Loyalists. As always happens in a successful revolution, the
party of opposition vanished, and when the peace of 1783 finally
put the stamp of reality upon the Declaration of 1776, the
patriot party had won its cause and had served its day.

Immediately thereafter a new issue, and a very significant one,
began to divide the thought of the people. The Articles of
Confederation, adopted as a form of government by the States
during a lull in the nationalistic fervor, had utterly failed to
perform the functions of a national government. Financially the
Confederation was a beggar at the doors of the States;
commercially it was impotent; politically it was bankrupt. The
new issue was the formation of a national government that should
in reality represent a federal nation, not a collection of touchy
States. Washington in his farewell letter to the American people
at the close of the war (1783) urged four considerations: a
strong central government, the payment of the national debt, a
well-organized militia, and the surrender by each State of
certain local privileges for the good of the whole. His "legacy,"
as this letter came to be called, thus bequeathed to us
Nationalism, fortified on the one hand by Honor and on the other
by Preparedness.

The Confederation floundered in the slough of inadequacy for
several years, however, before the people were sufficiently
impressed with the necessity of a federal government. When,
finally, through the adroit maneuver of Alexander Hamilton and
James Madison, the Constitutional Convention was called in 1787,
the people were in a somewhat chastened mood, and delegates were
sent to the Convention from all the States except Rhode Island.