A Vision for a New Nation

A Vision for a New Nation: Ideology and Reform in a Time of Crisis Lindsay M. Chervinsky Thomas Jefferson, Revolutionary: A Radical’s Struggle to Remake America. By Kevin R. C. Gutzman. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017. 304 pages. Paper, ebook. A Politician Thinking: The Creative Mind of James Madison. By Jack N. Rakove. The Julian J. Rothbaum Distinguished Lecture Series. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2017. 240 pages. Cloth, ebook. We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution. By George William Van Cleve. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. 410 pages. Cloth, ebook. Historians, drawn by the gravitational pull of the Constitution, have often neglected the generation, dynamics, and impact of the Confederation period. Though early republic statesmen struggled with the question of what the new nation should look like and how it could survive, previous scholarship has often treated the Constitutional Convention as a watershed moment for reform. They have dismissed similar efforts earlier in the 1780s as ineffectual and have characterized conflicting constitutional interpretations after ratification as emanating from differing ideological stances rather than shared recognition of the need for reform. In recent books, Kevin R. C. Gutzman, Jack N. Rakove, and George William Van Cleve depart from this tradition by evaluating the long game—how James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, and other political leaders experimented with new strategies and pursued novel venues for their visions for the nation long before and long after the ratification of the Constitution. In the twenty-first century, when calls for political and constitutional reform are particularly urgent, there is much to learn by exploring how early republic political leaders modified their reform efforts over the course of decades in response to circumstances on the ground. In We Have Not a Government, Van Cleve positions his work between two previous interpretations of the collapse of the Articles of Confederation. [End Page 715] Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historians, led by John Fiske, Andrew Cunningham McLaughlin, and John Bach McMaster, presented the 1780s as a decade of economic and constitutional crisis that inevitably led to the Constitutional Convention and a new government. On the other hand, historians such as Merrill Jensen and Charles A. Beard insisted that the crisis was imagined by subsequent historians to provide a compelling rescue narrative.1 Van Cleve acknowledges that some previous historians did exaggerate the crisis conditions of the 1780s, but he argues that the nation faced serious problems stemming from growing sectional and interstate conflicts. There is no reason, in his view, to think that the Confederation could have solved any of these issues. Van Cleve believes that contemporaries worried about the shortcomings of the Articles as well. He takes seriously the reforms considered in the early 1780s while showing how Congress was challenged by new issues after the war that frustrated its attempts at reform. In doing so, he offers two valuable new insights. First—consistent with the Vast Early America approach sweeping the field—Van Cleve presents the west as a major factor in the 1780s. States lost tax revenue as citizens fled to the western territories opened up by the Treaty of Paris (1783), while the new communities they formed produced divisions within states. On one side, settlers in the west demanded the states and Congress send military aid to protect against Native attacks. They also sought access to the Mississippi River to sell their goods as a cheaper alternative to markets on the Atlantic coast. Eastern communities, by contrast, blamed settlers for instigating conflict with Native Americans and preferred trade opportunities that favored seaboard communities. The states’ distrust for each other doomed Congress’s ability to resolve these conflicts at a national level. Because Congress lacked enforcement power, all financial requisitions were essentially voluntary and states hoarded money for their own defense, doubting that other states would come to their aid. Van Cleve suggests that attempts at reform generated from within Congress failed because the states—and factions within them—lacked faith in each other’s willingness and Congress’s ability to protect their economic and security needs. Second, Van Cleve deemphasizes moments traditionally stressed

Art history · Constitution · George (robot) · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Ratification · Scholarship · Sociology · Vision · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Anthropology · History · Law

• Revolutionary Characters

  Walter Russell Mead, Gordon S Wood•Foreign Affairs•2006

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• The New Nation

  James B Hedges, Merrill Jensen•The William and Mary Quarterly•1951

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• Thomas Jefferson and the Education of a Citizen

  Melvin Yazawa, James Gilreath•The William and Mary Quarterly•2000

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