From: jeffreydanielrubard@gmail.com   
      
   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    
   ltogether—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.   
      
      
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