The American Revolution did not create an American national identity. Perhaps those who had served with the Continentals developed an allegiance to the army as a truly national institution, but most inhabitants of "these United States" and their political leaders did not yet think in terms of loyalty to a national cause. For a decade after independence, most revolutionaries remained less committed to creating an American nation, a single national republic, than to organizing thirteen separate and loosely federated state republics. This perception and the paradox of social inequality in a society in which all citizens were "created equal" proved to be formidable obstacles in the construction of a new nation.

Republican Experiments

Strong local loyalties, as well as the conviction that republics could not prosper over large territories, determined the shape of the first state constitutions. These crucial early experiments in establishing a republican government maintained the basic structure of the old colonial polities, but dramatically altered the balance of power among the branches of government.

Popularly elected legislatures became the dominant force in the new governments, controlling not only weak executives but also the judiciary. Revolutionaries thus largely abandoned the British system of mixed government. They also departed from British practices by insisting on written state constitutions as a law superior to the government that defined the full scope of popular liberty.

While Americans focused on constructing their state constitutions, the national government received little attention. In fact, it took four years after 1777 for all the states to approve the Articles of Confederation. The Articles provided for a government by a national legislature, essentially a continuation of the Second Continental Congress. But they left the crucial power of the purse entirely to the states, as well as all final power to make laws for and execute control over undistributed western lands.

Few leaders in the 1770s perceived the need for a defined distribution of power between the states and the national government. They gave more thought to this issue of federalism only as the events of the post-revolutionary period revealed that neither the states nor the national government could individually cope with international challenges and domestic dislocations.

The Temptations of Peace

Many of these conflicts arose from the expanding settlement process in the West. That region confronted not only international difficulties, such as British efforts to lure Vermonters into Canada and Spanish attempts to encourage secession among southwesterners, but also internal problems as states squabbled over conflicting claims to western land.

An even more serious contest arose between "landless" and "landed" states when the latter claimed large western tracts under the terms of their old colonial charters. Only in 1781, when the last of the landed states, Virginia, finally ceded its charter rights to the national government, did all the state governments ratify the Articles of Confederation.

The settlement of the West also triggered controversy by democratizing state legislatures, a development some conservatives disdained. They warned that parochial western delegates lacked wealth, education, and a "larger view" of politics sufficient to prudently oversee the operations of government. Such fears of democratic excess influenced the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which withheld full self-government from these new territories until they had attained statehood but still established an orderly way of incorporating the frontier into the federal system and outlawed slavery in the region. On the other hand, the Northwest Ordinance ignored the rights of Indian peoples in the region and the flow of population into the region further aggravated the social and geographic dislocations of these communities.

While northern laws abolishing slavery and an increase in manumissions in the Upper South swelled the growth of the free black community and altered its character, in the South as a whole slavery continued to expand along with the cotton economy. More blacks lived in enslavement in 1800 than in 1776. The emergence of slavery as the "peculiar institution" of the South during the early national period would dominate the political agenda by the mid-nineteenth century.

During the Confederation era, though, contests over the West and battles over monetary policy remained the focal points of political debate. Alarmingly, both the national and state governments proved even more powerless to redress postwar economic disruption than they had in coping with the problems posed by the frontier.

Republican Society

As political leaders struggled to shape new republican governments, ordinary Americans struggled to define a new republican society. Newly rich families came to demand and receive greater status; workers began to organize; some women claimed a right to greater political consideration, more freedom to divorce, and better educational opportunities; religious dissenters clamored for disestablishment. Yet white male revolutionaries stopped short of extending equality to the most powerless groups in American society, blacks and women. Suggestions that women receive equal rights met with outright hostility that reflected American anxiety about the war's impact on gender roles. The governing view of equality remained essentially conservative, with an emphasis that leveled the top of society by abolishing aristocratic privilege rather than raising up the lowest social groups.

From Confederation to Constitution

In the mid-1780s, the political crises of the Confederation culminated with the controversy over the Jay-Gardoqui Treaty and the fear caused by Shays's Rebellion. In response, political leaders called the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Although the convention only held the power to revise the Articles of Confederation, it produced instead an entirely new frame of government establishing a truly national republic, the federal Constitution.

Based largely on James Madison's "Virginia Plan," the new Constitution provided for a separation of powers among a judiciary, a bicameral national legislature, and a strong executive. They broke a deadlock among the delegates over the issue of representation, a crisis that reflected the deep rivalry between northern and southern states, through a compromise that provided for equal representation of states in the upper house of Congress and representation proportional to population in the lower house, with a slave counting as three-fifths of a free person. Many Americans, including those who called themselves Anti-Federalists, feared that the Constitution gave too much power to the national government. Although their opposition to the new government failed after a bitter struggle, they convinced the framers to add the first ten amendments to the Constitution as a Bill of Rights that protected, among other liberties, the right to freedom of speech, protection against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the right to trial by jury. These debates reflected the continuing struggle over whether the nation should be ruled by enlightened gentlemen or by representatives of every social class.