From the time of the ratification of the United States Constitution, American politics shifted to the national level. One of the things that I realized late in my career, even though I had been trained as an historian of the colonial period, was this: it is virtually impossible to write a history of the United States after 1788 without dividing it into four-year segments. Presidential election years set the tone for the direction of the country, and this has been true ever since the early 19th century, when the federal government’s share of the economy was minimal. It is not a matter simply of money; it is a matter of political legitimacy. Issues of legitimacy are much more important than issues of taxation. Legitimacy tells what the taxes will be spent on. That is far more important than the amount of taxes collected.
The problem is this: voting for the President, who is the only representative of all the people, is functionally a covenantal act. People ratify a particular President, and in doing so, they transfer authority and legitimacy to him and to his administration.
Prior to the ratification of the Constitution, these events were limited to state and local governments, and before that to colonial governments that were technically under the authority of the King of England. Politics was local, and the great issues of the day were also local. These issues differed from state to state, or from colony to colony.
There was no national civil government. There was no national political issue that confronted citizens in every region. Because there was no national government, there was no means of covenant ratification, which first took place in 1788. There was no means of covenant renewal nationally. So, people did not think of themselves as Americans; they thought of themselves as residents of their particular state.
It is difficult to write a history of the United States politically prior to 1775. Other than the American Revolution, there were no national political events. There were so many different colonies, and so many different issues, that the focus of the historian of necessity moves to issues of economics, social institutions, literary trends, political theory in general, marriage patterns, church planting, and basically nonpolitical issues. These are what conservatives regard, at least in theory, as the central issues of civilization.
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