That transition from war to peace, from fighting for independence to living with it, proved quite difficult for Americans in the 1780s. It continued through the 1780s as Americans struggled with themselves over the interpretation and implementation through law and government of such ideas as life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.Īt times it may seem that governing in peace is more difficult than governing in war, and so it appeared in the immediate postwar years. The Revolution, therefore, did not end with the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and state constitutions nor did it end with victory in the war. ![]() Fissures and weak spots soon appeared in the philosophical and governmental systems that the revolutionaries had engineered, and the persons who discovered and exposed these were not outsiders, they were Americans. Consensus, however, although firmly founded on certain key ideas about rights and government, was in fact a rather fragile construct. ![]() The necessity of dealing with these threats, as well as a shared idealistic desire to initiate a new civil millennium, tended to steer the revolutionaries through a myriad of political conflicts into consensus on what they wanted to achieve: republican states and nation. They also focused on and fought fiercely against the external threat: Great Britain and its armies. Calling themselves patriots and Americans while cursing the loyalists as Tories, they tried, and often succeeded, in driving out these enemies. ![]() To borrow a phrase from a twentieth-century cartoon character, "We have met the enemy and he is us. " 1 In the early years of the American Revolution, and on through the War for Independence, revolutionaries distanced themselves from local opponents both in word and action. Shaping a Federal Union - Document Overview
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