American Sovereigns
The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War

How the American people could both be the ruler and the ruled led to choices that explain the current American constitutionalism.

Christian G. Fritz (Author)

9780521125604, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 27 April 2009

440 pages
23.4 x 15.6 x 2.3 cm, 0.61 kg

'In one of the most significant contributions to rethinking the nature and function of constitutionalism that this reviewer has encountered in many years, promising historian-lawyer Fritz (University of New Mexico) has taken a new look at the role of popular sovereignty in conflicts over the nature of constitutionalism in the US … A highly accessible, nicely produced, and beautifully researched and written book that is a must read for historians and teachers of public law.' S. N. Katz, Princeton University

American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory and jurisprudence that sees today's constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. American Sovereigns examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity - the people - would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant that the people were the sovereign and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved in 1776, in 1787, or prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today's constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.

1. Prologue
Part I. The People's Sovereignty in the States: 2. Revolutionary constitutionalism
3. Grass-roots self-government: America's early determinist movements
4. Revolutionary tensions: 'friends of government' confront 'the regulators' in Massachusetts
Part II. The Sovereign Behind the Federal Constitution: 5. The federal constitution and the effort to constrain the people
6. Testing the constitutionalism of 1787: the Whiskey 'Rebellion' in Pennsylvania
7. Federal sovereignty: competing views of the federal constitution
Part III. The Struggle over a Constitutional Middle Ground: 8. The collective sovereign persists: the people's constitution in Rhode Island
9. Epilogue.

Subject Areas: Legal history [LAZ], History of the Americas [HBJK]