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Introduction: Foundations of American Government On October 25, 1787, the New York City Independent Journal published the first essay of The Federalist. Its author was Alexander Hamilton, who had just recruited John Jay and James Madison to aid him in writing a series of essays designed to persuade the citizens of New York to ratify the federal Constitution that had been proposed five weeks earlier. Hamilton opened The Federalist, No. 1 with a striking challenge to his countrymen. It has been frequently remarked, he wrote, that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force. Americans now enjoyed a unique opportunity. Unlike the subjects of monarchies and empires, whose governments depended on the accidents of heredity or conquest, they were engaged in an unprecedented public debate to decide what kind of a republic they wished to inhabit.

Writers of The Federalist Papers

With the ratification of the Constitution by 11 states in July 1788, and the adoption of the Bill of Rights in 1791, the Founders established the basic form of government that still governs their “posterity.” The Constitution has been modified in significant ways since then, especially with the adoption of the three Civil War Amendments that ended slavery, enabled the national government to protect civil rights within the states, and enfranchised African Americans. Nor could the Founders have imagined the growth of the modern administrative state, with its countless agencies regulating so many aspects of life. Nevertheless, the basic structure of the national government follows the model that the Framers of the Constitution laid down in 1787.

When the Framers went to the Grand Convention at Philadelphia in May 1787 — also known as the Constitutional Convention or Federal Convention — they were already heirs to a rich era of constitutional debate and experimentation. At its start, when Americans first opposed the Stamp Act in 1765-66, they were merely trying to preserve their rights as self-governing provinces within the British Empire. When the imperial controversy ended in the Declaration of Independence, Americans began writing constitutions of their own, first at the state level, and then, with the Articles of Confederation, for the federal union. A decade later, the Federal Convention assessed the problems of republican government for both the union and the states. Once the Constitution was ratified, Americans faced new questions about how to interpret its meaning.

The Changing Meaning of Constitution

The foundations of American government emerged from these experiences. Of course, Americans had read deeply in the literature of Western political theory. They knew its great authorities, Plato and Aristotle, Machiavelli and Montesquieu, Hobbes and Locke, as well as other writers now known mostly to scholars: James Harrington, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, and James Burgh. And they also had a century and a half of autonomous government behind them. But the Founders of the American republic were also revolutionaries, and many of the lessons they applied to the creation of the Constitution in 1787 came from that experience.

Thinkers Who Influenced the Making of the Constitution

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CC To understand how this experience produced the foundations of American government, three topics deserve special attention. The first involves the very nature of a constitution. Before 1776, the primary use of that term was descriptive. Every society had a constitution, in the

sense of having an observable set of laws and practices that explained how it was governed. By 1787 Americans were giving this term a more specific meaning. A constitution was now a written document, adopted at a known moment of historical time, by distinctive procedures, which would operate as supreme fundamental law, defining what the institutions of government could do under its authority. Once a constitution was defined in this way, the question of its interpretation and enforcement became much more complicated, because now one could ask whether the acts of different departments or levels of government were constitutional or not.

Two other concerns dominated the thinking of the Framers. One was the problem of federalism: the division of power between national and state levels of government, and the relation between them. The Federal Convention was called to correct the manifest defects — or what James Madison called “the vices” — of the Confederation. It might have done that simply by giving the single-chamber Continental Congress a limited set of additional powers. Instead it proposed vesting a significant number of legislative powers in a bicameral Congress that could act directly on the citizens of the United States. That fundamental change required rethinking the basic nature of the national government, leading the Framers to create three independent departments that would enact, execute, and adjudicate national laws. This decision led the Framers to their other great concern: reconsidering the separation of powers across the three branches of government — legislative, executive, and judicial.

The Ideas of Federalism and Separation of Powers under the Articles and the Constitution

These three topics — the supreme authority of a written constitution, the creation of a federal system in which both the national and state governments would legislate for their citizens, and the separation of powers across three independent departments — became defining characteristics of the American political system.