Chapter 10 Summary
The unwritten character of the British constitution had been a big part of the problem that led
to the Revolution. They guarded against creating a homegrown elite entrenched in public office by
requiring that just about all state officials stand for election every year. Another anti-British resentment
was reflected in the disestablishment of the Church of England in every colony where it had been the
official church. Every state extended the franchise to more people than had enjoyed the right to vote
under colonial law. Several southern states enacted laws indicating the hope that the institution’s days
were numbered. The northern states went further; they abolished slavery or set in motion mechanisms
by which slavery would gradually disappear.
The collective affairs of the thirteen states were governed by the Articles of Confederation.
Under the Articles, the United States was “a firm league of friendship.” The weakness of the
Confederation Congress was consciously written into the Articles because the majority of the
revolutionaries who approved it were hostile to powerful government. The Confederation Congress had
its achievements. In January 1781, Virginia ceded the northern part of its claims to what would come to
be called the national domain. Within a few years, all the states with western claims except Georgia
followed suit. The Northwest Ordinances created procedures by which five future states would be
carved from the “Northwest Territory.”
Despite its achievements, disillusionment with the Confederation grew steadily. Finance was a
tenacious problem thanks to petty politics. Britain refused to treat the United States as an equal power.
Squabbles among the states invited foreign meddling. Alexander Hamilton and a few others, notably
James Madison of Virginia, intended a bloodless coup d’état, peacefully replacing the Articles of
Confederation with a completely new frame of government. Washington, Hamilton, and conservative
men like them believed that disorders like the Shays Rebellion in Massachusetts were the inevitable
consequence of weak government.
The Constitutional Convention met in secret first to last. They finished in September 1787
whence most of the delegates scattered north and south to lobby for their states’ approval. The men
who drew up the Constitution were conservatives in the classic meaning of the word. The government
they created was, in John Adams’s word, “mixed,” a balance of the “democratical” principle (power in
the hands of the many); the “aristocratical” (power in the hands of a few); and the “monocratical”
(power in the hands of one). Under the Constitution, the balance shifted, with preponderant powers
going to the federal government.
The Constitution was to go into effect when conventions in nine states ratified it. The battle for
ratification was between the federalists and anti-federalists. Among the anti-federalists were old
patriots who feared that any centralized power was an invitation to tyranny. Madison, Hamilton, and
John Jay took it upon themselves to answer critics in eighty-five essays later collected under the name
the Federalist Papers. The Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, was ratified in
1791 but tacitly agreed upon during the ratification process.