The Continental Congress won a long war for independence with a national government established by the Articles of Confederation. What would cause American leaders to want a new constitution just a few years later?
Fighting a war for independence against a distant king is one thing. But then governing almost half a continent is a different matter. Within months of the 1783 Treaty of Paris that ended our revolution, Americans began to worry over the problems of trying to maintain law and order in a vast country split into thirteen independent states, each with its own legislature, its own currency, its own debts, and its own rules. The simple fact that the country was devastated and divided by a seven-year-long war, was also challenging.
But in 1786, after only three years of peace, things started getting out of hand. With states and their citizens both deeply in debt and banks rare and no uniform currency, the economy was relegated mostly to bartering and trading. People couldn’t pay their taxes, or their bills, or their loans. Inflation and unemployment were rampant. Laws and courts were seen as tools of the landowning class to squeeze workers and tenant farmers pushed to the brink of bankruptcy. In western Massachusetts, they rebelled, led by a Revolutionary War veteran named Daniel Shays. What is now known as Shays’ Rebellion was eventually squelched by the Massachusetts militia, but it intensified the demands among many Americans for a stronger national government, something more than just an alliance between independent states—a truly national government with a national currency and national trade laws that could settle down the economy and make people and their jobs and businesses more secure.
So, the following year, the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia and created our U.S. Constitution and its federal government. The experiment with disunion hadn’t gone well. The experiment with Union continues.
"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/.
