Carol Berkin - A Sovereign People: The Crises of the 1790s and the Birth of American Nationalism

W HEN PRESIDENT GEORGE Washington delivered his first inaugural address on April 30, 1789, he confessed that as a man of inferior endowments from nature who was unpractised in the duties of civil administration, he feared his inadequacy to handle the challenges that lay ahead for the new federal government. Washington, however, was not the only man who felt the weight of those challenges. Along with the president, there were men who believed that the survival of the Republic rested on the Constitution and its governmentand that the success of both depended upon them. The anxiety they shared with the president can be seen in the debates in Congress, in cabinet meetings, in newspaper articles, and in their private correspondence.

Like Washington, these men called themselves Federalists, but in spirit they were nationalists. They had written the Constitution or supported its ratification from a firm conviction that a strong government representing all the people of the Republic was the surest path to economic growth and prosperity, to civil law and order, and to winning the respect and recognition from foreign nations necessary to insure Americas continued independence. They had met with fierce opposition at the ratifying conventions by men equally certain that the best way to protect the liberties and rights won in the Revolution was to keep power in the hands of the state governments. But the Federalists had won that hard-fought battle. And now, in 1789, the first president and the first Congress were preparing for the battles to come.

The stakes were high. If the federal government failed, and these men were well aware that it might, it would be their failure; if it succeeded, they hoped to be credited with that success. In short, Federalists tended to see themselves as the exclusive guardians of the federal experiment, the Constitutions true representatives and agentsand its only legitimate interpreters. They viewed anyone who opposed them, anyone who criticized them publicly or attacked their policies, as an enemy of the Constitution, of the federal government, and of the Republic.

There was oppositionin newspapers, in congressional debates, in memorials and petitions sent to the presidents, in outbreaks of open resistance and in challenges to the sovereignty of the United States by foreign powers. The laws passed by Congress and the policies set by the president were ignored by foreign representatives and resisted by citizens. Their policies were undermined by state officials protective of their own authority. And the Federalists in office were relentlessly accused of secretly plotting to destroy the Republic and create a monarchy in America. Federalists believed that this opposition would undermine their efforts to win the loyalty of the ordinary citizens to the Constitution and its government. Without the peoples support, the Constitution was only a piece of paper.

Looking back from the twenty-first century, it is often difficult to imagine that the acceptance of the Constitution was ever contested or that the authority of the federal government was so widely doubted. But a closer examination of the decade after the ratification of that piece of paper reveals that attachment to the federal government grew slowly. As it did, a new identity emerged. Vermonters and New Yorkers and Virginians came to see themselves less as citizens of their home states and more as citizens of a nation. The Federalist economic and fiscal policies alone cannot explain this shift. Although Alexander Hamiltons economic plan ensured that entrepreneurs and commercial interests would have a vested interest in the survival of the federal government, it did not win the hearts and minds of ordinary citizens. The Federalists needed help to lay the foundation for a strong and enduring central government. They found it in the least expected places: crises of government legitimacy and sovereignty.