The battle for America involved a number of groups, including Native Americans and Spanish, French, and British colonists. By the time the British won the French and Indian War to secure the colonists' defense, the colonists, already chafing under British rule, felt secure enough to sever the ties that bound them to the mother country, starting the Revolution and then in 1776 issuing the Declaration of Independence. Although that document proclaimed the equality of “all men,” the American founders clearly did not include African Americans, Native Americans, or women in that category.

Charged with creating a constitution, the founders drew up the Articles of Confederation, establishing a confederation of sovereign states. The new government wasn’t strong enough to provide political stability in the face of popular discontent, however. Worried about popular tyranny, which they saw threatened in actions like Shays’s Rebellion, the political elite called for a new Constitutional Convention in 1787.

The founders rejected a confederal system in favor of federalism, giving the central government and the states each some power of their own. Those who endorsed this political innovation were known as the Federalists, and those who opposed it, as Anti-Federalists. Federalists supported a strong central government in which representation was determined by population—a plan, called the Virginia Plan, favored by the large states. The Anti-Federalists, suspicious of centralized power, favored the New Jersey Plan, which limited power and gave each state equal congressional representation regardless of size. These issues were resolved in the Great Compromise, which created a bicameral legislature, basing representation on population in one house and on equality in the other. The other major conflict among the founders, over how slaves were to be counted for purposes of representation, was resolved by the Three-fifths Compromise.

The new Constitution was based on separation of powers and checks and balances, keeping the legislature, the executive, and the judicial powers distinct but allowing each some power over the others. The independence of the branches and the checks between them were enhanced by such institutions as the bicameral legislature, the Electoral College, and the practice of judicial review, though the latter is not mentioned explicitly in the Constitution. The founders provided for amendability, should circumstances require that the Constitution be changed in the future.

The Federalists and the Anti-Federalists waged a battle over ratification of the new Constitution, with the former setting out their case in a series of newspaper editorials known today as The Federalist Papers. In the most famous of these essays, James Madison argued that the new republic would be well able to handle the danger of factions, and in another, Alexander Hamilton argued that it would be dangerous to add a Bill of Rights to the document. Hamilton ultimately lost the argument, and the Bill of Rights was the price the Anti-Federalists demanded for their agreement to ratify the Constitution.