Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America

Consolidating Power in Revolutionary America: The Case of New York, 1775-1783 Between October 2, 1777 and February 7, 1778 the newly founded state assembly of New York took votes on the state supreme court, on prohibiting the sale of scarce grain to customers out of the state, and on an extraconstitutional convention that had seized power in the face of a military crisis in the late autumn of 1777 and that held it until the legislature could reassemble.I There is no reason, on the face of it, to expect any relationship among these divisions; none of them was a party issue and none of them was identified with the governor, George Clinton. Yet these votes-there were five in all-formed a single Guttman scale.2 In other words, voting patterns showed that the votes turned on a single basic issue: the existence and powers of the extralegal convention and other bodies like it. The problem with the court was the refusal of its judges, named to their posts by an earlier extralegal convention, to carry out their duties until reappointed constitutionally. The debate over the embargo bill asked whether the assembly should merely continue a prohibition already imposed by the convention or whether it should impose a new one, without mentioning the convention at all. The issue, in short, was legitimacy: should New York's constitutional republican institutions recognize the power that revolutionary bodies had exercised in the state since the collapse of the colonial government ? And if they did, would that betoken an abandonment of their own claim to be the sole legitimate political power in the state ? Conventional wisdom says that such a problem should not have existed in revolutionary America. Ever since its French counterpart provided a first basis for comparison, students of the American Revolution have remarked on the ease and smoothness with which that event

Economic history · Environmental ethics · Physics · Political science · Power (physics) · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Historical Economic and Legal Thought · History · Philosophy

• Congressional and State Legislative Roll-Call Studies by U. S. Historians

  Open Access•Joel H Silbey•Legislative Studies Quarterly•1981

  Add to list

• New York's Refugees and Political Authority in Revolutionary America

  Dziennik, Dziennik Dziennik•The William and Mary Quarterly•2020

  Add to list

• State Repression in the Iranian Bazaar, 1975–1977

  Open Access•Nimah Mazaheri•Iranian Studies•2006

  Add to list

• Labor in the era of the American revolution

  Gary B Nash, Billy G Smith et al.•Labor History•1983

  Add to list