American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution and the Constitution

The Revolution and the Constitution: Five Grand Narratives Notes

  1. This chapter borrows from, builds on, summarizes, and distills a lifetime of work. See especially Akhil Reed Amar, “Of Sovereignty and Federalism,” The Yale Law Journal 96, no. 7 (1987): 1425–520, https://akhilamar.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Of-Sovereignty-and-Federalism-2.pdf; Akhil Reed Amar, “Some New World Lessons for the Old World,” The University of Chicago Law Review 58, no. 2 (1991): 483–510, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1599964; Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Constitution: A Biography (Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2005); Akhil Reed Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution: The Precedents and Principles We Live By (Basic Books, 2015); Akhil Reed Amar, The Words That Made Us: America’s Constitutional Conversation, 1760–1840 (Basic Books, 2021); Akhil Reed Amar, “The Year That Changed Everything,” The Atlantic, May 4, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/05/what-made-the-constitution/618756/; and Akhil Reed Amar, Born Equal: Remaking America’s Constitution, 1840–1920 (Basic Books, 2025).
  2. John Adams to Abigail Adams, May 17, 1776, in Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield (Belknap Press of Harvard University, 1963), 1:411.
  3. Articles of Confederation of 1781, pmbl., conclusion.
  4. Articles of Confederation of 1781, conclusion.
  5. US Const. pmbl.
  6. US Const. pmbl.
  7. For more details and documentation, see Amar, The Words That Made Us, 259–65.
  8. Pa. Const. of 1776, art. I.
  9. Mass. Const. of 1780, pt. I, art. I.
  10. See Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution, 471. For more details and documentation of my parenthetical claim that d-words and r-words were nearly interchangeable in the ratification era and the decades that followed, see Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution, 276–80.
  11. Federalist, no. 8 (Alexander Hamilton); and Federalist, no. 5 (John Jay).
  12. US Const. pmbl.
  13. See generally George Bancroft, History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States of America, 2 vols. (New York, 1882); and John Fiske, The Critical Period of American History, 1783–1789 (Boston, 1888).
  14. For details and documentation, see Amar, America’s Unwritten Constitution, 5–7, 503–5nn1–2.
  15. See Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (University of North Carolina Press, 1969). See also Gordon S. Wood, The Making of the Constitution (Baylor University Press, 1987); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (Vintage Books, 1991); and Gordon S. Wood, “A New Kind of Democracy,” in Democracy and the American Revolution, ed. Yuval Levin et al. (AEI Press, 2024).
  16. James Madison to Thomas Jefferson, October 24, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0151.
  17. George Washington to the President of Congress, September 17, 1787, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/04-05-02-0306.
  18. On this point, I should also note the Madison-centered work of Wood’s estimable ally Jack N. Rakove.
  19. Douglass Adair, “The Tenth Federalist Revisited,” in Fame and the Founding Fathers: Essays by Douglass Adair, ed. Trevor Colbourn (W. W. Norton, 1974), 75–76.
  20. William H. Riker, The Strategy of Rhetoric: Campaigning for the American Constitution (Yale University Press, 1996).
  21. Larry D. Kramer, “Madison’s Audience,” Harvard Law Review 112, no. 3 (1999): 664, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342372.
  22. For more details and documentation, see Amar, The Words That Made Us, 254–55.
  23. See generally Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (Harper & Row, 1980); and Howard Zinn, A Young People’s History of the United States (Seven Stories Press, 2007).
  24. Pre-proclamation, more than 100 men died at Lexington and Concord in 1775, and more than 1,000 men died or suffered grievous injury in ferocious fighting on or near Bunker Hill. Long before Dunmore’s proclamation, Washington had taken charge of a vast and self-described continental army, and George III had proclaimed all the mainland colonies to be in revolt. Also, in late October 1775—again, before Dunmore’s proclamation—the monarch had formally told Parliament that “the rebellious war now levied is become more general, and is manifestly carried on for the purpose of establishing an independent empire.” George III, “His Majesty’s Most Gracious Speech to Both Houses of Parliament” (speech, Houses of Parliament, London, England, October 26, 1775), https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eccodemo/K124613.0001.001/1:1. The yearlong delay between Bunker Hill and formal independence had little to do with Dunmore’s Virginia, which had already in effect joined forces with Massachusetts Patriots. Rather, formal independence was delayed mainly because of the sluggishness of the middle colonies, including Quaker-filled Pennsylvania, which had few slaves and took steps to end slavery soon after independence. For an incisive analysis of middle-colony moderates in 1774–76 that tellingly makes no mention of Dunmore, see Jack N. Rakove, “The Revolt of the Moderates,” chap. 2 in Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010). Most of the key moderates highlighted by Rakove were notably antislavery: Pennsylvania and Delaware’s John Dickinson, who freed all his slaves in 1777; Pennsylvania’s James Wilson; and New York’s John Jay and James Duane. Granted, New York was another important laggard colony, and slavery loomed larger there than in Pennsylvania. But the Zinn school and its 1619 Project affiliates offer no proof that Dunmore’s proclamation in fact galvanized New York Patriots.