The Political Establishments of the United States 1784

Abstract

H T ISTORICAL understanding often consists in dividing people of the past into categories, and new understanding sometimes requires new categories. Study of the so-called Critical Period of American history has got along for some time now on categories that have begun to inhibit understanding instead of assisting it. It once seemed to make sense to divide men of the I780's into two opposing groups: on the one hand, aristocrats, large planters, wealthy merchants, and speculators, who hoped to promote their interests through strengthening the central government; on the other hand, democrats, artisans, small farmers, debtors, who hoped to promote their interests by keeping the central government weak. The overthrow of Charles Beard's work has diminished the plausibility of this division, but new categories have not yet been devised. What the old ones tend to obscure, among other things, is the rational approach to political problems displayed by a good many men of the time. When we read the debates at Philadelphia, our categories lead us to look for the interest groups concealed beneath every argument and to neglect the substance of the arguments themselves. We are likely to assume that we have understood a man's ideas when we have found a correlation with his economic interests and social status. But one exciting thing about the period of the I780's is the extraordinary political sophistication of the men who lived through it. They had had more experience in dealing with major problems of political thought than any other generation of Americans, and they were extremely articulate in discussing what they had learned. Perhaps we should turn aside, for a time at least, from the question of who they were and whom they represented and look for new organizing principles in what they thought. In examining the different ways that men grappled with the problems of republican government in a new nation, we may perhaps discover new categories that can assist understanding of the Confederation period. The pamphlet that follows is reprinted as a little known example of a kind of political thinking that existed in the I78o's and that was later evident in the Philadelphia convention. The author is unknown, and a pre-