans

Hamilton and the Federalists

• For twelve years, control of the new government remained firmly in the hands of the Federalists.

• That was in part because George Washington had always envisioned a strong national government and as president had quietly supported those who were attempting to create one.

• His enormous prestige throughout the nation was one of the Federalists’ greatest assets.

• Of all the national leaders of his time, Hamilton was one of the most aristocratic in personal tastes and political philosophy

• The Federalists, in short, offered more than a vision of how to stabilize the new government.

Enacting the Federalist Program

• Few members of Congress objected to Hamilton’s plan for funding the national debt, but many did oppose his proposal to accept the debt “at par,” that is, at face value

• Hamilton’s proposal that the federal government assume the state debts encountered greater difficulty

• The capital had moved from New York City back to Philadelphia in 1790.

• But the Virginians wanted a new capital near them in the South.

• Many Americans came to believe that the Federalist program served the interests not of the people but of small, wealthy elites.

The Republican Opposition

• The Constitution had made no reference to political parties, and the omission was not an oversight.

• Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers, Number 10, perhaps the most influential of all the essays

• Because the Federalists appeared to be creating a menacing and tyrannical structure of power, their opponents believed that there was no alternative but to organize a vigorous opposition

• This first “Republican” Party is not an ancestor of the modern Republican Party, which was born in the 1850s.

• This institutionalized factionalism is known to scholars as to the “first party system.”

• From the beginning, the preeminent figures among the Republicans were Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.

• The difference between the Federalist and Republican social philosophies was visible in, among other things, reactions to the French Revolution.

• As that revolution grew increasingly radical in the 1790s, with its attacks on organized religion, the overthrow of the monarchy, and eventually the execution of the king and queen, the Federalists expressed horror.

• But the Republicans generally applauded the democratic, anti-aristocratic spirit they believed the French Revolution embodied.

6.3: Establishing National Sovereignty

Securing the Frontier

• Despite the Northwest Ordinance, the Confederation Congress had largely failed to tie the outlying western areas of the country firmly to the government.

• Farmers in western Massachusetts had risen in revolt

• Settlers in Vermont, Kentucky, and Tennessee had toyed with the idea of separating from the Union.

• The new government under the Constitution inherited these problems.

• The federal government did not leave the settlement of the so-called Whiskey Rebellion to Pennsylvania, as the Confederation Congress had left Shays’s Rebellion to Massachusetts.

• The federal government won the allegiance of the whiskey rebels by intimidating them.

• It won the loyalties of other frontier people by accepting their territories as new states in the Union.

• The last of the original thirteen colonies joined the Union once the Bill of Rights had been appended to the Constitution

Native Americans and the New Nation

• The new government faced a greater challenge, also inherited from the Confederation, in the more distant areas of the Northwest and the Southwest, where Indians fought to retain tribal lands that the U.S. government claimed for itself.

• The ordinances of 1784–1787 had produced a series of border conflicts with Indian tribes resisting white settlement in what they considered their lands.

• Although the United States eventually defeated virtually every Indian challenge, it was clear that the larger question of who was to control the lands of the West—the United States or the Indian nations—remained unanswered.

• These clashes revealed another issue the Constitution had done little to resolve: the place of the Indian nations within the new federal structure.

• The Constitution barely mentioned Native Americans.

• Article I excluded “Indians not taxed” from being counted in the population totals that determined the number of seat states would receive in the House of Representatives, and it gave Congress the power to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian tribes.”

• it made clear that they were not “foreign Nations”

• Above all, the Constitution did not address the major issue that would govern relations between whites and Indians: land.

• Indian nations lived within the boundaries of the United States, yet they claimed (and the white government at times agreed) that they had some measure of sovereignty within their own lands.

• But neither the Constitution nor common law offered any clear guide to the rights of a “nation within a nation” or to the precise nature of tribal sovereignty, which ultimately depended on control of the land.

• Thus the relationship between the tribes and the United States remained to be determined by a series of treaties, agreements, and judicial decisions in a process that has continued for more than 200 years.

Maintaining Neutrality

• Another crisis in Anglo-American relations emerged in 1793 when the new French government, created by the Revolution of 1789, went to war with Great Britain and its allies.

• The first challenge to American neutrality came from revolutionary France and its first diplomatic representative to America, the brash and youthful Edmond Genet

• A second and even greater challenge came from Great Britain. Early in 1794, the Royal Navy began seizing hundreds of American ships engaged in trade in the French West Indies, outraging public opinion in the United States.

• The anti-British feeling rose still higher at the report that the governor-general of Canada had delivered a warlike speech to the Indians on the northwestern frontier encouraging them to challenge U.S. dominance there.

• War would mean an end to imports from England, and most of the revenue for maintaining his financial system came from duties on those imports.

Jay’s Treaty and Pinckney's Treaty

• Jefferson had resigned as secretary of state in 1793 to devote more time to his political activities, but his successor, Edmund Randolph, was even more ardently pro french than Jefferson had been.

• So Hamilton persuaded Washington to name a special commissioner to England: John Jay, chief justice of the United States Supreme Court and a staunch New York Federalist

6.4: The Downfall of the Federalists

• The Federalists’ impressive triumphs did not ensure their continued dominance in the national government.

• On the contrary, success seemed to produce problems of its own—problems that led to their downfall.

• After 1796, the Federalists never won another election.

The Election of 1796

• Despite strong pressure from his many admirers to run for a third term as president, George Washington insisted on retiring from office in 1797

• Jefferson was the uncontested candidate of the Republicans in 1796

• Hamilton, the personification of Federalism, had created too many enemies to be a credible candidate

• So Vice President John Adams, who had been directly associated with none of the unpopular Federalist measures, became his party’s nominee for president.

• The Federalists were still clearly the dominant party, and there was little doubt of their ability to win a majority of the presidential electors

• Adams presided over a divided party, which faced a strong and resourceful Republican opposition committed to its extinction.

• Adams was not even the dominant figure in his own party; Hamilton remained the most influential Federalist, and Adams was never able to challenge him effectively.

• The new president was one of the country’s most accomplished and talented diplomats, but he had few skills as a politician.

The Quasi-War with France

• American relations with Great Britain and Spain improved as a result of Jay’s and Pinckney’s Treaties.

• But the nation’s relations with revolutionary France quickly deteriorated.

• French vessels captured American ships on the high seas and at times imprisoned the crews.

• For nearly two years after the “XYZ Affair,” as it became known, the United States found itself engaged in an undeclared war with France

• The “quasi-war” came to a reasonably peaceful end

Repression and Protest

• The conflict with France helped the Federalists increase their majorities in Congress in 1798.

• Armed with this new strength, they began to consider ways to silence the Republican opposition.

• The result was some of the most controversial legislation in American history: the Alien and Sedition Acts.

• The Alien Act placed new obstacles in the way of foreigners who wished to become American citizens, and it strengthened the president’s hand in dealing with aliens.

• The Sedition Act allowed the government to prosecute those who engaged in “sedition” against the government

• President Adams signed the new laws but was cautious in implementing them. He did not deport any aliens,

• The Alien Act helped discourage immigration and encouraged some foreigners already in the country to leave.

• And the administration made use of the Sedition Act to arrest and convict ten men, most of them Republican newspaper editors whose only crime had been to criticize the Federalists in government.

• The Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, as they were known, used the ideas of John Locke to argue that the federal government had been formed by a “compact” or contract among the states and possessed only certain delegated powers.

• Whenever the federal government exercised any undelegated powers, its acts were “unauthoritative, void, and of no force.”

• Matthew Lyon, a Republican from Vermont, responded to an insult from Roger Griswold, a Federalist from Connecticut, by spitting in Griswold’s face. Griswold attacked Lyon with his cane. Lyon fought back with a pair of fire tongs, and the two men ended up wrestling on the floor.

The “Revolution” of 1800

• These bitter controversies shaped the 1800 presidential election.

• Adams and Jefferson were again the opposing candidates.

• But the campaign of 1800 was very different from the one preceding it. Indeed, it may have been the ugliest in American history

• The Republicans portrayed Adams as a tyrant conspiring to become king, and they accused the Federalists of plotting to subvert human liberty and impose slavery on the people

• The Constitution called for each elector to “vote by ballot for two persons.”

• The normal practice was for an elector to cast one vote for his party’s presidential candidate and another for the vice-presidential candidate

• By the Judiciary Act of 1801, passed by the lame-duck Congress, the Federalists reduced the number of Supreme Court justice ships by one but greatly increased the number of federal judgeships as a whole.

• Adams quickly appointed Federalists to the newly created positions.

• Indeed, there were charges that he stayed up until midnight on his last day in office to finish signing the new judges’ commissions. These officeholders became known as the “midnight appointments.”