Introduction

In recent years a new Unionist interpretation of the American founding has presented the US Constitution as a compact of union between sovereign states, which allowed them to maintain interstate peace and to act in unison as a single nation vis-à-vis other nations in the international state-system. Such an understanding of the American founding argues that the Constitution created a bisected American state divided into a federal government in charge of international and intraunion affairs and state governments in charge of promoting socioeconomic development and maintaining civic rights. The introduction provides an overview of different interpretations of the founding and of the structure of the book.

Legislation

The first federal Congresses implemented the US Constitution by turning the constitutional text into the policies and institutions of the federal government. Under the Washington administration (1789–1797) federal legislation was overwhelmingly concerned with foreign affairs, international commerce, the federal territories in the trans-Appalachian West, Native American diplomacy and trade, and relations between the member-states in the American union. Other than the post office, hardly any laws were adopted to regulate social and economic relations within the member-states of the American federal union. Congress’s record in the period stands in marked contrast with that of both American state legislatures, such as Pennsylvania, and legislatures of unitary states, such as Great Britain, which were much more concerned with domestic issue legislation. In the bisected American state, there was a distribution of authority between a federal government in charge of international and intraunion affairs and state governments in charge of domestic affairs.

Union

The preamble’s promise of “a more perfect union” suggests that the US Constitution of 1787 aimed to reform the less than perfect union established by the Articles of Confederation of 1781. The framers’ understanding of union was grounded in early modern political ideas about confederations, and their call for reform in their analysis of the flaws of the articles. Their reform of the American union was characterized by both change and continuity. Although the Constitution laid the basis for a federal government founded on popular sovereignty and capable of acting independently of the states, the fundamental purpose of the American union and the remit of the federal government remained the management of intraunion and international affairs. In the reformed American federal union the states still retained the power to regulate the social, economic, and civic life of their citizens and inhabitants with only limited supervision and control from the federal government.

Peace Pact and Nation

In recent years a new Unionist interpretation of the American founding has presented the US Constitution as a compact of union between sovereign states, which allowed them to maintain interstate peace and to act in unison as a single nation vis-à-vis other nations in the international state-system. The American compact of union entailed the voluntary circumscription of the member-states’ sovereignty and the creation of a federal government through the delegation of enumerated powers from the states to the union. The Constitution was a limited, if very important, reform of the already existing American union under the Articles of Confederation. It did not aim at a wholesale transformation of American social and economic life, but sought to equip the union with the means to address challenges that arose from intraunion tensions, on the one hand, and from international competition in the Atlantic marketplace and the Western borderlands, on the other.

Internal Police

The US Constitution reserved to the member-states of the American federal union the power to regulate their internal police. Now largely forgotten, but much in use in the decades surrounding the American founding, the term internal police described an extensive range of activities that eighteenth-century states did to regulate their societies and their economies. By recovering the illusive meaning of internal police and by studying how the Constitution distributed internal police powers between Congress and the state governments, it is possible to shed light on how the Constitution divided political authority between the states and the federal government in the American union. The analysis in this chapter shows that under the Constitution, domestic affairs in the early United States was overwhelmingly meant to be regulated by the state governments and not the federal government.

Conclusion

Interpreting the US Constitution as an instrument of federal union has important implications in terms of understanding of the American founding. The Constitution mattered much more to the international than to the domestic history of the United States. Its importance to the latter was dwarfed by the role of state constitutions and state legislation. The Constitution provided the institutional basis on which the nation would grow in territory, population, and riches in the nineteenth century. But if the federal government was active in foreign policy, so-called Indian diplomacy, and the management of the national domain, it played only a limited role in domestic developments. To understand the processes of economic and political modernization that characterized the United States in the nineteenth century, that is, the transition to a market economy and to liberal democracy, it is necessary to study the actions and inactions of the American state governments.