A well-constructed union

About this book

This dissertation traces the history of American federalism from its origins in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century attempts at colonial confederation to a later-eighteenth-century effort that, unlike the others, happened to be successful. Specifically, the study examines the intellectual history of American federalism, an area of inquiry that has been touched by many scholars but that has not been the focus of sufficient study in its own right. The project aims to recover the antecedents of federalism's novel proposition that a group of states could successfully unite to create a government structure based on a central---or federal---authority, to which authority the states surrender some but (crucially) not all their own powers, and which authority wields power over individual citizens. American federalism, I argue, was revolutionary because it concerned statehood. It sought to gather sovereignty and place it in a general government, not to parcel sovereignty out from an imperial center to a provincial periphery, or to husband it jealously within a loose league. The connection between empire and federalism thus provides the central analytic theme of the dissertation. A key question is this: to what degree did the concepts and institutions now recognizable as the beginnings of federalism in the United States grow out of those that underpinned British imperial governance of the North American provinces? The central claim of this dissertation is an argument for change rather than continuity. Not only did American federalism not replicate imperial structures, it emerged as a particular species of political organization that consciously diverged from some of the most fundamental aspects of the imperial system. The colonists'---and, later, the Americans'---political and legal worldview was a product of constant contest with metropolitan authorities and theories. To the extent that the colonists can be said to have inhabited a federal universe, this de facto condition stood in conflict with the official, metropolitan theory of the imperial system. By the 1780s, when the former colonists found themselves in the position of having to construct their own governments, they rejected several of what they viewed as the least desirable elements of the imperial system.