American Political History

On July 26th the convention handed 4 months of resolutions to 5 men and adjourned. On August 6th it got back a constitution — 7 pages, 23 articles, wide margins for the fight. This is the grind of August, told the way the room actually lived it: everything at once. The taxing power ending 10 years of begging circulars on an ordinary Thursday, while 2 days’ walk of clauses away Gouverneur Morris demands 14 years of citizenship for a senator — “7 years must be applied to learn to be a Shoe Maker” — in a room where the Constitution’s own draftsman was born in Scotland. Franklin’s rogues and prison hulks...

The branch that today holds the power to strike down acts of Congress was born without a fight — “that a national Judiciary be established,” agreed unanimously, in a morning. Then the Constitutional Convention spent a summer on the two questions hiding inside the easy answer. This is the story of the courts: Franklin’s Scottish lawyers, who always nominated the ablest man to the bench in order to divide his practice; the “may, not shall” finesse that mailed the fight over lower courts to the future; the two locks — tenure and salary — that put judges beyond the reach of the politicians...

No question defeated the Constitutional Convention like the question of how to choose a president. Across the summer of 1787 the delegates balloted on it some 60 times — popular election crushed 9 states to 1 after George Mason compared it to referring “a trial of colours to a blind man”; election by Congress condemned by Gouverneur Morris as “the election of a pope by a conclave of cardinals”; electors adopted in July and unwound 5 days later; a motion for a president serving for life that drew 4 states, Virginia among them; James Wilson reduced to proposing the executive be chosen by lot. Hugh Williamson told the r...

On June 1st, 1787, the Constitutional Convention reached the resolution nobody had wanted to write: a national executive. James Wilson moved that it consist of a single person — and the room went silent, long enough that 81-year-old Franklin had to coax the delegates into speaking. The reason for the silence sat on the dais: every man present was measuring an office for General Washington, in his presence, weighing out loud how much power one man could be trusted with while the man himself said nothing. This is the story of the 4 days that invented the presidency: Randolph calling a single ex...

The most notorious fraction in American history did not begin as a claim about personhood. It began as a tax formula — proposed in 1783, in the same Philadelphia room, by James Madison himself, to settle how slave states would be billed for the war debt. In that fight the North demanded the enslaved be counted in full, and the South demanded they barely count at all... because the count meant money. Four years later, James Wilson lifted the dead amendment’s exact words into the plan of the new government — “three fifths of all other persons” — and the incentive silently reversed: th...

On June 11th, 1787, Roger Sherman proposed the settlement — population in the House, one vote per state in the Senate — and the Constitutional Convention voted it down without a debate. This is the story of the 5 weeks it cost to walk back: Luther Martin’s 2-day endurance speech; Benjamin Franklin, 81 and unchurched, asking a deadlocked room why it had never once prayed — and the convention adjourning without a vote because it couldn’t afford a chaplain; Gunning Bedford telling the large states “I do not, gentlemen, trust you” and threatening a foreign ally; the July 2nd tie, 5–5–1, decided by an absent bachelor an...

In the second week of June 1787, the small states stopped losing votes politely. David Brearley proposed erasing every state boundary and redrawing America into 13 equal parts. William Paterson declared New Jersey would never confederate on proportional representation — “I would rather submit to a monarch, to a despot, than to such a fate” — and James Wilson answered that Pennsylvania would never confederate on anything else. This is the story of the counterstroke: the New Jersey Plan, 9 resolutions that stayed inside the congressional commission and quietly contained the seed of the supremacy clause. And it is the story of the most astonish...

On May 29th, 1787, Edmund Randolph — 33 years old, governor of Virginia, owner of the finest voice in the room — rose to open the main business of the Federal Convention, and 3 notebooks took him down. Madison recorded a statesman’s autopsy of the Confederation and an exhortation not to let the moment pass. Doctor McHenry caught the raw material Madison left out: “Are we not on the eve of war?” and the maxim that America’s chief danger arose from “the democratic parts of our constitutions.” And Robert Yates, Governor Clinton’s watchdog, heard a confession — “a strong consolidated union, in which the idea of stat...

4 prisoners from the Walnut Street jail carried Benjamin Franklin to the Constitutional Convention in a sedan chair — the oldest delegate, 81, riding above the cobblestones to sit with the youngest, a 26-year-old former army captain. Jefferson, reading the delegate list in Paris, called them “an assembly of demigods.” William Pierce of Georgia, sitting among them, wrote down what they actually looked like — and his private sketches of every man in the room are the heart of this episode: Madison, whose greatness “every Person seems to acknowledge”; Hamilton, brilliant and vain, caged by the two colleagues sent to outvote him; Wilson, who argued b...

James Madison stepped off the New York stage on May 3rd, 1787 — 11 days before the Federal Convention was scheduled to open, and 22 days before it actually could. This is the story of those waiting weeks and the first days of business: the muddy roads that held the delegates back, the Virginia delegation caucusing every afternoon to shape a plan that would speak first, General Washington’s escort into the city, and his apology, from the president’s chair, for his own inexperience. It is also the story of the rules the textbooks skip. Why Rufus King and George Mason demanded that n...

This is the finale of A Failed Nation. In February of 1787, the Confederation Congress faced the most awkward decision in its short and unhappy life: whether to bless a convention summoned, however politely, to replace it. Six states had already sent delegates to Philadelphia without waiting for permission. John Jay thought the whole thing legally “questionable.” Madison found Congress “much divided and embarrassed.” And on February 21st, by a vote of eight states to one, the dying government did the strangest thing a government can do — it authorized the meeting that would end it, leashing the delegates to the “sole and exp...

The convention that produced the Constitution was born, improbably, out of a fishing dispute and a failure. This is the story of the strange chain of events that led to Philadelphia. It begins in 1785 at Mount Vernon, where commissioners from Virginia and Maryland settle a quarrel over the Potomac — and prove that states can cooperate outside a paralyzed Congress. It runs through Annapolis in September of 1786, where a grand convention on interstate trade collapses when only five states bother to show up — and where a dozen men with no authority whatsoever, led by Alexander Hamilton’s pen, make a desper...

While the Confederation staggered, a small, sickly, soft-spoken Virginian sat in his study and tried to think his way out of the crisis. This is the story of James Madison’s quiet revolution — the trunk of books Jefferson shipped him from Paris, the grim survey of every failed republic in history he titled “Notes on Ancient and Modern Confederacies,” and the blunt diagnosis he called “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” where he located the deepest danger not in a government too weak, but in democratic majorities in the states turning tyrant against their own minorities. It is also t...

The Confederation has failed at nearly everything — paying its debts, defending its frontier, commanding the world’s respect. This is the episode about the one enormous thing it got right. In 1785, a lone surveyor named Thomas Hutchins began driving the grid across the Ohio wilderness — the checkerboard of townships and sections still visible under every Midwestern field, with one square in each reserved, from the start, for a school. And in July of 1787, even as the Constitutional Convention sat in Philadelphia drafting its replacement, the dying Confederation Congress passed the Northwest Ordinance — and did the thing no empire in history...

There were thirteen United States — and to the rest of the world, there were thirteen nations. This is the story of what that cost. In 1785, pirates out of Algiers seized two American ships and enslaved their crews, and the United States could do nothing to free them: no navy, no money, no power to answer. In London, John Adams sought a commercial treaty with Britain and was quietly refused, because Britain had grasped the essential thing about the new republic — that a treaty with Congress bound nothing, since Congress could not make its own states keep it. And at home...

The Treaty of Paris handed the United States a wilderness empire running to the Mississippi and the Great Lakes — and the bankrupt Confederation needed to sell it, fast, because western land was very nearly the only asset it had. There was one problem: the nations who lived there had never been conquered, had signed nothing, and were not leaving. This is the story of how the United States tried to take the Ohio country on the cheap — the dictated treaties that told the Shawnee and the Delaware they were a defeated people, the great confederacy that rose to reject them...

In 1784, Spain closed the lower Mississippi River — and with it, the only road to market for the tens of thousands of Americans pouring into Kentucky and the West. This is the story of what that closed river nearly did to the United States. When Spain dangled a rich trade treaty in front of the commercial North in exchange for America formally giving up its western river, Foreign Secretary John Jay was willing to take the deal, and Congress split down a line it had never split along before: not big states against small, not debtors against creditors, but North ag...

In the winter of 1787, a few thousand indebted farmers in western Massachusetts marched on their own government — and though they lost their one real battle in minutes, in the snow outside a federal arsenal, they did more to reshape the country than any army of the age. This is the story of Shays’ Rebellion: the veterans who had won the Revolution and come home to lose their farms to it, the creditor legislature in Boston that taxed them in coin they did not have, and the courthouses they closed by force to stop the foreclosures. It is the story of D...

In September 1786, a Newport butcher named John Weeden refused to take paper money for a joint of meat, and demanded silver. Under Rhode Island law, that was a crime — punishable by a fine, the loss of his vote, and a trial with no jury and no appeal. This is the story of what happened next: the farmers who took a state government by lawful election and used it to save their farms, the merchants who shut their doors rather than obey, and the courtroom in the Old Colony House where a Continental Army general argued that an elected legislature co...

In 1786 the Congress of the United States asked the thirteen states for 3.8 million dollars to pay the debts of the Revolution. It collected 663 dollars. This is the story of the broken money machine underneath everything else in these years — the crisis that drove an army to the edge of mutiny, ruined the richest man in America, and finally put muskets in the hands of farmers. A government that could not tax, only ask. Soldiers like Joseph Plumb Martin, who gave 7 years to the war and came home with a certificate worth pennies, sold to speculators driving about the country, in...

He was the richest man in America, and for most of the Revolution he was also its treasury. When the United States had no money and no credit, it borrowed on the name of Robert Morris — a Philadelphia merchant who put his own fortune and signature behind a bankrupt government, kept General Washington’s army fed, and personally financed the campaign that won the war at Yorktown. This is the story of the Financier of the Revolution: the reluctant patriot who voted against independence and then signed it, the pragmatist and money-chaser who saved the country and grew rich doin...

In the spring of 1783, with the Revolution all but won, the most dangerous enemy of the United States was its own army. Unpaid for years, cheated of their promised pensions, the officers camped at Newburgh, New York, had every reason to be furious — and an anonymous letter, circulating hut to hut, told them the time for begging was over. A faction of politicians in Philadelphia, led by Alexander Hamilton, saw in that fury a weapon they could use to force a helpless Congress into line. Their cause was just. Their argument was strong. And it led straight to the ed...

On December 23rd, 1783, in the Senate chamber at Annapolis, George Washington did the thing conquerors never do: he laid his commission at the feet of the Congress and went home to be a farmer — an act so astonishing that a stunned King George III reportedly called him “the greatest man in the world.” Three weeks later, in that very same room, that same Congress nearly failed to ratify the treaty ending the Revolution — not because an enemy stopped it, but because it could not get 9 states through the door. The war was the easy part. This is the government the Revo...

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Does the federal government have the authority to use military force against its own citizens?

Or can states, or counties, ignore federal taxes they believe are unconstitutional?

What happens when citizens believe a law violates their rights?

Short, Simple, Duty. President Washing accepts his second term.  

The French revolution breaks out, then France declares war on England. America is unprepared for war.  

We cover the battles to secure the Ohio territory ceded to America in the Treaty of Paris. 

We detail the emergence of political parties from Washington's own cabinet. 

Secretary Hamilton moves to create the Bank of the United States, in pushing so hard, the national divide over the issue marks the creation of political parties in America.  

America still is buried by the accumulation of debt from the revolutionary war. Secretary of Treasury Hamilton has a plan.   

We cover the story of the ratification of the Bill of Rights

We cover the creation of the court system and the earliest history of the Supreme Court.

President Washington selects his cabinet and sets the precedent on how cabinet meetings work.  

This wasn't really an election... not in the way we think of elections today. This was more like... a coronation by consensus.

We move to Virginia, whose ratification will complete the supermajority required for ratification of the Constitution of the United States of America.   

We turn to the debates in the Massachusetts ratification convention.   

The first major convention starts in Philadelphia with mobs forcing a vote for the date. Everyone knows, so goes Pennsylvania so goes the small states around them.    

The proposed constitution hit the newspapers, and public figures start taking positions and or writing with pen names to argue their points in the public sphere

Without records of all of the debates, I give the context of the materials we will cover in this season.