tution | V. Rights and Compromises | VI. Hamilton’s Financial System | VII. The Whiskey Rebellion

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I. Introduction | II. Shays’ Rebellion | III. The Constitutional Convention | IV. Ratifying the Consti-

tution | V. Rights and Compromises | VI. Hamilton’s Financial System | VII. The Whiskey Rebellion

and Jay’s Treaty | VIII. The French Revolution and the Limits of Liberty | IX. Religious Freedom | X.

The Election of 1800 | XI. Conclusion | XII. Primary Sources | XIII. Reference Material

THE AMERICAN YAWP

6. A New Nation

“The Federal Pillars,” from The Massachusetts Centinel, August 2, 1789. Library of Congress.

*The American Yawp is an evolving, collaborative text. Please click here to improve this chapter.*

I. Introduction

On July 4, 1788, Philadelphians turned out for a “grand federal procession” in honor of the new na-

tional constitution. Workers in various trades and professions demonstrated. Blacksmiths carted

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around a working forge, on which they symbolically beat swords into farm tools. Potters proudly

carried a sign paraphrasing from the Bible, “The potter hath power over his clay,” linking God’s

power with an artisan’s work and a citizen’s control over the country. Christian clergymen mean-

while marched arm-in-arm with Jewish rabbis. The grand procession represented what many Ameri-

cans hoped the United States would become: a diverse but cohesive, prosperous nation.

Over the next few years, Americans would celebrate more of these patriotic holidays. In April 1789,

for example, thousands gathered in New York to see George Washington take the presidential oath

of o�ce. That November, Washington called his fellow citizens to celebrate with a day of thanksgiv-

ing, particularly for “the peaceable and rational manner” in which the government had been estab-

lished.

But the new nation was never as cohesive as its champions had hoped. Although the o�cials of the

new federal government—and the people who supported it—placed great emphasis on unity and

cooperation, the country was often anything but uni�ed. The Constitution itself had been a contro-

versial document adopted to strengthen the government so that it could withstand internal con�icts.

Whatever the later celebrations, the new nation had looked to the future with uncertainty. Less than

two years before the national celebrations of 1788 and 1789, the United States had faced the threat

of collapse.

 

II. Shays’ Rebellion

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Daniel Shays became a divisive �gure, to some a violent rebel seeking to upend the new American government, to others an up-
holder of the true revolutionary virtues Shays and others fought for. This contemporary depiction of Shays and his accomplice
Job Shattuck portrays them in the latter light as rising “illustrious from the Jail.” Unidenti�ed artist, Daniel Shays and Job Shat-
tuck, 1787. Wikimedia.

In 1786 and 1787, a few years after the Revolution ended, thousands of farmers in western Massa-

chusetts were struggling under a heavy burden of debt. Their problems were made worse by weak

local and national economies. Many political leaders saw both the debt and the struggling economy

as a consequence of the Articles of Confederation, which provided the federal government with no

way to raise revenue and did little to create a cohesive nation out of the various states. The farmers

wanted the Massachusetts government to protect them from their creditors, but the state supported

the lenders instead. As creditors threatened to foreclose on their property, many of these farmers, in-

cluding Revolutionary War veterans, took up arms.

Led by a fellow veteran named Daniel Shays, these armed men, the “Shaysites,” resorted to tactics

like the patriots had used before the Revolution, forming blockades around courthouses to keep

judges from issuing foreclosure orders. These protesters saw their cause and their methods as an ex-

tension of the “Spirit of 1776”; they were protecting their rights and demanding redress for the

people’s grievances.

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Governor James Bowdoin, however, saw the Shaysites as rebels who wanted to rule the government

through mob violence. He called up thousands of militiamen to disperse them. A former Revolu-

tionary general, Benjamin Lincoln, led the state force, insisting that Massachusetts must prevent “a

state of anarchy, confusion and slavery.” In January 1787, Lincoln’s militia arrested more than one

thousand Shaysites and reopened the courts.

Daniel Shays and other leaders were indicted for treason, and several were sentenced to death, but

eventually Shays and most of his followers received pardons. Their protest, which became known as

Shays’ Rebellion, generated intense national debate. While some Americans, like Thomas Je�erson,

thought “a little rebellion now and then” helped keep the country free, others feared the nation was

sliding toward anarchy and complained that the states could not maintain control. For nationalists

like James Madison of Virginia, Shays’ Rebellion was a prime example of why the country needed a

strong central government. “Liberty,” Madison warned, “may be endangered by the abuses of liberty

as well as the abuses of power.”

 

III. The Constitutional Convention

The uprising in Massachusetts convinced leaders around the country to act. After years of goading

by James Madison and other nationalists, delegates from twelve of the thirteen states met at the

Pennsylvania state house in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787. Only Rhode Island declined to

send a representative. The delegates arrived at the convention with instructions to revise the Articles

of Confederation.

The biggest problem the convention needed to solve was the federal government’s inability to levy

taxes. That weakness meant that the burden of paying back debt from the Revolutionary War fell on

the states. The states, in turn, found themselves beholden to the lenders who had bought up their

war bonds. That was part of why Massachusetts had chosen to side with its wealthy bondholders

over poor western farmers.

James Madison, however, had no intention of simply revising the Articles of Confederation. He in-

tended to produce a completely new national constitution. In the preceding year, he had completed

two extensive research projects—one on the history of government in the United States, the other

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on the history of republics around the world. He used this research as the basis for a proposal he

brought with him to Philadelphia. It came to be called the Virginia Plan, named after Madison’s

home state.

James Madison was a central �gure in the recon�guration of the national government. Madison’s Virginia Plan was a guiding
document in the formation of a new government under the Constitution. John Vanderlyn, Portrait of James Madison, 1816.
Wikimedia.

The Virginia Plan was daring. Classical learning said that a republican form of government required

a small and homogenous state: the Roman republic, or a small country like Denmark, for example.

Citizens who were too far apart or too di�erent could not govern themselves successfully. Conven-

tional wisdom said the United States needed to have a very weak central government, which should

simply represent the states on certain matters they had in common. Otherwise, power should stay at

the state or local level. But Madison’s research had led him in a di�erent direction. He believed it was

possible to create “an extended republic” encompassing a diversity of people, climates, and customs.

The Virginia Plan, therefore, proposed that the United States should have a strong federal govern-

ment. It was to have three branches—legislative, executive, and judicial—with power to act on any

issues of national concern. The legislature, or Congress, would have two houses, in which every state

would be represented according to its population size or tax base. The national legislature would

have veto power over state laws.

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Other delegates to the convention generally agreed with Madison that the Articles of Confederation

had failed. But they did not agree on what kind of government should replace them. In particular,

they disagreed about the best method of representation in the new Congress. Representation was an

important issue that in�uenced a host of other decisions, including deciding how the national execu-

tive branch should work, what speci�c powers the federal government should have, and even what to

do about the divisive issue of slavery.

For more than a decade, each state had enjoyed a single vote in the Continental Congress. Small

states like New Jersey and Delaware wanted to keep things that way. The Connecticut delegate

Roger Sherman, furthermore, argued that members of Congress should be appointed by the state

legislatures. Ordinary voters, Sherman said, lacked information, were “constantly liable to be misled”

and “should have as little to do as may be” about most national decisions. Large states, however,

preferred the Virginia Plan, which would give their citizens far more power over the legislative

branch. James Wilson of Pennsylvania argued that since the Virginia Plan would vastly increase the

powers of the national government, representation should be drawn as directly as possible from the

public. No government, he warned, “could long subsist without the con�dence of the people.” )

Ultimately, Roger Sherman suggested a compromise. Congress would have a lower house, the House

of Representatives, in which members were assigned according to each state’s population, and an

upper house, which became the Senate, in which each state would have one vote. This proposal, af-

ter months of debate, was adopted in a slightly altered form as the Great Compromise: each state

would have two senators, who could vote independently. In addition to establishing both types of

representation, this compromise also counted enslaved people as three �fths of a person for represen-

tation and tax purposes.

The delegates took even longer to decide on the form of the national executive branch. Should exec-

utive power be in the hands of a committee or a single person? How should its o�ceholders be cho-

sen? On June 1, James Wilson moved that the national executive power reside in a single person.

Coming only four years after the American Revolution, that proposal was extremely contentious; it

conjured up images of an elected monarchy. The delegates also worried about how to protect the

executive branch from corruption or undue control. They endlessly debated these questions, and

not until early September did they decide the president would be elected by a special electoral

college.

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In the end, the Constitutional Convention proposed a government unlike any other, combining ele-

ments copied from ancient republics and English political tradition but making some limited demo-

cratic innovations—all while trying to maintain a delicate balance between national and state

sovereignty. It was a complicated and highly controversial scheme.

 

IV. Ratifying the Constitution

Delegates to the Constitutional Convention assembled, argued, and �nally agreed in this room, styled in the same manner as dur-
ing the Convention. Photograph of the Assembly Room, Independence Hall, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Wikimedia. Creative
Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.

The convention voted to send its proposed Constitution to Congress, which was then sitting in

New York, with a cover letter from George Washington. The plan for adopting the new Constitu-

tion, however, required approval from special state rati�cation conventions, not just Congress. Dur-

ing the rati�cation process, critics of the Constitution organized to persuade voters in the di�erent

states to oppose it.

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Importantly, the Constitutional Convention had voted down a proposal from Virginia’s George

Mason, the author of Virginia’s state Declaration of Rights, for a national bill of rights. This omis-

sion became a rallying point for opponents of the document. Many of these Anti-Federalists argued

that without such a guarantee of speci�c rights, American citizens risked losing their personal liberty

to the powerful federal government. The pro-rati�cation Federalists, on the other hand, argued that

including a bill of rights was not only redundant but dangerous; it could limit future citizens from

adding new rights.

Citizens debated the merits of the Constitution in newspaper articles, letters, sermons, and co�ee-

house quarrels across America. Some of the most famous, and most important, arguments came

from Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison in the Federalist Papers, which were pub-

lished in various New York newspapers in 1787 and 1788. The �rst crucial vote came at the begin-

ning of 1788 in Massachusetts. At �rst, the Anti-Federalists at the Massachusetts ratifying conven-

tion probably had the upper hand, but after weeks of debate, enough delegates changed their votes

to narrowly approve the Constitution. But they also approved a number of proposed amendments,

which were to be submitted to the �rst Congress. This pattern—ratifying the Constitution but at-

taching proposed amendments—was followed by other state conventions.

The most high-pro�le convention was held in Richmond, Virginia, in June 1788, when Federalists

like James Madison, Edmund Randolph, and John Marshall squared o� against equally in�uential

Anti-Federalists like Patrick Henry and George Mason. Virginia was America’s most populous state,

it had produced some of the country’s highest-pro�le leaders, and the success of the new govern-

ment rested upon its cooperation. After nearly a month of debate, Virginia voted 89 to 79 in favor of

rati�cation.

On July 2, 1788, Congress announced that a majority of states had rati�ed the Constitution and

that the document was now in e�ect. Yet this did not mean the debates were over. North Carolina,

New York, and Rhode Island had not completed their rati�cation conventions, and Anti-Federalists

still argued that the Constitution would lead to tyranny. The New York convention would ratify the

Constitution by just three votes, and �nally Rhode Island would ratify it by two votes—a full year

after George Washington was inaugurated as president.

 

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V. Rights and Compromises

Although debates continued, Washington’s election as president cemented the Constitution’s au-

thority. By 1793, the term Anti-Federalist would be essentially meaningless. Yet the debates pro-

duced a piece of the Constitution that seems irreplaceable today. Ten amendments were added in

1791. Together, they constitute the Bill of Rights. James Madison, against his original wishes, sup-

ported these amendments as an act of political compromise and necessity. He had won election to

the House of Representatives only by promising his Virginia constituents such a list of rights.

There was much the Bill of Rights did not cover. Women found no special protections or guarantee

of a voice in government. Many states continued to restrict voting only to men who owned signi�-

cant amounts of property. And slavery not only continued to exist; it was condoned and protected

by the Constitution.

Of all the compromises that formed the Constitution, perhaps none would be more important than

the compromise over the slave trade. Americans generally perceived the transatlantic slave trade as

more violent and immoral than slavery itself. Many northerners opposed it on moral grounds. But

they also understood that letting southern states import more Africans would increase their political

power. The Constitution counted each Black individual as three �fths of a person for purposes of

representation, so in districts with many enslaved people, the white voters had extra in�uence. On

the other hand, the states of the Upper South also welcomed a ban on the Atlantic trade because

they already had a surplus of enslaved laborers. Banning importation meant enslavers in Virginia and

Maryland could get higher prices when they sold their enslaved laborers to states like South Carolina

and Georgia that were dependent on a continued slave trade.

New England and the Deep South agreed to what was called a “dirty compromise” at the Constitu-

tional Convention in 1787. New Englanders agreed to include a constitutional provision that pro-

tected the foreign slave trade for twenty years; in exchange, South Carolina and Georgia delegates

had agreed to support a constitutional clause that made it easier for Congress to pass commercial leg-

islation. As a result, the Atlantic slave trade resumed until 1808 when it was outlawed for three rea-

sons. First, Britain was also in the process of outlawing the slave trade in 1807, and the United States

did not want to concede any moral high ground to its rival. Second, the Haitian Revolution (1791–

1804), a successful slave revolt against French colonial rule in the West Indies, had changed the stakes

in the debate. The image of thousands of armed Black revolutionaries terri�ed white Americans.

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Third, the Haitian Revolution had ended France’s plans to expand its presence in the Americas, so

in 1803, the United States had purchased the Louisiana Territory from the French at a �re-sale price.

This massive new territory, which had doubled the size of the United States, had put the question of

slavery’s expansion at the top of the national agenda. Many white Americans, including President

Thomas Je�erson, thought that ending the external slave trade and dispersing the domestic slave

population would keep the United States a white man’s republic and perhaps even lead to the disap-

pearance of slavery.

The ban on the slave trade, however, lacked e�ective enforcement measures and funding. Moreover,

instead of freeing illegally imported Africans, the act left their fate to the individual states, and many

of those states simply sold intercepted enslaved people at auction. Thus, the ban preserved the logic

of property ownership in human beings. The new federal government protected slavery as much as

it expanded democratic rights and privileges for white men.

 

VI. Hamilton’s Financial System

Alexander Hamilton saw America’s future as a metropolitan, commercial, industrial society, in contrast to Thomas Je�erson’s
nation of small farmers. While both men had the ear of President Washington, Hamilton’s vision proved most appealing and en-
during. John Trumbull, Portrait of Alexander Hamilton, 1806. Wikimedia.

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President George Washington’s cabinet choices re�ected continuing political tensions over the size

and power of the federal government. The vice president was John Adams, and Washington chose

Alexander Hamilton to be his secretary of the treasury. Both men wanted an active government that

would promote prosperity by supporting American industry. However, Washington chose Thomas

Je�erson to be his secretary of state, and Je�erson was committed to restricting federal power and

preserving an economy based on agriculture. Almost from the beginning, Washington struggled to

reconcile the Federalist and Republican (or Democratic-Republican) factions within his own admin-

istration.

Alexander Hamilton believed that self-interest was the “most powerful incentive of human actions.”

Self-interest drove humans to accumulate property, and that e�ort created commerce and industry.

According to Hamilton, government had important roles to play in this process. First, the state

should protect private property from theft. Second, according to Hamilton, the state should use hu-

man “passions” and “make them subservient to the public good.” In other words, a wise govern-

ment would harness its citizens’ desire for property so that both private individuals and the state

would bene�t.

Hamilton, like many of his contemporary statesmen, did not believe the state should ensure an equal

distribution of property. Inequality was understood as “the great & fundamental distinction in Soci-

ety,” and Hamilton saw no reason why this should change. Instead, Hamilton wanted to tie the eco-

nomic interests of wealthy Americans, or “monied men,” to the federal government’s �nancial

health. If the rich needed the government, then they would direct their energies to making sure it re-

mained solvent.

Hamilton, therefore, believed that the federal government must be “a Repository of the Rights of

the wealthy.” As the nation’s �rst secretary of the treasury, he proposed an ambitious �nancial plan

to achieve just that.

The �rst part of Hamilton’s plan involved federal “assumption” of state debts, which were mostly

left over from the Revolutionary War. The federal government would assume responsibility for the

states’ unpaid debts, which totaled about $25 million. Second, Hamilton wanted Congress to create

a bank—a Bank of the United States.

The goal of these proposals was to link federal power and the country’s economic vitality. Under the

assumption proposal, the states’ creditors (people who owned state bonds or promissory notes)

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would turn their old notes in to the treasury and receive new federal notes of the same face value.

Hamilton foresaw that these bonds would circulate like money, acting as “an engine of business, and

instrument of industry and commerce.” This part of his plan, however, was controversial for two

reasons.

First, many taxpayers objected to paying the full face value on old notes, which had fallen in market

value. Often the current holders had purchased them from the original creditors for pennies on the

dollar. To pay them at full face value, therefore, would mean rewarding speculators at taxpayer ex-

pense. Hamilton countered that government debts must be honored in full, or else citizens would

lose all trust in the government. Second, many southerners objected that they had already paid their

outstanding state debts, so federal assumption would mean forcing them to pay again for the debts

of New Englanders. Nevertheless, President Washington and Congress both accepted Hamilton’s

argument. By the end of 1794, 98 percent of the country’s domestic debt had been converted into

new federal bonds.

Hamilton’s plan for a Bank of the United States, similarly, won congressional approval despite

strong opposition. Thomas Je�erson and other Republicans argued that the plan was unconstitu-

tional; the Constitution did not authorize Congress to create a bank. Hamilton, however, argued

that the bank was not only constitutional but also important for the country’s prosperity. The Bank

of the United States would ful�ll several needs. It would act as a convenient depository for federal

funds. It would print paper banknotes backed by specie (gold or silver). Its agents would also help

control in�ation by periodically taking state bank notes to their banks of origin and demanding

specie in exchange, limiting the amount of notes the state banks printed. Furthermore, it would give

wealthy people a vested interest in the federal government’s �nances. The government would control

just 20 percent of the bank’s stock; the other eighty percent would be owned by private investors.

Thus, an “intimate connexion” between the government and wealthy men would bene�t both, and

this connection would promote American commerce.

In 1791, therefore, Congress approved a twenty-year charter for the Bank of the United States. The

bank’s stocks, together with federal bonds, created over $70 million in new �nancial instruments.

These spurred the formation of securities markets, which allowed the federal government to borrow

more money and underwrote the rapid spread of state-charted banks and other private business cor-

porations in the 1790s. For Federalists, this was one of the major purposes of the federal govern-

ment. For opponents who wanted a more limited role for industry, however, or who lived on the

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frontier and lacked access to capital, Hamilton’s system seemed to reinforce class boundaries and

give the rich inordinate power over the federal government.

Hamilton’s plan, furthermore, had another highly controversial element. In order to pay what it

owed on the new bonds, the federal government needed reliable sources of tax revenue. In 1791,

Hamilton proposed a federal excise tax on the production, sale, and consumption of a number of

goods, including whiskey.

 

VII. The Whiskey Rebellion and Jay’s Treaty

Grain was the most valuable cash crop for many American farmers. In the West, selling grain to a lo-

cal distillery for alcohol production was typically more pro�table than shipping it over the Ap-

palachians to eastern markets. Hamilton’s whiskey tax thus placed a special burden on western farm-

ers. It seemed to divide the young republic in half—geographically between the East and West, eco-

nomically between merchants and farmers, and culturally between cities and the countryside.

In the fall of 1791, sixteen men in western Pennsylvania, disguised in women’s clothes, assaulted a

tax collector named Robert Johnson. They tarred and feathered him, and the local deputy marshals

seeking justice met similar fates. They were robbed and beaten, whipped and �ogged, tarred and

feathered, and tied up and left for dead. The rebel farmers also adopted other protest methods from

the Revolution and Shays’ Rebellion, writing local petitions and erecting liberty poles. For the next

two years, tax collections in the region dwindled.

Then, in July 1794, groups of armed farmers attacked federal marshals and tax collectors, burning

down at least two tax collectors’ homes. At the end of the month, an armed force of about seven

thousand, led by the radical attorney David Bradford, robbed the U.S. mail and gathered about eight

miles east of Pittsburgh. President Washington responded quickly.

First, Washington dispatched a committee of three distinguished Pennsylvanians to meet with the

rebels and try to bring about a peaceful resolution. Meanwhile, he gathered an army of thirteen

thousand militiamen in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. On September 19, Washington became the only sit-

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ting president to lead troops in the �eld, though he quickly turned over the army to the command of

Henry Lee, a Revolutionary hero and the current governor of Virginia.

As the federal army …