American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War

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Cambridge University Press, Oct 29, 2007 - History
American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War challenges traditional American constitutional history, theory and jurisprudence that sees today's constitutionalism as linked by an unbroken chain to the 1787 Federal constitutional convention. American Sovereigns examines the idea that after the American Revolution, a collectivity - the people - would rule as the sovereign. Heated political controversies within the states and at the national level over what it meant that the people were the sovereign and how that collective sovereign could express its will were not resolved in 1776, in 1787, or prior to the Civil War. The idea of the people as the sovereign both unified and divided Americans in thinking about government and the basis of the Union. Today's constitutionalism is not a natural inheritance, but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about themselves as a collective sovereign.
 

Contents

Acknowledgments
ix
1 Prologue
1
PART ONE The Peoples Sovereignty in the States
9
PART TWO The Sovereign Behind the Federal Constitution
117
PART THREE The Struggle over a Constitutional Middle Ground
235
Key to Abbreviations
303
Notes
307
Selected Short Titles
403
Credits
411
Index
415
Copyright

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Page 18 - There is no position which depends on clearer principles than that every act of a delegated authority, contrary to the tenor of the commission under which it is exercised, is void. No legislative act, therefore, contrary to the Constitution, can be valid. To deny this would be to affirm that the deputy is greater than his principal; that the servant is above his master; that the representatives of the people are superior to the people themselves; that men acting by virtue of powers may do not only...

About the author (2007)

Christian G. Fritz is a professor of law at the University of New Mexico School of Law, where he has held both the Dickason and Weihofen chairs. Fritz has a Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley, and a J.D. from the University of California, Hastings College of Law. He is the author of Federal Justice in California: The Court of Ogden Hoffman, 1851–1891 (1991), a path-breaking work that analyzes the operation of the first federal district court in San Francisco. Fritz delivered the 2002 Justice William J. Brennan, Jr., lecture at the Oklahoma City University School of Law. Professor Fritz is a member of the American Society for Legal History and the American Historical Association, and has served on the editorial boards of several law and history journals.

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