Abstract
The United States Constitution, as signed by the Convention on 17 September 1787, and transmitted by Congress to the States, contained many of the republican elements already embraced by earlier American frames of government. It also included some of the modifications suggested by John Adams and other modern commentators to remedy the weaknesses that led the English Commonwealth and Roman republic eventually to fail. The document as a whole is more self-consciously republican1 than any of its predecessors, not only in establishing a senate2 but also in claiming to secure the ‘Blessings of Liberty’3 and to ‘guarantee to every state in this union a Republican form of government’.4 The President and Senate both had to concur in legislation, as Adams would have wished, but the Senate had long, six-year terms, to preserve the dignity and stability of its Roman model.5
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Notes
For ancient influences on the United States Constitution, see R. A. Ames and H. C. Montgomery, ‘The Influence of Rome on the American Constitution’, Classical Journal 32 (1934–35):19; Louis Cohn-Haft, The Founding Fathers and Antiquity’, Smith College Studies in History 66 (1980):137; Gilbert Chinard, Tolybius and the American Constitution’, JHI 1 (1940):38–58; Mitchell Franklin, ‘Concerning the Influence of Roman Law on the Formulation of the Constitution of the United States’, Tulane Law Review 38 (1964):621; Richard M. Gummere, ‘The Classical Ancestry of the United States Constitution’, American Quarterly 14 (1962):3–18; Charles F. Mullett, ‘Classical Influences on the American Revolution’, Classical Journal 35 (1939– 40):92-104; Epaminondas P. Panagopoulos, ‘Classicism and the Framers of the Constitution’, (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1952); Reinhold, Classica, 94–115.
For a brief summary, see Sydney George Fisher, The Evolution of the Constitution of the United States (Philadelphia, 1897), 215–309. Cf. Jensen, 1:52–68; Donald Lutz, The Origins of American Constitutionalism (Baton Rouge, La., 1980), 125–35.
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© 1994 M. N. S. Sellers
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Sellers, M.N.S. (1994). The United States Constitution. In: American Republicanism. Studies in Modern History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_11
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-13347-5_11
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