Abstract
The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, written over two decades after the colonies declared independence from Great Britain, represent a reaffirmation of the spirit of 1776. At the core, the Resolutions are intrepid statements in favor of self-government and limited central authority. A product of the political and constitutional battlegrounds of the 1790s, the Resolutions serve to link the federal union created by the Constitution with aspirations of the patriots of the American Revolution. Indeed, the touch of the author of the Declaration of Independence is unmistakable when one reads the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798.
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Notes
What I describe as a “party” in no way resembles the modern version of a political party. As Dumas Malone has observed, “[t]he term ‘party’ was something of a misnomer at a time when the affiliations of members of Congress were not a matter of record, and the organization was rudimentary from our point of view. Parties were loose groupings without legal sanction or formal leadership.” Dumas Malone, Jefferson the President: Second Term 1805–9 (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1974) p. xiii. For lack of a better term, I will describe the opposing groups as the Federalist party and the Republican party.
The Court/Country distinction originates from English political struggles of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. English Whigs saw the Court party as ever struggling to increase the influence of the executive by bribing members of Parliament with places and pensions in exchange for their support of programs meant to increase the size and power of government. Hence, the Country party saw the Court politicians as poor protectors of the people’s liberties. See John M. Murrin, The Great Inversion, or Court versus Country: A Comparison of the Revolution Settlement in England (1688–721) and America (1776–816), in J.G.A. Pocock, ed., Three British Revolutions: 1641, 1688, 1776 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 368–430;
Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978) pp. 126–60;
Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967) pp. 22–54.
Thomas Jefferson, The Anas of Thomas Jefferson, Franklin B. Sawvel, ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970) p. 27. Though Jefferson’s fear of monarchy was real, “not even in his wildest moments did he describe the monarchial-aristocratic faction as anything but small.”
Dumas Malone, Jefferson and the Ordeal of Liberty (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown and Company, 1962) p. 365.
For an example of American objections to hereditary rule, see Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in Lloyd S. Kramer, ed., Paine and Jefferson on Liberty (New York: Continuum Publishing Company, 1988) pp. 34–43.
Some High Federalists so missed the rule of George III that they freely conveyed information and government confidences to British secret agents. See Julian P. Boyd, Number 7: Alexander Hamiltons Secret Attempts to Control American Foreign Policy (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1964) p. 8.
Speech of Alexander Hamilton in the Federal Convention (June 18, 1797), in James Madison, Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 (New York: WW. Norton & Company, 1987) p. 134.
See Peter Shaw, The Character of John Adams (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1976) p. 231. According to Shaw, “some time after he became vice-president, Adams concluded that the United States would have to adopt a hereditary legislature and a monarch.” Ibid.
James H. Hutson, “John Adams’s Title Campaign,” 41 New England Quarterly 30, 30 (1968). For a discussion of Adams’s belief in a strong executive, see David McCullough, John Adams (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001) pp. 375–9.
Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986) p. 199.
Murray N. Rothbard, The Case Against the Fed (Auburn, Ala: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1994) p. 40. For an excellent critique of fractional reserve banking see pp. 33–70.
For a discussion of the Framers’ experience with paper money see Clarence B. Carson, The Constitution and Paper Money, in The Foundation of American Constitutional Government (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) pp. 166–75.
See Rothbard, supra note 28, pp. 27–9; Mark Skousen, Economics of a Pure Gold Standard (Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Foundation for Economic Education, 1996) pp. 1–10.
Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, William Peden, ed. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 1955) pp. 164–5. Though Jefferson remained a firm believer in the agrarian social system, his objections to industrialism grew less virulent in his later years.
Benjamin Franklin, The Political Thought of Benjamin Franklin, Ralph Ketcham, ed. (Indianapolis, Ind.: MacMillan Publishing Co., Inc., 1965) p. 229.
For an excellent statement of agrarian principles see Frank Lawrence Owsley, The Irrepressible Conflict, in I’ll Take My Stand (Baton Rouge, La.: Louisiana State University Press, 1977). For a thorough discussion of Jefferson’s agrarian views, see
Richard K. Matthews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, Kan.: University of Kansas Press, 1984) pp. 31–52. But see
Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and the New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984) (arguing that Republicans were modernists and actually saw agriculture as a parent of commerce, rather than the enemy of a modern capitalist order);
Lance Gilbert Banning, The Quarrel with Federalism: A Study in the Origins and Character of Republican Thought (St. Louis, Mo.: Washington University, 1972) p. 317.
A.V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Laws of the Constitution (Indianapolis, Ind: Liberty Fund, 1982) (1885) p. 3.
For a general history of the French Revolution, see Simon Schama, Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989).
John Cartwright to the President of the Committee of the Constitution of the Estates General (August 18, 1789), in Alfred Cobban, ed., The Debate on the French Revolution 1789–800 (London: Adam & Charles Black, 1960) p. 41.
Celebration of the Fourth of July, in Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–800: A Documentary Sourcebooks of Constitutions, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976) p. 338.
Merrill D. Peterson, Adams and Jefferson: A Revolutionary Dialogue (Athens, Ga.: The University of Georgia Press, 1976) p. 57.
1 James D. Richardson, ed., A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents (New York: National Bureau of Literature, 1897) p. 148.
Some scholars question whether this was an error or a deliberate attempt by the revolutionaries to go over Washington’s head and appeal directly to the representatives of the people. See, e.g., Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Long Affair: Thomas Jefferson and the French Revolution, 1785–800 (Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1996) pp. 156–7.
In fact, the Jacobins were so paranoid that they believed Genet was a counterrevolutionary. See Eugene R. Sheridan, “The Recall of Edmond Charles Genet: A Study in Transatlantic Politics and Diplomacy,” 18 Diplomatic History 463, 482–7 (1994).
Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: W.W Norton & Company, Inc., 1973) p. 146.
Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy (NewYork: Macmillan Company, 1923) p. 6.
Boyd, supra note 6, p. 12; see also, Albert H. Bowman, “Jefferson, Hamilton and American Foreign Policy,” 71 Political Science Quarterly 18, 20 (1956) (describing Hamilton’s sharing of information with the English). Viewing Hamilton as somewhat of a British agent, Jefferson wrote that Hamilton was “almost panick struck if we refuse our breach to every kick which Great Britain may chose to give it.” TJ to James Monroe, May 5, 1793, PTJ 25:66; see also Richard E. Ellis, The Jejfersonian Crisis: Courts and Politics in the Young Republic (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1971) p. 271 (observing that Hamilton and the High Federalists “believed that nothing should be done to disrupt or jeopardize Americas relations with England, even if it meant compromising Americas political independence and allowing economic domination by Great Britain”). Upon Hamilton’s death in 1804 at the hands of Aaron Burr, the British consul general in NewYork sent the following eulogy to the Foreign Office: “I consider him even as a loss to His Majesty and our Government, from the prudence of his measures, his conciliatory disposition, his abhorrence of the French Revolution and all republican principles and doctrines, and his great attachment to the British Government.” Quoted in
W.E. Woodward, A New American History (New York: Garden City Publishing Co., Inc., 1938) p. 309.
Quoted in James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993) p. 119.
James McHenry quoted in Stanley Elikins & Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) p. 556.
Quoted in Alexander DeConde, The Quasi War: The Politics and Diplomacy of the Undeclared War with France 1797–801 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1966) p. 72.
See Bernard A. Weisberger, America Afire: Jefferson, Adams, and the Revolutionary Election of 1800 (New York: HarperCollins, 2000) p. 222 (noting that “General Hamilton would have liked nothing better than an excuse to use his army to threaten Jefferson’s home state”).
See generally, Robert Higgs, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987).
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Watkins, W.J. (2004). Monocrats and Jacobins. In: Reclaiming the American Revolution. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09794-1_1
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