Reviewed by: From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History ed. by Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl Mark Boonshoft From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History. Edited by Douglas Bradburn and Christopher R. Pearl. Early American Histories. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2022. Pp. x, 274. Paper, $34.50, ISBN 978-0-8139-4742-6; cloth, $75.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-4741-9.) Since the publication in 1888 of John Fiske’s The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789, historians have debated whether the period between the conclusion of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the Constitution was actually critical. Fiske said yes, crediting the Framers with rescuing the United States from a crisis. Others, in the Progressive and neo-Progressive vein, have claimed the 1780s crisis narrative was contrived by elites to forward counterrevolutionary policies. Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969) splits the difference. Describing the 1780s as a period of crisis in republican thinking, Wood affirms the critical period framework and reinforces the Progressive view that the Constitution was part of an elite counterrevolution. The editors and contributors to this volume situate their work firmly within this long-standing historiographical debate. Yet the volume is almost agnostic on the central question: was this period critical? In the epilogue, Johann N. Neem argues that this volume’s unifying theme is that all the contributors explain practical efforts Americans made to explain and address the economic and political challenges of the 1780s. How so? Dael A. Norwood argues that the 1780s dashed commercial elites’ hopes for post-Revolutionary prosperity and stability. Those commercial men blamed the Articles of Confederation, which bolstered the narrative that the United States faced a crisis and needed to create a new government to serve as a “customs union” (p. 46). Hannah Farber tackles the question of fiscal reforms, particular the issuance of paper money. Farber casts the efforts of both the financier Robert Morris and the various state legislatures as practical responses to fiscal issues, grounded in existing networks and practices. Other essayists examine the centrifugal political forces at work during the 1780s. Douglas Bradburn explains how Mount Vernon became a symbol of the American nation and, in a polity that lacked a true power center, a national court from which George Washington could help reform the Union. Susan Gaunt Stearns turns to the trans-Appalachian West to show how white colonizers relied on Congress to manage foreign and Indian relations. Westerners’ sense that the Confederation Congress had failed them added to the overall sense of crisis that the Constitution’s advocates purported to solve. Nicholas P. Wood makes a novel contribution to the major historiographical debate about whether the Constitution was a proslavery document. Wood argues that the Articles of Confederation frustrated antislavery advocates, especially Quakers, who found Congress under the U.S. Constitution to be more responsive to antislavery agitation. [End Page 342] Christopher R. Pearl takes a long view of the Revolutionary-era crisis, deemphasizing the importance of the Constitution. During the 1760s, American colonists came to see their provincial governments as inadequate, a problem not solved until the 1780s and 1790s, when new and stable state governments finally proved adequate. Finally, Kevin Butterfield tackles the kerfuffle over the Society of the Cincinnati in the mid-1780s. The denouement of that debate assuaged fears that the United States would be taken over by a homegrown aristocracy and, therefore, undercut some Anti-Federalist arguments against ratification. By defining the critical period in terms that would make sense to Fiske, the volume leaves out important insights from recent works on the 1780s. Aside from Bradburn’s analysis of Mount Vernon, cultural history is largely absent from the volume. But the sense of crisis in the 1780s was framed by poetry (by the Connecticut Wits, for example) and by anxiety about the lack of a national language, educational system, history, and understanding of American geography. Nevertheless, From Independence to the U.S. Constitution: Reconsidering the Critical Period of American History is the most important book on the...
Read full abstract
Jun 1, 2023
L Kanagasabai 
Open Access