The enormous flag that inspired Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner” on display in 1873 in the Charlestown, Massachusetts, navy yard
Learning to Be a Nation
Independence from Britain gave America a chance to try to succeed as a nation but didn’t guarantee success. For the states, the hard work of learning to govern together came at a time when the whole continent seemed to be seething with energy and motion. Thousands of British soldiers remained around the western and northern perimeters like wolves, spoiling for another fight. Westward-pushing settlers and Native Americans struggled to control land and resources. Every effort to start a new state seemed to touch off a furious debate—would it be slave or free? And thousands of slaves risked their lives to escape northward to freedom.
Even the very nature of work changed. The shop gave way to the factory. Apprentices learned to pull levers. New water-powered looms spun cotton into yarn much faster than could be done by hand. Children went to work in mines and mills, and many didn’t come home, sleeping instead in company-owned boardinghouses. An inventor named John Baxter advertised that his new six-spindle loom “could easily be turned by children five to ten years of age,” and his twelve-spindle model by “girls from ten to twenty.” The new cloth-making machines ate up raw cotton, making slave labor more important than ever to cotton planters.
The Constitution, ratified in 1788, reflected the new nation’s unrest. It began with the words “We the People,” but left out more than three-fourths of all Americans: women, Native Americans, almost all African Americans, and young people. Like the new nation itself, it was clearly a work in progress.