Download or read book We Have Not a Government written by George Van Cleve and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 411 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In between the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitutions, our nation was governed by a much lesser known--and lesser written about--document called the Articles of Confederation. Unlike many other books, George Van Cleve's readable and original history of the nation during this period does not treat it as the "backstory" of how the Constitution came to be, but, rather, on its own terms. In 1783, the American states had won the Revolutionary War, and the Articles of Confederation had won majority support among the public. Yet, only four years later, the government totally collapsed. In analyzing the extraordinarily divisive issues the Confederation faced in the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, Van Cleve uncovers and explains why that collapse occurred. The Confederation faced massive war debts with virtually no authority to compel its members to pay them. It encountered punishing trade restrictions and strong resistance to American territorial expansion from powerful European governments. Bitter sectional divisions that deadlocked the Continental Congress arose from exploding western settlement. And a deep, long-lasting recession led to sharp controversies and social unrest across the country and among sections over greatly increased taxes, debt relief, and paper money. Van Cleve shows how these remarkable stresses transformed the Confederation into a stalemate government and eventually led conflicting interest groups to see that there would need to be structural changes to enable groups to advance their policies within a union powerful enough to govern a continental empire. Lucidly argued and superbly written, Stalemate Government will be the standard history of this critical period of our nation's birth for decades to come.