Chapter 7: Founding a Nation, 1783–1791

Following American independence, the young nation faced the fundamental challenge of constructing a functional republican government while preserving the revolutionary ideals of liberty that had inspired the break from Britain. The Articles of Confederation, adopted in 1781, reflected deep anxieties about centralized power by deliberately creating a weak national framework with minimal authority over taxation, commerce, or law enforcement, functioning essentially as a voluntary association of states rather than a unified sovereign body. Despite these structural limitations, the Confederation achieved significant accomplishments in managing western territories through the Land Ordinances, which established systematic procedures for surveying and selling public lands, designated portions for educational purposes, and notably prohibited slavery in the Northwest Territory, creating a vision of gradual western expansion based on free labor principles. However, economic instability, British retention of strategic frontier positions, and internal disorders including Shays's Rebellion demonstrated that fundamental governmental reform was necessary. Nationalist leaders including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton orchestrated the Constitutional Convention of 1787, where delegates constructed an entirely new framework featuring separated executive, legislative, and judicial powers, expanded congressional authority over revenue and interstate commerce, and an intricate system of federalism with mutual checks designed to prevent any single branch from dominating the others. Critical compromises addressed representation disparities between larger and smaller states through a bicameral structure, while slavery's position in the new republic was resolved through deeply troubling provisions including the three-fifths calculation for representation, mechanisms for retrieving escaped bondspeople, and a delayed prohibition on the transatlantic slave trade. The ratification process revealed fundamental disagreements between Federalists, who defended the Constitution's structural protections against factional tyranny through mechanisms like Madison's extended republic concept, and Anti-Federalists, who feared that centralized authority threatened local self-governance and individual freedoms. The inclusion of the Bill of Rights in 1791 ultimately secured ratification by guaranteeing specific protections for expression, conscience, and procedural justice. Yet the founding documents' universalizing language of popular sovereignty conspicuously excluded Native Americans, who confronted military campaigns and territorial dispossession, and African Americans, whom federal naturalization law explicitly defined as ineligible for citizenship, perpetuating a profound contradiction between revolutionary rhetoric and the reality of racialized exclusion.