The American Constitution: The Creation Of The United States Constitution

In the wake of Abraham Lincoln’s election to the presidency in 1860, South Carolinian officials signed a Declaration of Secession that renounced their ties to the United States and marked the creation of the Confederate States of America. Less than six months later, at the command of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, troops were dispatched to assault Fort Sumter, a Union fort in the South Carolinian port of Charleston. This was the battle that signified the division of a nation. This was the culmination of years of conflict and debate between northern and southern state officials, including topics such as the interpretation of the United States Constitution, economic policies that would only help either the north or the south, and

However, people in the early United States saw this Constitution from various points of view. These opposing interpretations of the document led to the development of the first political parties in United States history; the Democratic Republicans, who believed in a weaker central government that would reserve power to the citizens of the newborn country, and the Federalists, who believed that the central government should be powerful and able to utilize implied powers that were not expressly mentioned in the Constitution. Federalist president John Adams managed to pass the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were a violation of rights granted to the citizens of the United States via the First Amendment. The Democratic Republicans, under the leadership of Thomas Jefferson and in response to these acts, drafted the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, in which they expressed the idea of “nullification” for the first time. This concept allowed state government to nullify any federal law deemed unjust by the state legislature, and was but the first of many accounts of defiance against the federal government on a political