XPost: soc.history   
   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   On Mon, 24 Jan 2022 07:21:16 -0800 (PST), Jeffrey Rubard   
    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   
      
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