The New Nation; A History of the United States during the Confederation, 1781-1789 - Merrill... Book

Eye-opening account of post-Revolution, pre-Constitution America.

We've all heard "the story." The story is that the central government established by the Articles of Confederation was so ineffective that it had to be scrapped, and the U.S. Constitution just had to be written. The story may not be a total fairy tale, but, one realizes after reading this well-researched book, is that that version of events is selective and partisan.

Partisan? But they didn't have political parties back then, right? Well, yes they did. Both at the state level and the national level.

In the 1780s, there were "nationalists" and "federalists." The nationalists were those for a stronger, centralized government than the Articles of Confederation originally established. The federalists, or "true federalists," were (somewhat confusingly) the pre-cursors of the anti-federalists of the late 1700s and early 1800s. They believed in retaining the state prerogatives of the Articles of Confederation and the limits on central power, although they demonstrated a willingness to make improvements to the viability of the national government by passing significant legislation and amendments to the Articles of Confederation.

The nationalists were men like Washington, Robert Morris, John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton. The federalists or anti-nationalists of the time were Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, et al. The nationalists are better known today because they won the argument and the anti-nationalists gradually receded into obscurity.

One of the things this book reminds us of is that the 1780s were a post-war period. There was a lot of work to be done to get life back to regular order after the war. On the diplomatic front, a peace treaty had to be struck and trade relations with Britain and European powers had to be redefined. There was significant foreign debt and also major domestic debt. It was not, however, a period of economic collapse as some have claimed.

Trade expanded following the war. Americans had access to more, not fewer, foreign ports once they were free from the British. Europeans, especially the Dutch, recognized the overall creditworthiness of America and lent large sums of money. Everybody knew that America had vast potential wealth to the west, and even if there were some short-term political and financial blemishes on the country under the Confederate government, America was acknowledged as a good investment. The central government did reasonably well unwinding and settling the accounts of the Revolution.

Some people say the Confederacy was totally hamstrung because any major action required agreement of 13 states. But the same was true of the Continental Congress and the 13 colonies, and we still won our independence. The Confederate Congress built up reasonably effective but small bureaucracies to conduct the daily business of government. Various imposts were proposed that would have given Congress a steadier source of income rather than relying solely on requisitions from the states. Some were approved, some were defeated. The process was a bit ugly, but things could work.

However, one is left with the impression after reading this that some of the nationalist leaders simply didn't want to amend and improve the Confederate Congress. They wanted to replace it altogether.

Eventually, the nationalists had their way and they wrote the Constitution and the history books. Their opinions became the accepted history. The accomplishments of the Confederacy were downplayed and their warts were magnified.

This book sometimes suffered from long recitations of events. (State A dealt with issue X this way. State B dealt with X by doing Y. And on and on like that for four pages.) But it's the only book I know that provides such detail about this key moment in history.

My Goodreads friend Frank Theising has a standard for judging nonfiction books which is: did it change my way of thinking about the subject? Yes, The New Nation did just that for me. Life in America under the Articles of Confederation had its minuses and pluses to an extent I never appreciated before. But this book is not a glowing reflection on the Articles. It is even-handed and squarely faces the problems of the nation and its politics in the 1780s.