The success of the American Revolution depended on the creation and expansion of a “more perfect union” of free republican states. In the summer of 1787, as delegates of twelve of the original thirteen states (Rhode Island was not represented) gathered in Philadelphia to draft a new federal Constitution, the Congress of the old Confederation, meeting in New York City, enacted an ambitious plan for the creation of three to five new states in the national domain north and west of the Ohio River. That the Philadelphia framers were able to negotiate a “peace pact” for their quarrelsome, virtually disunited states was, contemporaries agreed, nothing less than a “miracle.” But it was a notoriously ineffectual Confederation Congress that took the boldest leap into futurity, envisioning the spread of white settlement and formation of new governments in a contested borderland far beyond its effective control. Adopted on July 13, 1787, the “Ordinance for the government of the territory of the United States North West of the river Ohio”—or Northwest Ordinance—was the blueprint for a great American empire of continental dimensions. If the framers had failed and the existing union had collapsed, the Ordinance would have been a dead letter. Yet if the establishment of a new national government gave life to the Ordinance, the Ordinance’s vision of national greatness animated the framers’ “new order for the ages.”
As they tottered at the abyss of anarchy and disunion, Americans dreamed of empire. Statehood and Union is a book about the new and improved vision of empire that American statesmen envisioned and implemented in the early republic’s formative years. It was the republican alternative to the empire that had failed to fulfill the aspirations of Anglo-American patriots in the years leading up to independence. In a passage that the Continental Congress cut from his original draft of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson lamented the demise of Anglo-American union: “We might have been a free & a great people together.” King George III failed to sustain that union, thus squandering the boundless prospects afforded by victory over the French in the Seven Years’ War. “Westward the course of empire,” Bishop George Berkeley exulted in 1726. But it was not to be. Instead of unleashing a westward surge, penny-pinching bureaucrats set a western limit to settlement in the Proclamation of October 7, 1763. The imperial government seemed determined to suppress the colonies’ population and prosperity and transforming them into subject provinces. When Parliament in one of its so-called “Intolerable Acts” of 1774 extended the jurisdiction of the formerly French province of Quebec to include the trans-Ohio region—so abrogating the charter claims of Virginia and other British colonies—the evil intentions of a corrupt ministry could no longer be doubted. Anglo-American patriots wanted to turn the clock back to the Peace of Paris in 1763, when they could still see themselves as agents and beneficiaries of imperial expansion. Without such an empire, the British connection—and allegiance to George III—seemed increasingly problematic, even pointless. Were subjects of the Crown free men or slaves?
Revolutionary Americans were imperialists who made war against the British imperial government and finally, with great reluctance, declared independence; large numbers of loyalists balked at that fateful choice, seeking refuge in other parts of the empire, retreating into neutrality (when and where that was possible), or joining the counter-revolution against their former countrymen. Of course, the “logic of rebellion” was articulated, or rationalized, in terms of fundamental principles: self-identified “Americans” mobilized in defense of their liberties and rights. Yet even though these claims were all framed in universal terms, they derived from British sources, evoking colonists’ experience under their common law jurisdictions, customary colony constitutions, and what they imagined to be an “imperial constitution.” What they all assumed was empire, a great, expansive domain within which property rights—the foundation of all other rights—were secure, even sacred. Breaking with the British Empire thus precipitated a great crisis. As the greatest power in the modern world launched a war of conquest and occupation against its erstwhile subjects, nothing could be secure. “Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” were promises Revolutionaries made to themselves and to future generations, an unprecedented “experiment” in the enlightened science of republican politics.
The most urgent question was whether Americans could recover and reconstitute the empire they had lost. If the British Empire had failed, how could the United States succeed? Both terms, “United” and “States” raised fundamental and enduring problems. Without the Crown, the former colonies had no recognized constitution or connection, only the ad hoc networks of communication, persuasion, and coercion that they had improvised in the name of the “common cause.” Without the sovereign powers of recognized, “civilized” states in the western state system, they were only “states” in a minimal sense: they might launch a rebellion, but they could not legitimately make war. Americans could only establish an effective continental government with a credible claim to sovereignty by recurring to the supposedly original source of authority in the people and then reconstructing the federal constitution of the old empire from the bottom up. When the drafters of the Northwest Ordinance provided for the creation of new states, they could not assume that “statehood” had a fixed meaning: they could only stipulate that new states would be “equal” (another ambiguous term) to the old, original states. Some clarification on this perennially confusing question would soon come from Philadelphia, as the framers recalibrated the deteriorating relationship of the federal whole to its constituent parts. And the meaning of “union”—the other term in my title—would also come into clearer, if by no means definitive focus. The meanings of these two terms were relational, and therefore—as we will see—subject to ongoing negotiation and redefinition.
(excerpted from the preface to the new edition)
