American Sovereigns: The People and America's Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War. By Christian G. Fritz. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. xii, 427 pp. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-521-88188-3.)

Abstract

American Sovereigns, by the legal scholar Christian G. Fritz, is an able contribution to the growing literature on “popular constitutionalism,” a body of scholarship contending that early Americans believed “the people” had the right to shape and interpret constitutions and laws through methods outside formal political and legal systems. This scholarship calls into question traditional legal history and theory that confines constitutionalism to the arena of courts and judicial opinion. Here, Fritz acts both as practitioner and critic, attempting to historicize popular constitutionalism more precisely and correct the static models posited by other legal scholars. Most of American Sovereigns focuses on illuminating a shared belief among the revolutionary generation that the constitutional authority of “the people” was not limited to polling stations, legislative halls, or courtrooms. Fritz argues that revolutionary-era Americans believed that “the majority of ‘the people’ could express their will directly” through protest, civil disobedience, and even violence if they thought governments opposed the public will (p. 20). Throughout the book, Fritz presents a diverse set of case studies in which thousands of people united to put popular constitutionalism into action. His examples include the Massachusetts Regulation of the 1780s, the uprisings in Pennsylvania in the 1790s, the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions, the Hartford Convention, the nullification crisis of the 1830s, and the Dorr Rebellion of the 1840s. In each case, Fritz shows that “although normally quiet and acquiescent, the people could, when they desired, act directly and independently of the existing government, or of constitutional procedures, to manifest their will” (ibid.).