Winning the war left the hardest question open: what kind of country would this be? The answer took years of argument, and it set examples watched across the world.

A general goes home

One early answer came from the army itself. In 1783 some officers, angry over unpaid wages, hinted at pressuring Congress by force. Washington talked them down. Then, on 23 December 1783 at Annapolis, Washington resigned his command to Congress and went home to Mount Vernon. Europeans who expected a victorious general to seize power were astonished, and Americans compared him to the Roman Cincinnatus. His later choice to leave the presidency after two terms reinforced the lesson that power in a republic is held on loan.

The Confederation and its troubles

The Articles of Confederation, in force from 1781, created a league of sovereign states with a weak Congress. Congress did pass one lasting law, the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which banned slavery north of the Ohio River and set out how territories could become equal states. But debts, trade wars between states and hard money pressed on ordinary people. In 1786 and 1787 Shays' Rebellion saw indebted farmers in western Massachusetts close courts to stop foreclosures. The state crushed it, but many leaders took it as proof that the union needed a stronger government.

The Constitutional Convention

Fifty five delegates met in Philadelphia from May to September 1787, with Washington presiding. James Madison's Virginia Plan proposed representation by population, which small states resisted. The Connecticut Compromise gave the House seats by population and every state an equal vote in the Senate. The convention also built in a separation of powers with checks: Congress makes laws, the president can veto them, and courts decide cases under them.

Slavery shaped the bargain throughout, though the word never appears. The three-fifths clause counted enslaved people as three fifths of a person for representation, adding to southern power. A fugitive clause required escaped slaves to be returned, and Congress could not ban the slave trade before 1808. Defenders argued that without these compromises there would have been no union at all; critics, then and since, answer that the price was paid by people who had no say.

Ratification and the Bill of Rights

Nine states had to ratify. Supporters, called Federalists, made their case in essays and speeches, most famously the Federalist papers. Opponents, the Anti-Federalists, were not cranks. Writers such as Brutus and the Federal Farmer, and leaders such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, objected that the Constitution centralized power and lacked a bill of rights. A large republic, they argued, would be ruled by distant elites, and a strong federal government would swallow the states. Some of their warnings about federal power and the courts proved shrewd.

Massachusetts ratified while recommending amendments, and other states followed that path. New Hampshire became the ninth state in June 1788. To keep his promise to the critics, James Madison introduced the amendments in the first Congress in 1789. Ten were ratified by December 1791 as the Bill of Rights, protecting speech, religion, the press, jury trial and more.

Echoes abroad

The Revolution's effects spread quickly. France had spent heavily on the war, and France's war debts deepened the money crisis that led to 1789. Lafayette, who had served with Washington, drafted France's Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen with advice from Jefferson. In Saint-Domingue, enslaved people rose in 1791 and founded Haiti, taking the language of rights further than the Americans had. Spanish American leaders read the American documents, and Venezuela declared independence in 1811. Britain, having lost its colonies, began sending convicts to Australia in 1788, partly because America no longer took them, and turned its empire toward Asia.

Worked example: Hanoi, 1945

On 2 September 1945, Ho Chi Minh stood before a crowd in Hanoi to declare Vietnam independent of France. Ho Chi Minh opened by quoting the American Declaration's words about all men being created equal and endowed with unalienable rights, and then cited France's own Declaration of the Rights of Man. The historian David Armitage has counted more than a hundred declarations of independence around the world since 1776, many borrowing the American model. Ask why a communist leader fighting a Western empire would quote Jefferson. Part of the answer is strategy: he hoped for American support. Part is that the words had escaped their authors. A text written by slaveholding colonists to justify a break with their king had become a general claim that peoples may govern themselves and that governments answer to the governed. The Revolution's legacy is that claim, together with the long struggle, at home and abroad, to make it true for everyone.