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We Have Not a Government: The Articles of Confederation and the Road to the Constitution

Amazon.com Price:  $22.90 (as of 06/05/2019 09:39 PST- Details)

Description

In 1783, as the Revolutionary War came to a close, Alexander Hamilton resigned in disgust from the Continental Congress after it refused to believe a fundamental reform of the Articles of Confederation. Just four years later, that same government collapsed, and Congress grudgingly agreed to improve the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention, which altered the Articles beyond recognition. What occurred all the way through this remarkably brief interval to cause the Confederation to lose public confidence and inspire Americans to replace it with a dramatically more flexible and powerful government? We Have Not a Government is the story of this contentious moment in American history.

In George William Van Cleve’s book, we encounter a sharply divided The usa. The Confederation faced massive war debts with virtually no authority to compel its members to pay them. It experienced punishing trade restrictions and strong resistance to American territorial expansion from powerful European governments. Bitter sectional divisions that deadlocked the Continental Congress arose from exploding western settlement. And a deep, long-lasting recession led to sharp controversies and social unrest across the country amid roiling debates over greatly increased taxes, debt relief, and paper money. Van Cleve shows how these remarkable stresses transformed the Confederation into a stalemate government and sooner or later led up to now conflicting states, sections, and interest groups to advocate for a union powerful enough to govern a continental empire.

Touching at the stories of a wide-ranging cast of characters—including John Adams, Patrick Henry, Daniel Shays, George Washington, and Thayendanegea—Van Cleve makes clear that it used to be the Confederation’s failures that created a political crisis and led to the 1787 Constitution. Clearly argued and superbly written, We Have Not a Government is a should-read history of this a very powerful period in our nation’s early life.

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