From Independence to the U.S. Constitution

Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History

Douglas Bradburn, Christopher R. Pearl, Douglas Bradburn, Christopher R. Pearl

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9780813947419
• eBook ISBN: 9780813947433
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The "Critical Period" of American history—the years between the end of the American Revolution in 1783 and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1789—was either the best of times or the worst of times. While some historians have celebrated the achievement of the Constitutional Convention, which, according to them, saved the Revolution, others have bemoaned that the Constitution's framers destroyed the liberating tendencies of the Revolution, betrayed debtors, made a bargain with slavery, and handed the country over to the wealthy.

This era—what John Fiske introduced in 1880 as America's "Critical Period"—has rarely been separated from the U.S. Constitution and is therefore long overdue for a reevaluation on its own terms. How did the pre-Constitution, postindependence United States work? What were the possibilities, the tremendous opportunities for "future welfare or misery for mankind," in Fiske's words, that were up for grabs in those years? The scholars in this volume pursue these questions in earnest, highlighting how the pivotal decade of the 1780s was critical or not, and for whom, in the newly independent United States.

As the United States is experiencing another, ongoing crisis of governance, reexamining the various ways in which elites and common Americans alike imagined and constructed their new nation offers fresh insights into matters—from national identity and the place of slavery in a republic, to international commerce, to the very meaning of democracy—whose legacies reverberated through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and into the present day.

Contributors:Kevin Butterfield, Fred W. Smith National Library for the Study of George Washington at Mount Vernon * Hannah Farber, Columbia University * Johann N. Neem, Western Washington University * Dael A. Norwood, University of Delaware * Susan Gaunt Stearns, University of Mississippi * Nicholas P. Wood, Spring Hill College

Index

Page references in italics indicate illustrations.

abolitionists, 93–114; drafting of Constitution and, 100–103; after ratification of Constitution, 103–14; Quakers as, 95–100, 246

Ackerman, Bruce, 248

Adams, Abigail, 234n8

Adams, Henry, History of the United States during the Jefferson and Madison Administrations, 244

Adams, John: on aristocratic power, 218, 231; on British trade restrictions, 35–36; on commerce as goal of diplomacy, 28; Defence of the Constitutions, 232; on Society of the Cincinnati, 225–26; trade regulation and, 24, 39, 55n57, 55n60

Adams, John Quincy, 230

Adams, Samuel, 224

Adams-Onís Treaty (1819), 250

agriculture, 74–76, 79

Allen, Andrew, 161

Allen, William, 161, 162

Amar, Akhil, 243

American Convention of Abolition Societies, 111

Anderson, Benedict, 259n41

Anglican Church, 158

antifederalists, 84–85, 216

aristocratic power, 216–33; diminishing fears of, 229–33; prerogative and, 37, 156–57, 160–61, 163; Society of the Cincinnati and, 220–29

Articles of Confederation: currency and finance under, 195, 199; federalism and, 82; slavery and, 94, 95, 98, 113, 246; trade regulation and, 37, 40–41, 55n54, 99; Western territories and, 127, 129, 134–35, 136, 141

autonomy, 129, 132–33, 135, 144

Bache, Sarah Franklin, 78

Bailyn, Bernard, 239

Balogh, Brian, 147n15, 251

Bank of North America, 193, 207

Bank of the United States, 251–52

Barbary pirates, 32–33, 55n45, 244, 247

Barlow, Joel, 66, 84, 230; “The Vision of Columbus,” 78

Battle of Fallen Timbers (1794), 145

Beard, Charles, 15, 53n37; An Ec...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• The Constitutional Consequences of Commercial Crisis: The Role of Trade Reconsidered in the Critical Period
• America’s Court: George Washington’s Mount Vernon in the Critical Period
• Abolitionists, Congress, and the Atlantic Slave Trade: Before and after Ratification
• Federalism on the Frontier: Secession and Loyalty in the Trans-Appalachian West
• “Such a Spirit of Innovation”: The American Revolution and the Creation of States
• Something from Nothing? Currency and Finance in the Critical Period
• An Excess of Aristocracy: Democracy and the Fear of Aristocratic Power in the 1780s
• Epilogue: Turn Down the Volume!
• Notes on Contributors
• Index