"The new republic began in 1781 after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation and continued when the Americans replaced the Articles with the United States Constitution 7 years later. In 1789, the people elected their first federal government. Over the next 15 years, the founding generation made substantive formal changes: in 1791, the states adopted the first 10 amendments, known collectively as the Bill of Rights, followed by two others in 1795 and 1804. The United States doubled its geographic size in 1803 when the Jefferson administration purchased the Louisiana territory from France. The new republic endured slavery, even as some states began its gradual elimination in the 1780s. Most Americans focused on modifying their new government and its powers while declining to resolve the future of slavery. To avoid contention and disunion, the delegates to the constitutional convention did not address it. The words "slavery" or "slave" appear nowhere in the document. Some abolitionists like Benjamin Franklin - a former slave owner himself - John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and Benjamin Rush attempted to raise the issue, but their efforts failed. Later leaders like William Lloyd Garrison, who founded the abolitionist paper, The Liberator, in 1831 and was co-founder of the Anti-Slavery Society, were active throughout the period. It was not until the end of the Civil War that slavery finally ended. The period also saw the enhancement of the Supreme Court's authority when Chief Justice John Marshall issued his unanimous opinion in Marbury v. Madison in 1803. Marshall wrote into the Constitution that the judges' duty was to interpret the document and to overturn all laws that conflicted with that interpretation. New institutions were created, such as the Bank of the United States, and the Court unanimously approved Congress's authority to create it. George Washington was the first president to sign an executive order while James Monroe was the first to issue a signing statement, indicating his ideas of legislation and how he intended to enforce it"-- Provided by publisher.
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