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The first chapter of Wilentz gave a basic outline of the process in which democracy came about in post revolution America. He starts out speaking of the basic form of democratic meetings taking place, paying particular attention to the groups that met in the Philadelphia area. He speaks of the Continental Congress, as well as the Pennsylvania Provincial Conference and the Pennsylvania Convention. Benjamin Franklin was an elected member of all three of these conferences, displaying how people of influence were elected to take charge of these initial meetings of Democracy. This was effective in giving the reader a basic understanding of how democracy quickly became a likable system in early American history.
Wilentz then went on to speak of how the Constitution was eventually crafted with the different influences of people. In this section of the chapter, he did a good job making references to different situations that occurred. However, he completely lacked giving adequate detail on such topics. When looking at the problem with the Articles of Confederation, the only mention he made was “under the loosely knit Articles of Confederation, was so feeble that it had become nearly impossible to conduct a foreign policy”(12). Yes that was true, but there were many other issues that the articles contained that played an even larger role than this. For example, the articles did have the power to tax. This crippled Americas economy because we had a significant war debt from the Revolution and had no way to bring money in to help counteract this debt. Also, there was no intra state currency established. So money in North Carolina would be different than the money in Pennsylvania. This greatly inhibited intra state communication and cooperation. This caused the states to act as 13 individual entities, and not as one nation. This clearly demonstrated how a confederacy model did not work in America, with the basis of state governments having more power than the national.
Off of that, he did explain how the constitution came into effect after the Articles did eventually fail. Yet he failed to mention the new constitution was intended to be a federalist model, in which the states and the federal government have the same amount of power. He did make mention of federalist 51, yet a more in depth depiction of these documents would have been nice, as these documents my Madison, Hamilton, and Jay significantly outlined the intention for the government, in hopes of winning over public support for the constitution. I also would have liked him to go into more detail about the struggle for the Bill of Rights. As my classmate pointed out in “Democracy and Slavery”, the rural yeoman and farmers wanted to make sure their fundamental rights were not in jeopardy. The Bill of Rights would pass, which he pointed out, but it was a long process that I would have preferred him to go more into more detail on.
Overall, this chapter lacked sufficient information about a pivotal point in our history.