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Two hundred and thirty years ago, 55 courageous men met in Philadelphia to create a model for governing a vast, newly independent country. They assembled after almost a decade of division and disorganization under the nation’s original founding document, the Articles of Confederation.

After more than a century of remarkable achievements, their vision went badly off track, in circumstances the Founders could not predict. American growth has made the nation’s single most important job, the presidency, a recipe for failure. This history explains our current predicament, and it points to how we might improve.

The crisis that motivated the scrapping of the Articles of Confederation in favor of a new Constitution was clear.

The first government of the United States could not raise money for the common defense, it could not manage shared roads and ports, and it could not regulate competing claims on new territories in the rapidly expanding West. The states that had united together in the revolution against British colonialism were rapidly coming apart.

On the eve of the Constitutional Convention, George Washington, then a retired military commander, described the situation as dire.

“The disinclination of the individual states to yield competent powers to Congress for the Federal Government,” he wrote, will “be our downfall as a Nation.”

Washington and his fellow delegates in Philadelphia did not have a specific roadmap for their work. Weeks into the Constitutional Convention, Washington wrote: “I almost despair of seeing a favorable issue to the proceedings.” The delegates from big and small states had different interests, and the delegates from slave and non-slave states lived in essentially different societies.

What brought the Founders together in writing the Constitution, and what persuaded people to ratify the document, was a commitment to effective democratic governance — a shared effort to make the institutions of the United States serve the basic needs of citizens across a vast territory.

Abraham Lincoln later called this “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” The delegates were high-minded thinkers who understood the need for cooperation and compromise in a functioning republic. They recognized that the different parts of the country would not work together without rules, procedures and leaders who integrated them into a single, but still self-governing, whole.

That was the genius of “federalism,” as conceived by the Founders. The national government needed new powers to bring citizens together for common goals. Those powers had to reinforce state and local governance which served the particular needs of regions and towns.

Effective governance meant division of responsibility, overlapping authority and cooperation between actors with different but shared authorities. The U.S. military was a model for federalism, with a national Army and Navy, under the Constitution, but also continued reliance on state militias and local sheriffs.

These men of the law had different responsibilities, but they coordinated their activities to insure a safe country for all citizens. Federalism worked that way to protect freedom and enable effective governance at the same time.

As the nation’s first President, Washington followed this model. Under his leadership the United States developed new governing capacities to manage a growing national economy and a complex web of diplomatic negotiations in a dangerous world.

The national government helped to encourage state and local governing capacities over frontier lands, immigrant populations, and an emerging system of higher education — all funded but not controlled from the nation’s capital.

The success of the Constitution was in building effective governance, not ideological perfection. It was messy and contradictory from the start. The President, Congress and the states often disagreed about who had legitimate authority over land, trade and especially slaves. And