Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787

"I remind my graduate students that Gordon Wood prepared The Creation of the American Republic as his doctoral dissertation, just to scare or, hopefully, inspire them. The fact that so much research and intellectual sophistication went into a PhD thesis is one of the staggering facts of modern intellectual life. The Creation of the American Republic established that the history of constitutional invention in America did not begin with the convention of 1787. The process of constitutional invention took off in 1776, as Americans were moving to declare independence. As the colonies became states, they had to create governments anew because their old forms of government had significant royal elements to them. So to replace colonial charters they wrote new constitutions, which said specifically what state governments could do and how they would be structured. Wood shows that there was this rich body of experimentation going on at the level of state government. He then identifies, traces and explains all the changes – some gradual, some significant – that took place in American constitutional thinking between independence and the writing of the federal constitution. In 1786 and 1787, when it became evident that the nation needed a new federal constitution, the experience of the states provided a real source of information, arguments, experience and inspiration that the framers in Philadelphia drew on quite deeply. I think the nature of the presidency was the biggest issue. There was no real model at that time, anywhere in the world, of a republican presidency. Americans were rejecting monarchy and what we now call ministerial government, meaning the cabinet form of government that was evolving in Britain. They wanted to have a president who was constitutionally independent of the legislature, but not so powerful as to be a potential despot. They didn’t know what kind of influence and authority the president would be able to acquire or need to exercise. They had no satisfactory ideas as to how the president was going to be elected, so they settled on the electoral college system. So I think the single largest issue that the framers left open was the question: “What will be the nature of executive power in a national republic?” Since then, American politics has been, in many respects, the story of the construction of presidential power. There were bills of rights attached to some, but not all, of the state constitutions. In 1776 it was not clear if these statements of right were meant to be legally binding or who would enforce them. They preferred the language “declaration of rights”. There’s significance in the distinction – a declaration might mean a set of principles you’re affirming rather than a set of legal rights you’re granting. Between 1776 and 1787 Americans started to think of declarations of rights or bills of rights as having more legal authority. By the late 1780s there’s more agreement that bills of rights should list a set of legal rights that someone, presumably the courts, would be responsible for enforcing."