1789

August 15, 2023
A history of how the Constitution was put into practice. Allen (1929-2018) accepts the myth that Americans disliked the weak Articles of Confederation, which guided the Colonies through and after the Revolution. In fact, most Americans, from farmers to city workers, had few objections. Only the educated elite--northern lawyers and businessmen, southern planters--hated dealing with 13 separate currencies, banks, commercial regulations, and legal systems. Assembling in in 1787, they cobbled together the Constitution, a mixture of specific and ambiguous guidelines for a more or less democratic central government. That was the easy part. Assembling a functioning government from these guidelines was exceedingly difficult. However, it's fun to read about, and readers will enjoy Allen's lively account of what followed as the first Congress assembled in New York in spring 1789 and welcomed the first president. After inventing a ceremonial inauguration, it spent the following two years inventing the federal government literally from scratch. While George Washington invented the presidency, the House and Senate, notes the author, "completed a dizzying list of tasks, creating the departments of State, Treasury, and War, devising a federal judiciary system...building a financial structure for raising and collecting taxes and tariffs; approving a plan for funding foreign and domestic war debts." Congress members also established a national bank, patent office, and navy (but no army), conducted a census, passed the Bill of Rights, and allowed Washington to move the capital to "somewhere along the Potomac River in Virginia." Allen doesn't delve deeply enough into the issue of slavery, but he provides a solid overview of how early leaders mostly came together to create a new system of government. Fergus Bordewich's The First Congress is perhaps the best popular account of the foundation of the U.S. government, but this is a worthy competitor. A fairly inspiring, mostly traditional work of early American history.

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Starred review from November 6, 2023
Historian Allen (Tories), who died in 2018, recreates in this meticulous and fast-moving posthumous account the events of the pivotal year 1789 in America. (“Everything that happened in that epochal year would shape and empower the history that has followed it,” he writes.) Those happenings included, most notably, the implementation of the U.S. Constitution, as well as the first presidential election, the first legislative session of Congress, and the emergence of political parties. Allen profiles such famous founders as George Washington and John Adams alongside more obscure figures like Lt. Col. David Humphreys, one of Washington’s aides, who was the first to enlist Black troops for the Continental Army and was later tapped to draft Washington’s first inaugural address. Allen’s frequent flashbacks to the years immediately preceding 1789 make clear that the unification of separate states into one country was anything but inevitable, with many Americans suspicious of a federal government that could infringe on their rights. As Allen outlines the “threads of unification would bind the states together in a powerful transcontinental nation,” he casts a wide net—addressing, for example, how in 1789 Britain took its first steps toward abolishing slavery, which would eventually have massive ramifications in its fledgling former colony. It’s a superb distillation of a complex moment in U.S. history.