America’s first 4th of July occurred in 1776. But our Constitution wasn’t drafted until 1787 and wasn’t ratified until 1788, so what happened in between?
Most Americans know that independence from Great Britain was formally declared on the 4th of July 1776 by the Continental Congress. Many assume that our constitution was adopted the same day, but it wasn’t. The revolutionary war continued to be managed by that Continental Congress for the seven years required to achieve victory over the redcoats. In 1776, the Continental Congress adopted the Articles of Confederation, which could be understood as the American nation’s first constitution.
This document, adopted by the Congress on November 15, 1777, for the first time proposed the United States of America, but that’s precisely what the founders understood America to be: a group of separate sovereign states who were “united” only in fighting for independence. It created not a nation but a “league of friendship” among those states, who were considered nations, in and of themselves. It established an alliance of those states against the British, a confederacy.
Because of the war and due to other delays and disputes, the articles weren’t ratified by all thirteen states until March 1, 1781. At that point, the revolutionary Continental Congress was replaced by the Congress of the Confederation, the first United States Congress. In the 1780s, it became apparent that a confederation of states created too many problems for the new American nation. A weak central government that couldn’t collect taxes, print money, or regulate interstate commerce threatened to devolve into a crazy quilt of separate state currencies, separate treaties with foreign powers, and states imposing tariffs on each other’s commerce. So, in 1787, James Madison, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and others decided to try again. The product of their labors was a new nation and a new Constitution of the United States of America.
"The History of Our Freedoms" is produced by KEDT-FM in Corpus Christi. Dr. Bill Chriss is a historian and legal scholar. For more on history and the constitution, check out his blog at https://drbillchriss.substack.com/.
