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{Bookshelf Recommendation}
The Frailty of the United States
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| Dr. Daniel Krebs |
James R. Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).
This immensely readable book focuses on the 1790s in U.S. politics, the decade after the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution until the election of Thomas Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. Many historians, and a wider American public, have generally treated the U.S. Constitution and its political system as a fact, established firmly through the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 and 1788, and the inauguration of George Washington as first president of the United States in 1789.
Not so James R. Sharp. His book shows the incredible frailty of the U.S. as a political construct during the first decade of its existence. In fact, Sharp argues, the U.S. nearly broke apart multiple times in violent civil war during these first ten years.
For Sharp, the U.S. Constitution was “almost fatally flawed at its inception” (2). The founding document had given citizens considerable protection from potential abuses of power by the state, but it provided no mechanism for resolving political conflict between diverging interests. The founders, as Sharp explains, had unrealistically placed too much trust in “expectations of civic harmony, selfless behavior, and consensus upon a national public good” (3).When two “proto-parties” (8) – Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans and Alexander Hamilton’s Federalists – emerged after 1789, primarily over sectional issues, neither group accepted the other side as legitimate opposition (i.e. different interests and goals but still loyal to the United States). Both sides were convinced that the other side, once in power, would inevitably lead the country into catastrophe. Both sides thus sought to vanquish the other side completely to save the achievements of the revolution – and both sides nearly destroyed the United States in the process.
Dr. Daniel Krebs is a Professor of History at the University of Louisville. He specializes in military history and colonial & revolutionary American history. Views expressed here are his own and do not necessarily reflect those of the McConnell Center.
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