Early Republic

George Washington, elected the first president in 1789, set up a cabinet form of government, with departments of State, Treasury, and War, along with an Attorney General (the Justice Department was created in 1870).

The Early Republic, c.1780-1830, was a period of transition. The new independent nation expounded the Founding Father''s ideals of equality and expanded its borders beyond what was imaginable before 1776.

In April of 1789 the ink on the recently ratified Constitution was barely dry when George Washington began the trek from his Mount Vernon plantation to the national capital at New York.

The thirteen American colonies declared their independence from Britain in 1776. But they had to win their independence in a long war that followed. During that war, the colonies were united by an agreement called the Articles of Confederation.

The economic problems faced by the Congress deeply touched the lives of most Americans in the 1780s. The war had disrupted much of the American economy. On the high seas the British NAVY had great superiority and destroyed most American ships, crippling the flow of trade. On land, where both armies regularly stole from local farms in order to find food, farmers suffered tremendously.

Long before the Civil War and the days of the Wild West, early American History began with those first Native Americans who settled upon this land some 15,000 years ago. But, the history of the United States begins with those first early explorers, beginning with Christopher Columbus, and continuing with various explorers from England, France, Spain, the Netherlands, and other European countries.

A timeline of the American Republic from the first Europeans on the continent onward.

Traditionally, when we tell the story of “Colonial America,” we are talking about the English colonies along the Eastern seaboard. That story is incomplete-by the time Englishmen had begun to establish colonies in earnest, there were plenty of French, Spanish, Dutch and even Russian colonial outposts on the American continent-but the story of those 13 colonies (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia) is an important one. It was those colonies that came together to form the United States.

Bernard Bailyn, one of our greatest historians, shines his light on the nation's Dark Ages.

Attempting to include all phases in the development of European colonies in the Americas, the Newberry has an abundance of primary source material documenting the British, French, Spanish and Portuguese colonies. Like other subject areas within American history, the Ayer and Ruggles collections have a wealth of material for the study of the Colonial Period.

Following the end of the American Revolution, the United States struggled to define its foreign policy, to determine how to implement it, and to maintain necessary commercial ties with Europe without becoming embroiled in European conflicts and politics. Differences over foreign policy became a basis for the founding of political parties in the new nation as the debate pitted the Federalists, led by the Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, against the Jeffersonians, represented by Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

Established in 1977, the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) is an association of scholars dedicated to exploring the events and the meaning of United States history between 1776 and 1861.

The American Revolution was a political upheaval that took place between 1765 and 1783 during which colonists in the Thirteen American Colonies rejected the British monarchy and aristocracy, overthrew the authority of Great Britain, and founded the United States of America.