Abstract
The great distinction and historic achievement of the American Constitution was to weld the disparate, shambling cluster of the selfinterested original states into a national union. In other words, to create a nation of shared principles. The idea that a true political community was to be defined as a community of principle had advocates among the many differing thinkers whose names have been variously linked with the concept or the forerunners of the Enlightenment, notably Machiavelli, Harrington, Locke, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui, Hume, and Rousseau.1 In the longest of long runs, as Abraham Lincoln was to insist when he warned Americans that “[a] house divided against itself cannot stand,”2 that principle would determine whether the United States could survive as a nation.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The author wishes to acknowledge support from Slaughter and May of London and Getty, Meyer and Mayo of Lexington, Kentucky.
David A. J. Richards, Foundations of American Constitutionalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 294–295.
Paul M. Angle, ed., Created Equal? The Complete Lincoln-Douglas Debates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 1–9.
Which is the underlying theme of Jacob E. Cooke, ed., The Federalist (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961).
John Marshall, Life of George Washington.,5 vols. (New York, 1925) 5: 279–306 for the full text, 283.
Ibid., 285.
Ibid., 284–285.
Andrew W. Robertson, “ ‘Look on this picture . . . And on this!’: Nationalism, Localism and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787–1820,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 1263–1280.
J. J. Powell, Essay Upon the Law of Contracts and Agreements, 2 vols. (London: For J. Johnson and T. Whieldon, 1790).
Walker P. Mayo, “The Federal Bill of Rights and the States before the Fourteenth Amendment,” DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1993, 223–227.
The leading work is James H. Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), esp. 213–246. The right to citizenship and related duties were matters of heated party debate.
J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 204–205.
Mayo, “Federal Bill of Rights,” 1–26, appendix D; William W. Crosskey, Politics and the Constitution in the History of the United States, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), 2: 1070; attacked by Charles Fairman, “The Supreme Court and the Constitutional Limitations on State Governmental Authority,” University of Chicago Law Review 21 (1953): 40–78; Crosskey’s reply, William Winslow Crosskey, “Charle’s Fairman, ‘Legislative History,’ and the Constitutional Limitations on the State Authority,” University of Chicago Law Review 22 (1954): 1–143; Fairman’s rejoinder, Charles Fairman, “A Reply to Professor Crosskey,” University of Chicago Law Review 22 (1954): 144–156; J. R. Pole, “The Individualist Foundations of American Constitutionalism,” in “To Form a More Perfect Union”: Critical Ideas of the Constitution, ed. Herman Belz, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1992), 98–101.
William Rawle, A View of the Constitution of the United States of America (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey and I. Lea, 1825); Mayo, “Federal Bill of Rights,” 256–257. These remarks represent an attempt to reconcile the dissenting views expressed in my essay, “The Individualist Foundations,” above, with the persuasive Marshallian argument of Akhil Reed Amar, The Bill of Rights (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 140–171.
The issues are analyzed in J. R. Pole, The Pursuit of Equality in American History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 180–185; Don E. Fehrenbacher, The Dred Scott Case: Its Significance in American Law and Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978) for comprehensive cover.
William E. Nelson, The Fourteenth Amendment: From Political Principle to Judicial Doctrine (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 156–159. Pole, Pursuit of Equality, 224–226.
Noel T. Dowling and Gerald Gunther, Constitutional Law: Cases and Materials, 7th ed. (Brooklyn: Foundation Press, 1965), 49–50.
United States, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789–1873 (Boston, 1863), 12: 432.
United States, Statutes at Large of the United States of America, 1789–1873 (Boston, 1866), 14: 27.
James Bryce, The American Commonwealth (London and New York: Macmillan, 1891) I: 27.
Ibid, I: 390.
Alan Cromartie, Sir Matthew Hale: Law, Religion and Natural Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 36, 107.
Editor information
Copyright information
© 2006 Gary L. McDowell and Johnathan O’Neill
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Pole, J.R. (2006). Nation-Making and the American Constitutional Process. In: McDowell, G.L., O’Neill, J. (eds) America and Enlightenment Constitutionalism. Studies of the Americas. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601062_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230601062_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-53362-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-60106-2
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)