The American People and the American Revolution

M OST histories of the American Revolution have been told largely in terms of the period as seen by its leaders. The role of the American people has been neglected or ignored despite the fact the two fundamental political decisions of the age, and the documents which embodied them, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787, were based on the theoretical foundation of the sovereignty of the American people. Yet it cannot be ignored-unless one ignores the evidence-that many of the men who signed the Declaration of Independence and virtually all of those who signed the Constitution, and prefaced it by proclaiming themselves We the People of the United States, had little faith in the sovereignty of the people when transferred from the realm of political theory to the realm of political reality. On the first day of the Convention of 1787, Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia told the delegates Our chief danger arises from the democratic parts of our [state] constitutions. It is a maxim which I hold incontrovertible, the powers of government exercised by the people swallows up the other branches.' Two days later he explained the proposed senate would help curb the evils under which the United States labored and that in tracing these evils to their origin every man had found it

Genealogy · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · History

• The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770-1840

  Open Access•Peter Stamatov•Theory and Society•2011

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