American Enterprise Institute

Democracy and the American Revolution

The Spirit of Independence and the Rhythm of Democratic Politics Notes

  1. Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), D 3.1, 3.17, 3.22.
  2. Abraham Lincoln, “Address Before the Wisconsin State Agricultural Society” (speech, Wisconsin Agricultural Society, Milwaukee, WI, September 30, 1859), https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/fair.htm. 
  3. Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” (speech, Corinthian Hall, Rochester, NY, July 5, 1852).
  4. Stephen Skowronek, Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal, 2nd ed. (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2011). See also the historical patterns outlined in Samuel P. Huntington, American Politics: The Promise of Disharmony (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983).
  5. Edmund Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies” (speech, Parliament, London, March 22, 1775), http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch1s2.html. 
  6. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1997); Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York: Norton, 1993).
  7. John Wise, The Churches Quarrel Espoused (Boston, MA: J. Allen, 1717); and John Wise, Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches (Boston, MA: J. Allen, 1717).
  8. Burke, “Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies.”
  9. John M. Barry, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty (New York: Viking, 2012), 278, 283ff, 341n13.
  10. Thomas Jefferson, letter to Edward Carrington, 1787, in American Political Thought: A Norton Anthology, ed. Isaac Kramnick and Theodore J. Lowi (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 359–60.
  11. Thomas Jefferson, letter to R. C. Weightman, June 24, 1826, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbpe.15300100/?st=text. 
  12. “What country can preserve it’s [sic] liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance?” Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Smith, November 13, 1787, https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/jefferson/105.html. “No society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.” Thomas Jefferson, letter to James Madison, September 6, 1789, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0248. 
  13. Jack N. Rakove, ed., The Annotated U.S. Constitution and Declaration of Independence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 22–23.
  14. Kermit Roosevelt III, The Nation That Never Was: Reconstructing America’s Story (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 38–52.
  15. Stephen A. Douglas, “Remarks of the Hon. Stephen A. Douglas, on Kansas, Utah, and the Dred Scott Decision” (speech, State House, Springfield, IL, June 12, 1857), https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc00358. 
  16. George Kateb, Lincoln’s Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015), 81.
  17. Julian P. Boyd, ed., The Papers of Thomas Jefferson: January 1760 to December 1776 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), 1:243–47.
  18. On the Jeffersonian Republicans’ use of the Declaration, see Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011), 641.
  19. Abraham Lincoln, “Speech of Hon. Abram Lincoln, in Reply to Judge Douglas” (speech, State House, Springfield, IL, June 26, 1857), https://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/glc02813. 
  20. Lincoln, “Speech of Hon. Abram Lincoln, in Reply to Judge Douglas.”
  21. Abraham Lincoln, letter to George Robertson, August 15, 1855, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/robert.htm. 
  22. Lincoln, “Speech of Hon. Abram Lincoln, in Reply to Judge Douglas.”
  23. Lincoln, “Speech of Hon. Abram Lincoln, in Reply to Judge Douglas.”
  24. John Stuart Mill, “The Contest in America,” in The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto, Canada: University of Toronto Press, 1984), 21:142.
  25. Jonathan Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistance,” in American Political Thought, ed. Keith E. Whittington (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), 115–16.
  26. Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistance.”
  27. Kenneth L. Deutsch and Joseph R. Fornieri, eds., Lincoln’s American Dream: Clashing Political Perspectives (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005), 107–8.
  28. Dennis C. Rasmussen, Fears of a Setting Sun: The Disillusionment of America’s Founders (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021), 12–13.
  29. Boucher, “On Civil Liberty, Passive Obedience, and Non-Resistance.”
  30. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (London: Black Swan, 1689), §§ 230, 243.
  31. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1.5–8, 3.1.
  32. Abraham Lincoln’s statement of the need for a “political religion” of obedience to the laws can be found in his early speech “On the Perpetuation of Our Political Institutions,” known as the “Lyceum Address.”
  33. Mark E. Neely Jr., Lincoln and the Triumph of the Nation: Constitutional Conflict in the American Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 48.
  34. Kateb, Lincoln’s Political Thought, 56, cf. 86.
  35. Abraham Lincoln, “Fragment on the Constitution and Union,” January 1861, https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/fragment-on-the-constitution-andunion-2. 
  36. Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, 1.5–8.