Democracy, Liberty, and Property. Группа авторов
later generations that may likewise be called upon to set the direction for the future course of their political societies.
Indeed, this collection of convention debates is just as timely now as when it was first published in 1966. In the intervening decades scholars such as Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, and Donald Lutz have revolutionized the study of the American founding, highlighting the political alternatives available to the founding generation and the deliberation that went into their choices among those alternatives.9 This volume complements that research, showing that as the nation grew and developed, nineteenth-century Americans had to confront anew the perennial question of how to guarantee liberty and promote self-government. Also, since the initial publication of these debates many countries throughout the world have thrown off dictatorships. This volume provides a model of self-government, of popular participation in making fundamental political choices, that can serve as an inspiration to those struggling to secure liberty and create viable popular governments. Finally, for students this volume illustrates how political liberty can encourage and elevate public discourse. By reading and reflecting on these debates, they can better understand the enduring issues relating to liberty and popular rule that they will confront as citizens.
G. Alan Tarr
Suggested Further Reading
Recent decades have witnessed a burgeoning interest in American state constitutions and American political development. Listed below are sources pertinent to constitutional development and constitutional debates in Massachusetts, New York, and Virginia, and in the American states more generally, from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the Civil War.
Bruce, Dickson D. The Rhetoric of Conservatism: The Virginia Convention of 1829–30 and the Conservative Tradition in the South. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1982.
Cogan, Jacob Katz. “The Look Within: Property, Capacity, and suffrage in Nineteenth-Century America.” Yale Law Journal 107 (November 1997): 473–98.
Dinan, John J. The American State Constitutional Tradition. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006.
———. The Virginia State Constitution: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2006.
Elazar, Daniel J. “The Principles and Traditions Underlying American State Constitutions.” Publius 12 (Winter 1982): 11–25.
Fehrenbacher, Don E. Constitutions and Constitutionalism in the Slaveholding South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989.
Finkelman, Paul, and Stephen E. Gottlieb, eds. Toward a Usable Past: Liberty under State Constitutions. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1991.
Freyer, Tony A. Producers versus Capitalists: Constitutional Conflict in Antebellum America. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994.
Friedman, Lawrence M. “Fallacies of American Constitutionalism.” Rutgers Law Journal 35 (Summer 2004): 1327–69.
———. “State Constitutions in Historical Perspective.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 496 (March 1988): 33–42.
Fritz, Christian G. “Alternative Visions of American Constitutionalism: Popular Sovereignty and the Early American Constitutional Debate.” Hastings Constitutional Law Quarterly 24 (Winter 1997): 287–357.
Galie, Peter J. The New York State Constitution: A Reference Guide. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991.
———. Ordered Liberty: A Constitutional History of New York. New York: Fordham University Press, 1996.
Hall, Kermit L., and James W. Ely Jr., eds. An Uncertain Tradition: Constitutionalism and the History of the South. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Hall, Kermit L., Harold M. Hyman, and Leon V. Sigal, eds. The Constitutional Convention as an Amending Device. Washington, D.C.: American Historical Association and American Political Science Association, 1981.
Handlin, Oscar, and Mary Flug Handlin. Popular Sources of Political Authority: Documents on the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1966.
Hoar, Roger Sherman. Constitutional Conventions: Their Nature, Powers, and Limitations. Boston: Little, Brown, 1919.
Hulsebosch, Daniel Joseph. Constituting Empire: New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664–1830. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.
Lutz, Donald S. Popular Consent and Popular Control: Whig Political Theory in the Early State Constitutions. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.
McHugh, James T. Ex Uno Plura: State Constitutions and Their Political Cultures. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.
Novak, William J. The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.
Scalia, Laura J. America’s Jeffersonian Experiment: Remaking State Constitutions, 1820–1850. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1999.
Steinfeld, Robert J. “Property and Suffrage in the Early American Republic.” Stanford Law Review 41 (January 1989): 335–76.
Sturm, Albert L. “The Development of American State Constitutions.” Publius 12 (Winter 1982): 57–98.
Sutton, Robert P. Revolution to Secession: Constitution Making in the Old Dominion. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989.
Tarr, G. Alan. Constitutional Politics in the States: Contemporary Controversies and Historical Patterns. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.
———, Understanding State Constitutions. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Williams, Robert F. State Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials. 4Thed. Charlottesville, Va.: Lexis Law Publishing, 2006.
The constitutional convention has been called “America’s basic institution.” It developed in the actual process of state-making during the American Revolution. When the people of the thirteen colonies declared their independence, they had not only to prove their claim on the battlefield but also to reestablish the foundations of political authority. The fundamental principle was stated in the Declaration of Independence: “That governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” But how could the people, thrown into the figurative state of nature by the dissolution of old bonds and allegiance, reduce the principle to practice? History furnished no models; and political philosophers, though they had speculated on the sovereignty of the people, had not descended to the lowly realm of political means and institutional contrivance to implement their theory.
The Revolutionary Americans discovered the answer to the riddle in the constitutional convention. A product not of abstract theory but of developing practice, of essentially ad hoc experimentation under the trying conditions of the Revolutionary War, the first state constitutions were at best imperfect realizations of the principle of popular consent in the making of government. In 1780, however, the Massachusetts constitution produced a model from which the theory of constituent sovereignty could be formulated. It contained three main elements. First, the people, through their elected delegates, “represent” their sovereignty in a convention called to constitute a government. Second, the constitution thus framed is ratified by the people and given effect by their majority. Third, the people retain the right to revise, and presumably to abolish, the constitution by the ongoing exercise of their sovereignty.
It was scarcely to be expected that the first state constitutions would endure beyond the age that produced them. The age was a time of peril; American society was in its infancy; self-government was a daring