A debt-ridden farmers’ uprising exposes a government too weak to govern, and fifty-five delegates lock themselves in a Philadelphia room all summer to replace it — then spend the next sixteen years finding out, through a whiskey tax, a stolen-bribe scandal, a jailed congressman, and an election that nearly broke itself, whether the untested republic they wrote into being could actually survive its own arguments. (The Revolution that preceded it is covered in full in this archive’s Liberty’s Ledger volume.)