Episode Details

In this episode, we explore how america barely survived its infancy. So imagine launching a brand new country. Right. Oh, an incredibly stressful thought. Yeah. And within three years, your capital city is evacuated because of a deadly biological virus. Right. Your citizens are in open armed rebellion over the price of whiskey. And your founding fathers are secretly drafting legislation to basically overthrow each other's authority. It really paints a different picture. Welcome to the United States in the 1790s. It completely shatters that mythological painting we all have in our heads, doesn't it? Oh, total. The one where, you know, a group of men in powdered wigs just calmly sign a flawless piece of parchment, step outside and politely hand over this perfectly functioning society. It totally shatters it. And I mean, that actually brings us to our mission for you, the listener, on today's deep dive. Right. Because you might think the founding of the U .S. was the state has the inherent right to just ignore it. And think about the intellectual danger of that idea. If any state can unilaterally decide which federal laws it wants to follow, you don't have a country anymore. You have a loose suggestion of a country. Right. The system was entirely at war with itself, and they were actively realizing that the initial programming needed urgent patches to prevent a total collapse. Which brings us to a literal patch on the timeline, the 11th Amendment passing in 1795. Yeah, the 11th Amendment perfectly illustrates how reactionary early American governance actually was. How so? Well, in 1793, the Supreme Court heard a case called Chisholm v. Georgia, which basically ruled that a citizen of one state could sue another state in federal court. Okay. The states were absolutely horrified by this. It was a massive breach of their perceived sovereign immunity.