American Enterprise Institute

The American Revolution and the Constitution

From Colonial Rule to Constitutional Administration Notes

  1. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2017), 321. Martin Diamond agreed: “It is to the Constitution that we must ultimately turn as the completion of the American Revolution.” See Martin Diamond, “The Revolution of Sober Expectations,” in America’s Continuing Revolution: An Act of Conservation (AEI Press, 1975), 32.
  2. Here, too, Diamond puts it best: “With the Constitution the Americans completed the half-revolution begun in 1776 and became the first modern people fully to confront the issue of democracy,” he wrote in 1975. “But, again, the American Revolution precisely in its revolutionary thrust was simultaneously distinctively sober. . . . The sobriety lies in the Founding Fathers’ coolheaded and cautious acceptance of democracy.” From revolution to constitution, the question of American government “gradually became a debate over how to create a decent democratic regime.” See Diamond, “The Revolution of Sober Expectations,” 38–39.
  3. John Adams, “Thoughts on Government,” April 1776, Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/06-04-02-0026-0004. Adams is quoting James Harrington’s 1656 Commonwealth of Oceana.
  4. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776), https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-paine-common-sense-pamphlet.
  5. Paine, Common Sense.
  6. Abraham Lincoln, “First Inaugural Address,” speech, Washington, DC, March 4, 1861, https://www.abrahamlincolnonline.org/lincoln/speeches/1inaug.htm.
  7.  Maier describes this “extended controversy in North Carolina” in great detail. King George III refused to assent to a North Carolina law that would have empowered judges to liquidate nonresidents’ property for defaulting on their debts, a power that “the Crown considered contrary to the substance and spirit of English law.” The assembly refused to enact the judicial legislation without such a power, and the ensuing standoff caused the courts to eventually close. See Pauline Maier, American Scripture: Making the Declaration of Independence (Vintage, 1997), 110.
  8.  Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 105.
  9.  Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 105.
  10.  See Galloway, “A Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1760),” in Exploring the Bounds of Liberty: Political Writings of Colonial British America from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and Craig B. Yirush (Liberty Fund, 2018), 3:1662.
  11. Galloway, “A Letter to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1760),” 3:1663–64.
  12. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 106–7.
  13. Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 107–8.
  14. Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. IV.
  15. Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. IX.
  16. Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. IX.
  17. Northwest Ordinance of 1787, § 4. The Northwest Ordinance also contained a fascinating provision, empowering the territory’s three-judge court as a legislature: “The governor and judges, or a majority of them, shall adopt and publish in the district such laws of the original States, criminal and civil, as may be necessary and best suited to the circumstances of the district, and report them to Congress from time to time.” Northwest Ordinance of 1787, § 5.
  18. Articles of Confederation of 1781, art. IX; and Northwest Ordinance of 1787, § 4.
  19. US Const. art. VI, cl. 2.
  20. James Madison, “James Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention,” The Records of the Federal Convention of 1787, ed. Max Farrand, vol. 1. (Yale University Press, 1911).
  21. Madison, “James Madison’s Notes of the Constitutional Convention.”
  22. Alexander Hamilton, “Constitutional Convention. Plan of Government,” Founders Online, June 18, 1787, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0099.
  23. US Const. art. II, § 2, cl. 2.
  24. For a much more detailed account of this part of the convention’s deliberations, seeAdam J. White, “Toward the Framers’ Understanding of ‘Advice and Consent’: A Historical and Textual Inquiry,” Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy 29, no. 1 (2006), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=813464.
  25. Federalist, no. 78 (Alexander Hamilton), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0241.
  26. Brutus, “XV,” in Herbert J. Storing, ed., The Complete Anti-Federalist (University of Chicago Press, 1981), 2:438.
  27. Brutus, “XV,” 2:186–89.
  28. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  29. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  30. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  31. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  32. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  33. Federalist, no. 78 (Hamilton).
  34. Maier, American Scripture, 106.
  35. Maier, American Scripture, 112.
  36. Thomas Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America (July 30, 1774), quoted in Maier, American Scripture, 113.
  37. Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, quoted in Maier, American Scripture, 113.
  38. Jefferson, A Summary View of the Rights of British America, quoted in Maier, American Scripture, 113.
  39. Charles C. Thach Jr., The Creation of the Presidency, 1775–1789: A Study in Constitutional History (Liberty Fund, 2007), 15.
  40. Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 15–16.
  41. Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 16.
  42. Leonard D. White, The Federalists: A Study in Administrative History (Macmillan, 1948), 1.
  43. Thach, The Creation of the Presidency, 48.
  44. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States,” Founders Online, April 1787, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0187.
  45. Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States.”
  46. Federalist, no. 37 (James Madison), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0227.
  47. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  48. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  49. Federalist, no. 62 (Alexander Hamilton), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0212.
  50. Federalist, no. 62 (Hamilton).
  51. Federalist, no. 62 (Hamilton).
  52. Federalist, no. 62 (Hamilton).
  53. Federalist, no. 70 (Alexander Hamilton), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0221.
  54. Harvey C. Mansfield, Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power (Free Press, 1989), 267.
  55. Federalist, no. 70 (Hamilton).
  56. Federalist, no. 72 (Alexander Hamilton), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0223.
  57. Federalist, no. 68 (Alexander Hamilton), https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-04-02-0218.
  58. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  59. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  60. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  61. Federalist, no. 37 (Madison).
  62. Federalist, no. 62 (Madison).
  63. Federalist, no. 72 (Hamilton).
  64. For an example of summarizing arguments for court-packing and other changes to the federal judiciary, see Michelle Adams et al., Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States: Final Report: December 2021, American Presidency Project, December 8, 2021, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/final-report-the-presidential-commission-the-supreme-court-the-united-states.