An Unlikely Beginning at Greenwood School

The idea first came to me while listening to twenty-eight high school students recite the Gettysburg Address before their classmates and proud parents. My son Scott was teaching science at Greenwood School in Putney, Vermont, and had invited me to serve as a judge for their annual oratory competition. I don’t recall the exact date, but during the painstaking effort to discern what Lincoln actually said, I suddenly realized that the opening sentence of Lincoln’s famous address contained a fundamental historical error.

Lincoln began: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.” But this simply wasn’t true. The historical reality was far more complex and contradictory than Lincoln’s nationalist narrative suggested. This realization launched me on an investigation that would challenge conventional understandings of America’s founding and reveal the extraordinary improbability of the United States as we know it today.

The Revolutionary Reality: Thirteen Sovereign States

In 1776, the thirteen North American colonies united for a single purpose: to win their independence from Great Britain. They declared themselves not as a unified nation, but as “free and independent states” – a crucial distinction that would shape American politics for decades. The war effort required coordination, but not unity. Each colony-turned-state viewed itself as a sovereign entity, comparable to what we might today call mini-nations.

The government they established under the Articles of Confederation in 1781 reflected this reality. As one historian aptly described it, the Confederation was essentially a “peace treaty” among sovereign states that voluntarily came together for mutual security – a kind of regional League of Nations rather than a true national government. The central authority possessed no power to tax, no executive branch, and no judiciary. Important decisions required approval from nine of the thirteen states, and amendments to the Articles needed unanimous consent, making substantive change nearly impossible.

The Political Psychology of Distance

To understand why a unified American nation seemed so improbable in the immediate post-revolutionary period, we must appreciate the overwhelming significance of geographical distance in the late eighteenth century. Most Americans were born, lived, and died within a thirty-mile radius. A letter required three weeks to travel from Boston to Philadelphia. Political horizons and loyalties were correspondingly local.

In this world without broadcast media, telephones, or internet, the ideal political unit was the town or county, where representatives were neighbors who could be trusted to defend local interests. Any distant national government was viewed with deep suspicion – as a domestic version of the British Parliament that had provoked the revolution. The ideological core of the independence movement had been opposition to distant, unaccountable power. Creating a powerful national government would have seemed to many revolutionaries like replacing one form of tyranny with another.

This profound distrust of centralized authority wasn’t merely philosophical; it was baked into the revolutionary experience. Patriots had fought against what they perceived as the arbitrary, arrogant, and corrupt power emanating from London and Whitehall. The very concept of a strong national government contained all the possibilities of tyranny that Americans believed they had rejected through their revolution.

The Centrifugal Forces of the Confederation Era

The period between the Treaty of Paris in 1783 and the Constitutional Convention in 1787 demonstrated the powerful centrifugal forces pulling the states apart. Without the common enemy of Britain, the states began pursuing their own separate interests with increasing vigor.

Several states established their own navies and maintained independent diplomatic contacts with foreign powers. They printed their own currency and erected trade barriers against neighboring states. Boundary disputes threatened to escalate into armed conflict. The Confederation Congress found itself increasingly irrelevant, unable to raise revenue or enforce its decisions. By 1786, many observers believed the American experiment was failing.

The most dramatic evidence of the Confederation’s weakness came with Shays’ Rebellion in western Massachusetts. When the state government struggled to put down the uprising, it became clear that the federal government lacked either the authority or the resources to assist. This event shocked many political leaders into recognizing the need for a stronger central government, though there was little consensus about what form it should take.

The Constitutional Revolution of 1787

The movement that produced the Constitution represented what we might call America’s “second revolution” – a dramatic reimagining of the political framework that emerged from the first revolution. The fifty-five delegates who gathered in Philadelphia during the summer of 1787 embarked on what amounted to a peaceful coup against the existing political order.

Their original mandate was merely to revise the Articles of Confederation. Instead, they produced an entirely new framework of government that fundamentally transformed the relationship between the states and the central authority. The Constitution created a national government with powers that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier: the authority to tax, to regulate interstate commerce, to raise armies, and to make treaties.

The document represented a brilliant series of compromises between large and small states, between northern and southern interests, and between those favoring a strong national government and those fearing centralized power. The resulting system of federalism created a novel distribution of authority that reserved certain powers to the states while granting others to the national government.

The Battle for Ratification

The ratification struggle revealed how deeply divided Americans remained about the proper relationship between the states and the central government. The Federalists, who supported the Constitution, argued that only a stronger national government could preserve the union and secure American interests abroad. The Anti-Federalists warned that the proposed government would consolidate power to such an extent that it would destroy state sovereignty and ultimately threaten individual liberty.

The debate was conducted through newspaper essays, pamphlets, speeches, and private correspondence. The Federalist Papers, written by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, provided the most sophisticated defense of the proposed system. Their arguments ultimately prevailed, but only after promises were made to add a Bill of Rights that would explicitly protect individual liberties against federal power.

The ratification process itself demonstrated the continuing power of state sovereignty. The Constitution took effect only after nine states approved it, but everyone understood that without ratification by key states like Virginia and New York, the new government would be stillborn. Even after ratification, many Americans continued to view the union as a compact among sovereign states that could theoretically be dissolved.

Creating National Identity from Diversity

The establishment of the new government under the Constitution in 1789 marked the beginning, not the end, of the nation-building process. The first challenge facing the Washington administration was to make the theoretical authority of the federal government a practical reality across the vast American landscape.

Alexander Hamilton’s financial program – including the assumption of state debts, the creation of a national bank, and the establishment of a mint – created economic structures that bound the states together through shared financial interests. The suppression of the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794 demonstrated that the federal government would enforce its laws even against armed resistance.

Meanwhile, events in Europe ironically contributed to American nation-building. The French Revolution and subsequent Napoleonic Wars created pressures that forced Americans to define their national interests against those of European powers. The partisan battles between Federalists and Democratic-Republicans, while often bitter, ultimately took place within a framework that accepted the legitimacy of the federal government.

The Enduring Tension in American Federalism

The question of state versus federal authority did not disappear with the adoption of the Constitution. It resurfaced repeatedly throughout American history – in the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the Hartford Convention of 1814, the Nullification Crisis of 1832, and ultimately in the secession movement that led to the Civil War.

Lincoln’s invocation of a nation “conceived in liberty” in 1863 represented the triumph of a particular nationalist interpretation of American history. His claim that the union predated the states provided the constitutional justification for preventing secession and ultimately for abolishing slavery. While this interpretation served noble purposes, it nevertheless represented what we might call a “creative misreading” of the historical record.

The truth is more complicated and more interesting: the United States was not born as a nation but became one through a prolonged and often contentious process. The constitutional framework established in 1787 created the possibility of nationhood, but it took decades of political development, economic integration, and social change to create the reality of national identity.

The Modern Relevance of the Founding Debate

The tension between state and federal authority remains very much alive in contemporary American politics. Questions about the proper scope of federal power, the rights of states, and the meaning of federalism continue to animate political debates about healthcare, education, environmental regulation, and countless other issues.

What makes the American system unique is not that these tensions were resolved at some point in the past, but that the framework established by the founders allowed for ongoing negotiation between competing visions of government. The genius of the American system lies in its ability to accommodate both unity and diversity, both national power and local autonomy.

The story of America’s founding reminds us that nations are not natural entities that emerge automatically from shared geography or culture. They are constructed through political choices, historical accidents, and what Lincoln called “the mystic chords of memory.” The United States was made, not born, and its creation against considerable odds represents one of the most remarkable achievements in modern political history.

Conclusion: The Improbable American Nation

Looking back from our present perspective, the existence of a unified American nation seems inevitable. But this is the illusion of hindsight. For those living through the revolutionary and early national periods, the dissolution of the union appeared at least as likely as its preservation.

The creation of the United States as we know it required overcoming enormous geographical, political, and psychological obstacles. It demanded that Americans expand their political imaginations beyond local concerns to embrace national identity. It necessitated compromises that left fundamental questions about the nature of the union unresolved – questions that would ultimately have to be settled on the battlefield.

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, for all its historical imprecision, ultimately represented not a description of the past but a vision for the future. It articulated what America had become through the terrible ordeal of civil war rather than what it had been at its founding. In doing so, it helped create the very national identity that it purported to describe.

The true story of America’s founding is not one of inevitable nationhood but of extraordinary political creativity in the face of seemingly insurmountable challenges. It is a story that should inspire not because it was predestined, but because it was achieved against considerable odds through compromise, imagination, and what the founders called “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.”