From the New York Times

By JAY WINIK

Published: November 27, 2009

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, no question haunted the founders more than whether the young, precarious United States could survive. Would the country last in perpetuity? Or was it fated to be a bold experiment in republicanism that would ignominiously fail?

As the founders knew all too well, the examples from the rest of the world were not encouraging: with bewildering rapidity republics came and went, ever ready to disintegrate into bickering, fragmented entities, or collapsing through conquest, or dying through despotism. James Madison perhaps put it best, moaning that the United States was “in a wilderness without a single footstep to guide us.”

Quite true. Yet as Gordon S. Wood demonstrates in “Empire of Liberty,” his superb new account of America’s pivotal first quarter-century, these inchoate Americans were audacious from the very start. Timothy Dwight, the president of Yale, brazenly asserted that the United States was destined to be “God’s own Word.” Madison called America an Arcadian “paradise,” while Thomas Jefferson labeled the nation “the world’s best hope.” And when they gazed over at the decadent, decaying monarchies of France and England, Americans concluded they were on the cusp of a new age, destined to be “an asylum to the good, to the persecuted and to the oppressed.”

In fact, however, the obstacles a debt-ridden America faced were monumental. Under the Articles of Confederation, its Congress had been a feeble instrument that could barely muster a quorum. Its 13 states acted like 13 independent countries, and squabbling ones at that. Laws were, as Vermont officials put it, “altered — re­altered — made better — made worse” with such dizzying speed that people scarcely knew what the law was. The national government couldn’t tax, couldn’t raise an army and couldn’t suppress internal insurrections.

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Also see The Miller Center’s Gordon Wood Interview.

Tags: Articles of Confederation, Gordon S. Wood, New York Times, Thomas Jefferson

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