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The United States fought and achieved a great victory over the British Empire to secure its independence. But the great victory was nearly ruined and the infant nation stillborn due to a badly flawed initial system of governance emplaced by the founding fathers in the Articles of Confederation used as the blueprint for the new government. The largest problem with the Articles was that the National Government was inferior to the state one. In fact, even the tiniest state could and did block the national from getting anything done. Rhode Island was notorious for this.

 

It was soon realized that another Congressional Committee would be needed to redo the Articles of Confederation. But what really happened was that instead of just reediting the Articles, the convention, behind closed doors in Philadelphia, wrote a completely new document which became known as The Constitution of the United States. Writing a new constitution was the easy part. The hard part was getting it ratified by nine of the thirteen states so that it would be adopted as a whole for the entire United States of America.

Triumvirate focuses on the three men most famous for the ratification of the new Constitution: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and James Madison. These three men, under the pen name of Publius, wrote the most famous series of essays on the need for adopting the Constitution: The Federalist Papers. The people who were opposed to the Constitution as written were called, naturally enough, the Anti-Federalists.

The debate for most of the Anti-Federalists was not that the Constitution wasn’t needed, but it needed to have protections built in. The main complaint by most of the Anti-Federalists was that no bill of rights was expressly stated in the Constitution. It is rather comical to read how New York State demanded the right to keep and bear arms in light of the current policies concerning the Second Amendment today. Or how New York City threatened to secede from New York State and become an independent state if they did not ratify the Constitution. But the triumvirate in the book had a major player who worked behind the scenes to get the Constitution ratified: George Washington.