Free Andrew Jackson by H.W. Brands Page A

might have completed the journey in a day, humans walking on a decent road in a week. But there was no such road, making the roundabout trip by water the only feasible way to transport families and their belongings.
    Transportation wasn’t a problem for the people of the frontier alone. During the 1780s the difficulty of distance was a rock on which the Union nearly broke—although whether it was more dangerous than other submerged boulders was a matter of interpretation. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, the United States were decidedly plural, having united for the purpose of fending off the British, a purpose that vanished upon the peace. The Articles of Confederation continued to link them, but because the articles had been drafted deliberately weak, the links bound no state to do much it didn’t want to do. The national government could requisition operating funds from each state but couldn’t compel payment, which meant that it often didn’t get paid. It could preach amity and cooperation to the states but couldn’t prevent their waging economic war on one another. It could urge the states to keep their defenses strong but couldn’t support a decent army or conscript anyone to fight.
    The weaknesses of the Confederation caused many Americans to worry that their republican experiment was coming undone. When domestic unrest broke out in Massachusetts, led by Revolutionary War veteran Daniel Shays, the worries mounted. When the British refused to relinquish control of forts in the Ohio Valley, which they had promised in the Paris treaty to do, the weakness at the center became a source of national embarrassment. Those most worried and embarrassed mobilized in favor of a stronger central government. James Madison and Alexander Hamilton organized a convention at Annapolis in 1786. When the turnout proved disappointing, they rescheduled for Philadelphia the following summer.
    The Philadelphia convention initially confronted what seemed an insurmountable barrier: the requirement under the Articles of Confederation that amendments receive the unanimous endorsement of the states. But what Madison, Hamilton, and the others couldn’t climb over they skirted, proposing not to amend the Articles but to write an entirely new constitution. It was a bold gambit, one that risked angry disavowal by those who had sent the delegates to Philadelphia. Yet it was a move they considered necessary in view of the current crisis. The delegates aimed to craft a stronger union, one with the energy and power to accomplish the purposes of a proud and growing nation. They worked through the hot Pennsylvania summer, meeting in closed session in the same hall where the Continental Congress had approved independence eleven years earlier. In September they revealed their blueprint to the world, asking the states to ratify the new charter and put the old, weak government out of its—and their—misery.
    The Philadelphia charter was elegant in places, workmanlike in others, downright clunky in yet others. Like all works of committee it embodied compromise. One obvious compromise regarded representation in the new Congress. States with few inhabitants had wanted to maintain the Confederation principle of one vote per state. Heavily peopled states desired representation by population. The result was a hybrid legislature, with the Senate embodying the small-state position and the House of Representatives the big-state view. Another compromise determined the selection of the president: not by the Congress or by the states directly but by an electoral college created anew every quadrennium. Who would the president represent, then? It was a fair question. Some in the convention sought to ban slavery, deeming it antithetical to the basic principles of liberty and self-government. Yet the slave-thick southern states stood together, defending their peculiar institution as necessary to their economic development. The most the antislavery delegates