I know the American People are much attached to their Government,” Abraham Lincoln said in his Lyceum Address of January 1838, when he was a rising, almost-29-year-old state politician in Illinois. Curiously, American government was itself just shy of 62 years old, which, in politics, is not a long time for attachments to develop. The United States had no long descent to trace from toga-draped elders; it had no official language, no state church, and no national university. It was built around a Declaration and a Constitution whose creators were guided by what they had read in a dozen or so treatises of Enlightenment political theory. By all traditional understandings of government, the American republic should have been impossible. The reactionary Frenchman Joseph de Maistre sneered that “the government of a nation is no more its own work than its language” and cannot “be made as a watchmaker makes a watch.”

Still more dubious, the government that the Constitution mandated was to be a republic with a strong pull toward democracy—exactly the kind of government that in classical history was admired for its nobility but pitied for its fragility and that had never worked effectively, except in small-scale, face-to-face environments. And the 13 former British colonies that established their independence as American states would be joined together only as a federal union. “It will not be an easy matter to bring the American States to act as a nation,” predicted the Earl of Sheffield in 1784. “We might as reasonably dread the effects of combinations among the German as among the American States.” Even our allies agreed: “In all the American provinces,” wrote France’s chargé d’affaires in America in 1787, there will be “little stability.”