By Paul Carrier
If I were to ask you when the United States came into being, chances are you’d say 1776, with the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. You’d be in good company, after all. Abraham Lincoln said just that in the Gettysburg Address.
But you’d be wrong.
If given another chance, you might choose 1781, when the Articles of Confederation went into effect. But you’d be wrong again, according to Pulitzer-Prize winning historian Joseph J. Ellis, whose latest book, The Quartet, argues that the United States was still but a dream when the Revolutionary War ended with the Treaty of Paris in 1783.
Ellis contends that the United States, as a real country with a functional government, was not born until the “second American revolution” drew to a close in 1789, with the implementation of the Constitution. He says four men — George Washington, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay — were largely responsible for that nation-saving event.
The Declaration of Independence ended our allegiance to Britain, but did not create a practical system of governance to replace the old one. And when the states ratified the Articles of Confederation, the resulting government was so weak it was more of a gentlemen’s club than a mechanism to pull 13 mini-nations into a workable union.
After the Revolutionary War ended, most of the delegates elected to the anemic Congress created by the Articles of Confederation either refused to serve or failed to show up. The Congress lacked a quorum to ratify the definitive version of the Treaty of Paris, or to accept Washington’s resignation as commander in chief, and it was plagued by a “pervasive indifference that rendered argument itself impossible.” So while the Declaration of Independence was a glorious triumph, the Articles of Confederation, which were in effect from 1781 to 1789, were an abysmal failure.
Yet the long, painstaking slog that led to the drafting and adoption of the Constitution “cannot be described as natural,” Ellis writes. It represented “a dramatic change in direction” from a confederation of sovereign states to “a nation-size republic, indeed the largest republic ever established.”
That, Ellis explains, was no easy task, and no quick sell. The political forces in play at that time were “centrifugal rather than centripetal, meaning that the vast majority of citizens had no interest in American nationhood, which they saw as irrelevant,” and even reminiscent of the British monarchy. Enter Washington, Madison, Hamilton and Jay, who disregarded popular opinion and “carried the American story in a new direction.”
Ellis explores how this quartet of revolutionaries, aided by the likes of Gouverneur Morris and other radicals, called the Constitutional Convention, set its agenda, led it to endorse the Constitution, guided that document through the contentious process of ratification by the states, and drafted the Bill of Rights. He shows that although these reformers did not always get their way — Madison initially believed the president should have the power to veto state laws, for example — they succeeded in creating a strong national government, but one that did not subjugate the states.
Once the debate moved from the Constitutional Convention to the eight-month, state-by-state ratification process, Ellis notes, the struggle became more freewheeling, less manageable and even vicious at times. Some newspaper articles that opposed ratification dubbed Hamilton “Tom Shit,” for example, and made the preposterous suggestion that he was Washington’s son.
But the federalists, as supporters of the Constitution were known, had several factors working in their favor. Ratification only required the approval of nine states. The federalists were united, whereas opponents could not agree on the best alternative to the Constitution. Votes in the large, seemingly hostile, states of New York and Virginia came late in the game, by which time pressure to ratify was building. And although the states could suggest amendments, they could not make their approval of the Constitution contingent on any subsequent changes.
Ellis shatters, or at least undercuts, various myths that surround the creation and adoption of the Constitution. The drafting of it was no miracle, as some historians claim. The Federalist Papers, which promoted ratification, were less influential than we have been led to believe. And 21st-century conservatives who wish to follow the “original intent” of the framers in our day and age do not know their history. “The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution,” Ellis writes.
In sharp and vivid prose, The Quartet sketches telling profiles of the four men who are central to Ellis’ lively take on this second American Revolution. There’s the charismatic and aggressive Hamilton, who jumped from “impoverished oblivion to center stage.” Jay was an accomplished diplomat, “permanently poised” and “always the calm center of the storm.” Diminutive and no orator, Madison (five foot four and 120 pounds) was a master politician and a brilliant political philosopher. As for Washington, the indispensable man, he was “the most nationalistic of the nationalists,” fully realizing that the Articles of Confederation could not be fixed. They had to be tossed aside. And so they were, thanks to four founders, their allies, and a radical vision of nationhood.
