Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution
Woody Holton
Average Americans Were the True Framers of the Constitution
Woody Holton upends what we think we know of the Constitution’s origins by telling the history of the average Americans who challenged the framers of the Constitution and forced on them the revisions that produced the document we now venerate. The framers who gathered in Philadelphia in 1787 were determined to reverse America’s post–Revolutionary War slide into democracy. They believed too many middling Americans exercised too much influence over state and national policies. That the framers were only partially successful in curtailing citizen rights is due to the reaction, sometimes violent, of unruly average Americans.
If not to protect civil liberties and the freedom of the people, what motivated the framers? In Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Holton provides the startling discovery that the primary purpose of the Constitution was, simply put, to make America more attractive to investment. And the linchpin to that endeavor was taking power away from the states and ultimately away from the people. In an eye-opening interpretation of the Constitution, Holton captures how the same class of Americans that produced Shays’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (and rebellions in damn near every other state) produced the Constitution we now revere.
"Holton demonstrates a lucid and systematic dismantling of the myths surrounding the making of our national government. His succinct account persuasively revives the economic interpretation of the Constitution in terms well-suited for our times, and it will surely become the essential work for students of the founding era. The Constitution enabled the ascent of the United States to great political and economic power, Holton makes plain, but at a profound cost to democracy. If Americans today find our national politicians entrenched in office, out of touch with their constituents, and responsive to lobbyists for the rich, they will understand why after reading this compelling book." —Robert A. Gross, James L. And Shirley A. Draper Professor of Early American History, University of Connecticut, and author of The Minutemen and Their World
"Woody Holton reframes the coming of the Constitution, revealing the rich debate Americans conducted over the cause of capital in the new land. In this account, real people—farmers, soldiers, taxpayers, speculators, creditors and entrepreneurs—replace images of the Founders, and intimate issues like tax fairness, economic effects, and electoral accountability matter far more than abstractions. The result is a new and compelling history." —Christine Desan, Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
"Woody Holton invites us to revise most of what we think we know about the origins of the United States Constitution. In this account the Founding Fathers do not appear as selfless philosophers journeying to Philadelphia to explore competing theories of republican government. Rather, Holton describes them as deeply anxious men, determined to contain a surge of popular democracy that seemed to threaten their financial interests. In this brilliantly researched study Holton thus revives an economic interpretation of the Constitution and in the process reminds us that ordinary American farmers after the Revolution imagined a strikingly different nation from the one that the Founders gave us." —T.H. Breen, Director, Center for Historical Studies, Northwestern University
"Here is a book that helps answer the puzzle of how in 1787 the framers of the Constitution curbed what they considered ‘the excess of democracy’ in the states and at the same time accommodated democratic pressures. Using a vast array of little appreciated contemporary sources, Holton constructs a fresh, sinewy argument that unfolds with a mounting sense of excitement. The result is a tough, realistic way of thinking about the founders. Unruly Americans is a brilliant book, rich with insights into the American Revolution and the Constitution." —Alfred Young, author of Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution
"Move over, Founding Fathers. It turns out that average Americans from the ‘unruly mob’ had more to do with insuring the personal liberties we Americans now hold dear than did the Framers we so revere. Woody Holton’s fascinating and energetic new book makes us take a fresh look at the Constitution, especially the Bill of Rights. The populist underpinnings of our Republic are real, and this has clear implications for the role that citizens ought to play today in reforming American democracy. Holton’s lesson: If the establishment won’t change the system, the people can. They’ve done it from the beginning." —Larry J. Sabato, Director, Center for Politics, University of Virginia
Praise for Forced Founders
"Its lively style and wealth of anecdotes will make it an enjoyable read for anyone." --Journal of American Studies
"May be the most important book on the political culture of Revolutionary Virginia since Rhys Isaac's The Transformation of Virginia, 1740-1790." --Journal of Southern History
"This book gives us a brisk and convincing analysis of a region—and revolutionary leaders—we thought we already knew." --Journal of American History
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
384 pages
Size: 6 x 9
Notes/Index
$30.00
Hardcover
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 10/2007
ISBN: 0-8090-8061-3
Forgotten Allies
The Oneida Indians and the American Revolution
Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin
Tribal, violent, riven with fierce and competing loyalties, the American Revolution as told through the Oneida Indians, the only Iroquois Nation to side with the rebels, shatters the old story of a contest of ideas punctuated by premodern set-piece warfare pitting patriotic colonists against British Redcoats. With new detail and historical sweep, Joseph T. Glatthaar and James Kirby Martin offer a vivid account of the Revolution’s forgotten heroes, the allies who risked their land, their culture, and their lives to join in a war that gave birth to a new nation at the expense of their own.
Not only capturing for the first time the full sacrifice of the Oneida in securing American independence, Forgotten Allies also provides details and insights into Oneida culture and how it was shaped, changed, and molded throughout many years of contact with the American colonists. Above all else, it depicts the valor and determination of an Indian nation that fought with all the resolve of the rebels only to be erased from America’s collective memory. A long-overdue corrective, Forgotten Allies makes certain that the Oneidas’ story is finally told.
“This is a book that will surprise and delight anyone interested in American history. It reveals in vivid scrupulously researched detail a hitherto unknown side of the War for Independence.”—Thomas Fleming, author of Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge
Joseph T. Glatthaar is the author of six books and teaches history at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
James Kirby Martin is the author of eleven books and teaches history at the University of Houston.
448 pagesSize: 6 x 9
8 Pages of Black-and-White Illustrations/Frontispiece/6 Maps/Notes/Bibliography/Index
$30.00
History
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 10/2006
ISBN: 0-8090-4601-6
American Leviathan
Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier
Patrick Griffin
The war that raged along America’s frontier during the period of the American Revolution was longer, bloodier, and arguably more revolutionary than what transpired on the Atlantic coast.
Between 1763 and 1795 westerners not only participated in a War of Independence but engaged in a revolution that ushered in fundamental changes in social relations, political allegiances, and assumptions about the relationship between individuals and society. On the frontier, the process of forging sovereignty and citizens was stripped down to its essence. Settlers struggled with the very stuff of revolution: violence, uncertainty, disorder, and the frenzied competition to remake the fabric of society. In so doing, they were transformed from deferential subjects to self-sovereign citizens as the British Empire gave way to the American nation. But something more fundamental was at work. The violent nature of the contest to reconstitute sovereignty produced a revolutionary settlement in which race and citizenship went hand in hand. The common people demanded as much, and the state delivered. As westerners contended in a Hobbesian world, they also created some of the myths that made America American.
Patrick Griffin recaptures a chaotic world of settlers, Indians, speculators, British regulars, and American and state officials, vying with one another to remake the West during its most formative period.
“In this book, Griffin aims to re-conceptualize the American Revolution in the West and his explanation of the ways Hobbesian disorder and violence on the American frontier escalated and laid the basis for the acceptability of federal state power in the West is very convincing.” —Gordon S. Wood, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Radicalism of the American Revolution
Patrick Griffin is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux384 pages Size: 6 x 9 2 Black-and-White Illustrations in Text/MapNotes/Index
$30.00
American History
Hill and Wang
Pub Date: 04/2007
ISBN: 0-8090-9515-7
July 24, 2007