Chapter 7: Founding a Nation, 1783–1791

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Welcome to the deep dive.

Okay, picture this.

New York City, 1788.

The streets are just packed, thousands of people celebrating.

Why?

It's the grand federal procession.

They're celebrating the new constitution.

Exactly.

And the star of the show is this huge replica ship on wheels, the federal ship Hamilton, 30 sailors on board firing cannons.

It's pure spectacle.

A real symbol of hope, right?

And unity for this new nation.

Yeah.

Benjamin Rush even wrote that social class just sort of melted away in these parades.

Everyone was caught up in it.

Yeah, that feeling, this huge optimism, but also knowing there's this massive job ahead.

That's where we're jumping in today.

So today we're diving deep into a really crucial time, drawing from Eric Foner's Give Me Liberty, chapter seven, founding a nation 1783 1791.

A pivotal eight years.

Absolutely.

Our mission here is to unpack how the US went from, well, basically 13 separate entities loosely tied together to a nation under a single constitution.

We'll look at the big events, the key players, and the really tough questions they were grappling with about liberty, power, and who they even were.

And that's the core of it, isn't it?

This massive challenge.

How do you actually build a lasting republic based on liberty after a revolution?

It's about high ideals, hitting hard realities, lots of debate, especially over who gets to be part of this empire of liberty Jefferson dreamed of.

Okay.

So let's get a feel for this new nation right at the start.

Hopes were incredibly high, weren't they?

This idea of a rising empire, different from Europe based on the declarations principles.

Right.

And they did have advantages.

I mean, look at the sheer size of the place bigger than Britain, Spain, and France combined.

Plus being geographically isolated helped, especially when Europe erupted into war later and a young growing population, lots of land ownership, relatively high literacy among white citizens felt like a fresh start.

Definitely.

But let's not get carried away.

The reality was also pretty shaky controlling that vast territory.

Easier said than done.

Yeah.

Foner points out most people live near the coast.

Huge areas west of the Appalachians were still Native American land.

The British hadn't left their forts near the Great Lakes.

And Spain could potentially choke off trade by closing New Orleans.

Plus communication was basic.

It was overwhelmingly rural and incredibly diverse,

different ethnicities, religions, and crucially around 700 ,000 enslaved people.

Unity was, well, aspirational at best.

John Adams nailed it when he said, we have no Americans in America.

It really highlights the challenge.

It forces these huge questions.

How should the country develop?

How do you balance local control with national needs?

And the big one,

who actually counts as American who gets the blessings of liberty?

So how did they first try to answer that?

What was the initial governing structure?

Okay.

So that brings us to America under the Confederation.

This is their first shot based on the Articles of Confederation, ratified in 1781.

And these articles, they really show how scared people were of strong central power after the war with Britain, right?

Exactly.

It wasn't really a government blueprint, more like a treaty for mutual defense.

Foner calls it a firm lead of friendship.

The states kept their sovereignty, freedom, and independence.

So a weak national government,

one house congress, one vote per state, no matter the size, no president, no national judiciary.

Right.

And needing nine states to agree on anything major,

that was tough.

But the killer weaknesses were that Congress couldn't tax anyone directly and couldn't regulate commerce.

It had to ask the states for money.

Which you can imagine didn't always work out so well.

Not reliably, no.

It was a structure born from fear, but those fears created, let's say, operational difficulties pretty quickly.

Still, it wasn't all bad under the articles.

Foner points out some real achievements, especially with managing all that western land they acquired after the revolution.

That's a key point.

Getting states like Virginia to give up their western land claims to the national government was huge.

It created a national domain and fostered some sense of unity.

And led to those important land ordinances, like the Ordinance of 1785 that set up the system for surveying and selling land in the Old Northwest, north of the Ohio River.

Yeah, that checkerboard pattern across the landscape, selling sections of 640 acres and reserving one section per township for public education.

That was pretty forward thinking.

But the big one was the Northwest Ordinance of 1787.

That laid out the process for creating new states.

And crucially, these new territories wouldn't be colonies.

They'd eventually become equal states.

Jefferson's Empire of Liberty idea in action.

And importantly, it banned slavery in the Old Northwest.

A decision with massive future consequences, even if it wasn't always perfectly enforced on the ground.

Right.

And under the articles, they also started setting Indian policy, generally assuming tribes would eventually disappear or assimilate, and negotiating treaties like Fort Stanwix and Fort McIntosh to get land sessions.

So some successes, particularly with the west,

but the underlying weaknesses, they started to cause serious problems, didn't they?

Oh, big time.

Economic chaos started brewing.

The national government was broke, couldn't pay war debts.

Britain blocked U .S.

ships in the West Indies trade.

But British goods flooded American markets, hurting local artisans.

And the states were going in different directions, printing their own money, messing with debt collection.

Exactly.

Which infuriated creditors and created massive instability.

And this leads right into

Right.

1786 -87 in Western Massachusetts,

debt ridden farmers, many Revolutionary War veterans led by Daniel Shays.

They shut down courts to stop foreclosures.

They called themselves regulators, using symbols like liberty trees.

It really echoed earlier protests.

But this time, it seriously spooked the elite.

Why was it such a turning point?

Because it convinced many powerful figures, people who were already leaning this way, that the articles were just too weak.

That maybe, just maybe, liberty could be threatened by too much democracy, or at least by unchecked popular action.

Ah, so the fear shifts.

It's not just fear of a king anymore, but fear of the crowd, maybe?

Sort of.

Figures like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton started arguing for a stronger national government.

They believed, as Foner quotes, liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power.

They wanted an energetic government to create stability, protect property, and manage the economy effectively.

And this thinking led to the Annapolis Convention in 86.

Yeah, delegates from only six states showed up to talk about commerce, but they realized the problems were bigger.

So they called for another convention, in Philadelphia the next year, ostensibly to revise the articles.

Which brings us to the main event, the Constitutional Convention, Philadelphia, May 1787.

55 delegates.

Pretty much the American elite, Washington, Franklin, Madison.

Mostly wealthy, educated men who agreed the national government needed more power.

And they met in secret, right?

Which tells you something about how sensitive this was.

Madison kept detailed notes, thankfully.

Absolutely crucial notes.

They quickly agreed they needed a whole new structure.

Legislature, executive, judiciary.

Congress needed taxing power.

States couldn't mess with property rights so much.

They were aiming for a republic somewhere between monarchy and, well, what they saw as the chaos under the articles.

But they clashed hard over representation, didn't they?

Big states versus small states.

Big time.

Madison's Virginia plan wanted representation based on population in both houses of Congress.

Smaller states panicked and proposed the New Jersey plan.

Keep one house, one vote per state, like the articles.

Deadlock.

So how did they break it?

The Great Compromise, sometimes called Connecticut Compromise.

He had a two -house Congress,

the Senate, with two senators from each state chosen by state legislatures that pleased the small states, and a house of representatives with representation based on population elected directly by the people pleasing the large states.

But even with the House being directly elected, the overall system had features designed to dampen direct democracy, right?

Definitely.

The Senate was meant to be more insulated, with longer terms.

Federal judges got life appointments.

And the president wasn't elected by popular vote, but by this complex electoral college system.

The founders were still pretty wary of pure popular rule.

So they hammer out this new framework.

Feiner highlights two core principles.

Federalism and checks and balances.

Let's unpack those.

Okay.

Federalism is about dividing power between the national government and the state governments.

The Constitution definitely beefed up national power, taxing, commerce, war, foreign policy.

But states kept control over most daily life stuff, like education and local law enforcement.

It set up this ongoing tension over where the line is drawn.

Which we still debate constantly today.

Exactly.

And then checks and balances or separation of powers is about dividing power within the national government between Congress, the president, and the judiciary.

So Congress makes laws, but the president can veto them.

Right.

But Congress can override veto with a two -thirds vote.

The president appoints judges, but the Senate has to confirm them.

The president can be impeached by the House and removed by the Senate.

It's this intricate web designed to prevent any one part from getting too powerful.

But there was one issue that really threatened to tear the whole thing apart.

Slavery.

Yeah.

Feiner emphasizes how deeply divisive this was, even though the words slave and slavery were deliberately kept out of the final document.

Sort of conspicuous silence.

But the constitution absolutely protected slavery and practiced it through several key clauses.

Three main ones.

First, the slave trade clause.

Congress couldn't ban the importation of slaves for 20 years until 1808.

A huge number of people, around 170 ,000 Africans, were forcibly brought in during that window.

Second.

The Fugitive Slave Clause.

It required states to return escaped slaves to their owners.

But importantly, it was vague on how this was supposed to happen, which caused massive friction later.

And the third, the most politically impactful one.

The Three -Fifths Clause.

This decided that, for purposes of representation in the House and the Electoral College, you'd count three -fifths of the enslaved population.

Which gave the southern states way more political clout than their free population warranted.

Immense clout.

Feiner notes that 12 of the first 16 presidents were southern slaveholders.

It embedded the power of slavery right into the heart of the new government.

So these were ugly compromises.

Some delegates, like Gouverneur Morris, apparently objected strongly on moral grounds.

He called it an injustice to human nature.

But ultimately, the desire for national unity, or perhaps the power of the southern delegates, won out.

Even opponents of slavery, like Patrick Henry, worried the new government might eventually interfere with it.

Okay, so Morris, despite his objections, actually wrote the final, polished version.

And changed the preamble.

Yeah, from we the people of the states evolved to the much more powerful we the people of the United States.

He also added those goals.

Establish justice, promote general welfare,

secure liberty things the articles failed at.

Then 39 delegates signed it, and off it went to the states for ratification.

Kicking off another huge fight.

The ratification debate.

This wasn't a done deal at all.

Not even close.

It needed nine states to

So Hamilton, Madison, and John Jay wrote those famous essays, the Federalist Papers, under the name Publius.

Arguing for the Constitution, right?

Saying this new system would actually protect liberty through checks and balances.

Exactly.

And Madison, in Federalist 10 and 51, made this really novel argument.

Don't fear a large republic, embrace it.

He said the sheer size and diversity of interest would prevent any single faction from dominating.

It's a defense of pluralism, really.

But the opponents, the Anti -Federalists, weren't buying it.

What were their main fears?

They thought it gave way too much power to the national government.

People like Patrick Henry, Samuel Adams.

They worried it would be dominated by elites, merchants, creditors.

They felt true liberty lived in smaller communities, closer to the people.

Their rallying cry was liberty.

Arguing the Constitution threatened it.

And their biggest weapon, Foner points out, was what the Constitution lacked.

Absolutely.

No Bill of Rights.

Where were the protections for free speech, trial by jury, freedom of the press?

This is a powerful argument.

So how did the Federalists win?

Better organization, probably controlled more newspapers.

But the clincher was Madison's promise.

Ratify now, and we'll add a Bill of Rights in the first Congress that swayed enough people.

By mid -1788, they had the nine states and eventually all 13 joined.

So Anti -Federalism as a movement faded, but that core idea, suspicion of centralized power, stuck around, didn't it?

Deeply embedded in American political culture, yes.

And it directly led to the Bill of Rights ratified in 1791.

It's ironic, isn't it?

The freedoms we often think of as most fundamental weren't in the original plan.

They were added because of the opposition.

Precisely.

Madison, who initially thought Bills of Rights were just parchment barriers,

ended up drafting them.

The First Amendment is huge freedom of religion, speech, press, assembly.

Totally different from Britain,

setting up the U .S.

as officially secular.

Then you have the Second Amendment, right to bear arms linked to a militia, protections against unfair trials, the Tenth Amendment reserving powers to the states.

Right.

Foner notes that while maybe not a huge deal to everyone at the time, the Bill of Rights became incredibly important later, especially in the 20th century.

It really framed how Americans talk about freedom as a list of rights protected from the government.

Okay, but let's circle back to that phrase, we the people.

The Constitution established who was in, but it also implicitly defined who was out, right?

Very much so.

Foner stresses this.

The Constitution identifies three groups.

Indians treated as members of separate nations, other persons, the euphemism for slaves, and the people who are entitled to American freedom.

So Native Americans were largely considered outside the system.

Generally, yes.

Leaders debated whether they should be removed, assimilated, or would just disappear.

Assimilation meant forcing them into farming, adopting American culture, abandoning their own ways.

It was a fundamental challenge to their identity.

And this led to continued conflicts like the wars in the Ohio Valley.

Absolutely.

Little Turtle's Miami Confederacy handed the U .S.

Army a massive defeat in 1791.

It took Anthony Wayne's victory at Fallen Timbers in 1794, leading to the Treaty of Greenville.

Where tribes gave up huge amounts of land in Ohio and Indiana.

Yes, and that treaty established the annuity system, yearly federal payments to tribes.

Foner argues this institutionalized government influence and outsider control over tribal life.

But most tribes resisted assimilation, seeing freedom as maintaining their autonomy and traditions.

What about African Americans?

They were a huge part of the population.

About one -fifth by 1790.

But their status was incredibly ambiguous.

The Constitution didn't define citizenship.

States decided who had rights.

In the North, with gradual emancipation, free blacks often had some rights, even voting in some places.

But the vast majority were enslaved and basically excluded from the idea of the American people.

Foner mentions Krevker's Letters from an American Farmer from 1782.

That popular book defined the man, the American, as a mix of Europeans.

Explicitly leaving Africans out of that melting pot.

And then Congress made an official policy with the Naturalization Act of 1790.

What did that do?

It limited naturalization becoming a citizen if you immigrated strictly to free white persons.

Passed with no debate, it basically barred any non -white immigrant from citizenship for 80 years.

It's a stark legislative definition of who belonged.

Even Jefferson, the author of the Declaration, struggled with this, didn't he?

In his notes on the state of Virginia.

It's deeply contradictory.

He wrote powerfully that enslaved people must eventually be free.

But he also expressed racist beliefs about their supposed natural incapacity for freedom and citizenship.

He believed in a homogenous white citizenry.

And his own actions, freeing very few of the people he enslaved, highlight this conflict.

It really shows the divided mind of that generation, as Foner puts it.

Absolutely.

So the revolution ironically widened the gap between free white Americans and enslaved black people.

Race became, Foner says, a convenient justification for slavery in a nation supposedly built on liberty.

We the people increasingly meant white people.

OK, so pulling this all together, we've gone from that weak league of friendship under the articles to the much stronger but deeply compromised system of the Constitution.

We saw the big debates, the crucial compromises over representation and slavery, and the fight for the Bill of Rights.

And we've seen how that powerful we the people had sharp defined edges from the very beginning, excluding huge groups based on race and origin.

What's crucial to take away here is that these fights over power, liberty, who belongs, they didn't end in 1791, not by a long shot.

No, they just set the stage for centuries of conflict and debate.

They continue to shape how we understand America, our rights, our identity.

We're still grappling with reconciling those founding ideals with a historical reality.

So here's something to think about as we wrap up.

What does it really take to build an empire of liberty, especially when its foundations were so intertwined with exclusion?

And how do those original debates about who is truly part of we the people continue to echo and challenge us today?

Definitely something to chew on.

Thanks for joining us on this deep dive into the founding of a nation.

Until next time, keep exploring, keep questioning, and keep diving deep.