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By Root 1817 0

of the great drama.” To squeeze into one act all the scenes of military and political action required to secure independence would be a great understatement. But Rush was right to think that the meaning of the Revolution could not be limited to the struggle for independence alone. What made it more than a war of national liberation, what made it truly revolutionary, was the common belief that Americans had been granted an opportunity few other peoples had known, and that none had managed to fulfill: in the words of John Adams, “to form and establish the wisest and happiest government that human wisdom can contrive” (p. 86). Such governments, Adams further observed, had to be “republican” in form and principle. They had to draw their authority from the people, yet at the same time be so balanced as to prevent the people from misusing their power.

This part of the drama took the form of an experiment that accompanied the movement toward independence in 1776. During the preceding two years, the authority of the legal governments in most of the colonies had collapsed, because governors appointed by the Crown could not collaborate in organizing defiance to its rule. Real power flowed instead to the network of committees, conventions, and congresses that had first formed in 1774 to carry out the urgent work of resistance and to implement the program of Congress. This apparatus had grown more potent with the outbreak of civil war in April 1775.

With each passing month, however, Americans grew more nervous about the absence of legal government. With courts closed in most colonies, many normal operations of government ceased. By early 1776 individual colonies were petitioning Congress to be allowed to resume legal government. Congress first granted this permission on a case-by-case basis. Then, in May 1776, it adopted a blanket resolution authorizing new governments to be created everywhere.

Americans could not simply restore their prior colonial governments. Except in Rhode Island and Connecticut (the two colonies that appointed all of their officials), executive and judicial office-holders served under the authority of either the Crown or the proprietary families (the Penns in Pennsylvania and Delaware, the Calverts in Maryland) in whom the Crown had vested the right of government. Some new way had to be found to reconstitute executive and judicial power. Moreover, the colonists harbored an array of grievances and grudges against the distribution of power among the different parts of government under the old imperial regime. In the first enthusiastic blush of revolution, they were inclined to strengthen the authority of the most representative branch of government—the legislature—while weakening the executive. Given that wars ordinarily place a premium on the effective use of executive power, this might seem like a naive decision. But it was also a natural reaction to past grievances, when governors acting under instructions from London had often prevented colonial legislatures from pursuing the measures they favored.

Acting under these assumptions, the colonies began writing constitutions that made the legislature the dominant branch of government. If any check were needed upon government, it would come from the people themselves, relying on the practice of annual elections to control their representatives. This assumed that the people would be willing and able to carry out this duty—that they possessed the virtue (meaning commitment to the public good) that the citizens of a republic were expected to maintain.

By May 1777 most of the states had adopted new constitutions. In doing so, they also established a new definition of what a constitution was. In Britain, the word constitution was commonly used to describe the underlying traditions, conventions, and principles of government. In America, however, the word acquired a more precise meaning. A constitution was a document, adopted at a known historical moment, that explicitly established and empowered, and thereby potentially limited, the authority of a government. In Britain,