4 - The Compromising Confederates

Summary

The fear of a tyrannical executive left an undeniable mark on the state constitutions. These foundational documents shared a common feature: the emphasis switched one more time from the corporatist and hierarchical vision of the people to the horizontal and egalitarian one, and granted extended powers to the state legislatures. Yet the corporatist vision of the colonial peoples was not to be abandoned when it came to establishing the Articles of Confederation. As in the case of the now largely forgotten Articles of the Confederation of the United Colonies instituted by the Puritans more than a century before, the theoretical equality of corporations, regardless of their actual size, made a compromise possible, despite the marked differences among the newly-created thirteen states. It was no small feat, considering that just a few years before, these differences – economic, religious, cultural, etc. – were considered by most actors and outsiders impossible to overcome. Even if the Articles of Confederation turned out to be short lived and deficient in many respects, it was a constitution that formalized the idea of dual citizenship and made possible the compromises of the Philadelphia Convention.