Benjamin Franklin's Plans for a Colonial Union, 1750–1775

It is a long time since any serious student of history has proceeded on the assumption that whenever our forefathers wanted to shape or re-shape their governments, local or national, they sat down and drawing forward a sheet of paper said, “Lo, now we will make ourselves a constitution.” Our whole conception of history is nowadays shot through with theories of evolution, of the adoption and incorporation of the old into the new. Yet the process by which the institutions of the past have been wrought into those of the present is often neglected; a general statement, an indistinct impression is frequently allowed to stand unverified for lack of consultation of easily available records. For instance, no student of our constitutional history today lets Gladstone's remark as to the genesis of our federal Constitution go unchallenged; it is accepted as a fact that that instrument is at once a summary and the culmination of colonial and confederate legislative experience. Moreover, the part that the ineffective Articles of Confederation played in the formation of our federal Constitution, negative as it was, has been clearly and incontrovertibly set forth.